Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're going to sue me for running, in my head, the program "if misbehave, then boycott"? Because that's all it takes to be a member of a "mob". Or you're going to sue me for passing on information of , even if it's true, because you're afraid of being cancelled? That's a fairly horrifying dystopia you're painting. Nobody has to incite a mob. It just happens. It's collective action. There's no one to sue, unless you…
I was discussing an individual being attacked for personal thoughts posted in the past. If a company supports things you don't, sure, just don't support that company. But when a group tries to get a person fired for something unpopular that they said in the past, then using a mob to get them fired is vigilante justice.
Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
71–80 of 177 posts
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#72Ironic that this is being posted by the NYT (though not as an editorial, I guess), who fired Quinn Norton within 24 hours because she'd embedded herself in Anonymous and consequently used the word "fag", years earlier. The mob framed her as anti-gay despite her having had an outspokenly bisexual life partner around that time.
Right, there are only three consistent positions here: 1) this type of firing is unfair and bad, 2) this type of firing is fair and good ("consequence culture"), or 3) "I'm a partisan who just wants my enemies to burn" Maybe 80% of the people that opine on this subject are in category 3), 19% are in 1), and only 1% actually believe this sort of thing is great even when it hits someone that's on their team. Unfortunat…
On a separate note, I don't agree with your breakdown of people because I think it's possible to have principles that are not partisanship but are also orthogonal to "mob good" vs "mob bad".
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#73There has to be more accountability here. It should be possible for a potential employee to see a company's past actions with respect to this sort of thing. In general a potential employee should know going in that an employer is so unprofessional that they might throw them under the bus for something as trivial as social media.
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#74Schmidt had a habit as Google CEO of saying true things in the least palatable way. That was the same interview where he said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." People interpreted it as a flippant dismissal of privacy, but what he was trying to express was this era was coming... The modern web was going to make hiding one's past behavior extremely difficult.
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#75The NYT is extremely sectarian. They have been doing exactly what they now critizice for people in their right for a long time. And it is impressive what we are seeing today with corona and Wuhan lab, all those media were basically calling lunatics to those that believed in the Wuhan lab hypothesis,licking the boots of their Chinese masters, now suddenly it is ok to believe that. It is a huge problem for them, when l…
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#76In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal: the same way vigilante justice is illegal now. Causing a person to be fired/doxxed by a mob for an action that isn't even illegal (free speach) is no more morally noble then going and beating them up over a suspected crime. If a person commits a crime, then let courts decide, otherwise it's just mob rule and vigilante "justice". That said, I think it's going to take…
> In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal: Which actions exactly should be illegal? I assume you don't want to make me force watching movies from certain producers that I don't like anymore. At the same time in some countries retail stores basically have to cater to everyone and already can be made liable if they don't sell something that they advertised for as long as customers stick to terms and conditio…
Firing an employee or terminating a contract in response to a twitter mob.
You are of course free to boycott whoever you want- but my impression is that those threatened boycotts won't really cause much damage to companies. People keep saying that firings are meant to "limit damage" but I have yet to see proof of this. To me it is mostly virtue signalling on the part of the involved businesses- it's not meant to prevent an economic damage but as a form of PR and advertising.
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#77In order to delete the posts you have to manually click on each and every one and then click on delete. Sometimes it throws an “unexpected error” and then you have to click on everything again, but then it often throws the error again.
Another way is to “mark all” but that only marks 50 posts at once. If you scroll down then it adds another 50 posts, at the cost of about 20 seconds per scroll, so when you scroll down far enough you can accumulate a lot of posts that will be available for “mark all”. But, mind that Facebook doesn’t like you to batch remove all of your history. So after 150 or 200 posts (the amount is changing apparently randomly) accumulated and clicking on delete, they throw a “Challenge required” error. With trial and error you find out that this error appears always after you accumulated too much, so you’d naturally think, let me just go back one step and scroll a couple of time less to generate a new and smaller list. But it’s not possible to generate that list of posts again for some reason, as going away from the activity monitor and back into it again just shows again the >200 posts list nicely prefetched for you. I found the only way to “reset” this view is to log out of Facebook and log in back again, then the activity monitor starts at 50 posts again.
Hopefully when you then batch delete 150-200 posts, there isn’t a special post in between which brings another error when trying to delete from the activity monitor in batch or manual. It seems that this error only appears when you deleted too many posts in a specific time frame. What you need to do is to find that post in the haystack of at minimum 50 posts, click on it’s time such that you get on the posts individual page (better open in another tab or you might get insane eventually, if not already) and then delete the post from there by using the menu button.
Hopefully it allows you to delete and you can continue to batch delete the rest in batches of 150-200. Otherwise you will have to wait for a couple of hours you receive a new delete allowance.
Lastly, even if you at first think posts were deleted, you might have to revisit and see again, as some posts just reappear again. You don’t find them necessarily inside the activity monitor again but e.g. when you use the search, or even worse, when others use the search on these posts.
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#78An organization that ran multiple exposes on people by digging thru their social media is suddenly worried about people digging thru their own past to find obviously antisemitic trash
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#79> Or at the very least, why hasn’t a fear of mutually assured destruction set in? I think this is the mutually assured destruction phrase. A lot of the “cancel culture” has been deployed by the Left. The Right is now using it against people on the Left. This “cancel culture” will go away when both sides see that there is no net gain, only a grinder destroying people.
Re: Our digital pasts weren’t supposed to be weaponized like this
#80In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal: the same way vigilante justice is illegal now. Causing a person to be fired/doxxed by a mob for an action that isn't even illegal (free speach) is no more morally noble then going and beating them up over a suspected crime. If a person commits a crime, then let courts decide, otherwise it's just mob rule and vigilante "justice". That said, I think it's going to take…
Will it be illegal at the point of expressing an opinion online?
Will it be illegal at the point of agreeing or liking an opinion expressed online?
Will it be illegal at the point where one is purchasing a product or service and determines where their money will go based on an opinion they hold?
People are allowed to have, express and hold opinion. They are allowed to make decisions based on these opinions.
> Additionally, one would think cancelling should fall under libel and slander laws, and the accused would be able to go after the instigators.
Good news! These laws exist.
> It's uncomfortable when it's "your side" that finds it's goals at odds with human rights, but in the end we're all better off with defending basic human rights.
When "your side" starts advocating that people should not have, hold or act on opinions, you might start wondering who you're on side with.