121–130 of 177 posts
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> Firing an employee or terminating a contract in response to a twitter mob. So, all I have to do is hire a few Twitter bots once in a while and I’m permanently unfireable?
You can still be fired for cause. But the company will have to do work to document that to demonstrate it wasn't for past statements.
In 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…
> 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.
MAD doesn't work when the people who get destroyed aren't the people who launched the missiles. It isn't enough for them to be other people from the same faction. When Kennedy was considering nuking Khrushchev, he had to face the reality that, if he did, his own family would die, and if he didn't, they probably wouldn't. Khrushchev, mutatis mutandis . If Kennedy had given the first-strike command, an individual colon…
Stanislav Petrov decided to ignore the official protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
Ironic 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.
It's pretty obvious that the reason the NYT is doing this is that someone was fired who they saw as being on the same side as them, for online speech they were extremely sympathetic towards, due to stuff dug up by Republican supporters. This particular issue is heavily tied to the US political divide: supporting Palestine is seen as a left-wing thing, and labelling those people as anti-Semites a right-wing tactic. Wh…
I think we agree, but to elaborate further, here's an informative post on the topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-pop...
One should also look at how the average person would see this. If after expressing an opinion, the only viable career left is that of a political commentator/provocateur (the market for which is limited), most people will stay silent.
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You can still be fired for cause. But the company will have to do work to document that to demonstrate it wasn't for past statements.
So you're incentivizing being racist on the internet to make it harder to fire somebody.
The only exception here is the cancelling of people with relatively small followings/influence who receive heavy-handed negative attention (like the Reddit bomber or people in academia like the N-word professor) but instances like these are fewer and far between and will probably decline over time as boomers leave the discourse (die).
I used to work at a few big media companies in a position that required a decent amount of public facing and had brushes with this sort of behavior in the past (people tweeting death threats at me, which I just brushed off because I understood what I signed up for and am not naive). These days I work for myself in a “blue collar” industry and mostly ignore social media, so I can’t really be cancelled.
I guess the point i’m trying to make is, if this is something you’re actually worried about, just
1; go work in an industry that lacks the highly educated, overstimulated, and mostly out of touch people that dominate 99% of the discourse but speak for 1% of the population
2; learn how to read the room (ie. listen more and talk less)
Big tech wanted everyone to have a voice and now they do. :)
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> Which actions exactly should be illegal? 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…
> Firing an employee or terminating a contract in response to a twitter mob Weird way to end 'right to work' laws, but any port in a storm I guess.
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> In 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. I’m incredibly dubious that you can write a law that accomplishes this that won’t run afoul of the first amendment. And honestly, I think that…
If you walk up to someone and punch them, it is reasonable for that person to press charges even though the repercussions may only last a few minutes. The consequence will be more-or-less immediate, even if it starts and ends with a discussion with a police officer. If you slander someone, their recourse is to sue even though the repercussions may last for months or years. The consequence will not be immediate and th…
It seems pretty obvious to me that this would make “cancel culture” markedly worse.
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It’s fairly obvious from the context that we’re talking about the American tradition of free speech, and the jurisprudence around it. So in this case “made up” means “there is no case law to support your assertion about how the principle of free speech should work in American law”. I find an attempt to assert that all laws are made up kind of lazy side stepping of bother the issue at hand and kind of annoying. Furthe…
> It’s fairly obvious But why? Do people from other countries deserve to have their digital pasts weaponized? That was absolutely not obvious to me.
Because the top article is a NYT article, and this forum is largely American in composition. There are interesting discussions about free speech rights in other countries, but in this case it’s reasonable to assume an American context.
> Do people from other countries deserve to have their digital pasts weaponized
I’ll remind you that presuming good faith is a rule here, this is a nakedly bad faith interpretation of what I said.
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But a group trying to get someone fired for what they did or said in the past is the individuals in the group exercising their own protected political speech. It's difficult to see how that can be made illegal without curtailing political speech itself.
If firing for speech is made illegal, then a boycott will be ineffectual and thus not happen. You don't have to outlaw the speech of the mob, just the ability for a company to fire someone over someone's past statements.
If it's made illegal to fire people for speech, I doubt people would have any qualms (assuming they have the purchasing power and scale) with driving the corporation to bankruptcy. Another corporation will take its place.