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Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

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Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#121
post #117
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamergate was a harassment movement aimed at women in videogames that had some very smart people thinking of justifications and excuses to protect it in public.

Gamergate was an INSANELY complex situation, involving thousands of actors with differing and intentionally unclear motivations. It was eventually labeled as a "movement" by the opposition, not by the "members" of the "movement", in order to paint a picture of their persecution, whether valid or invalid. They wanted a platform. They were given one. And they exploited it. I mean, Jesus, just read the wikipedia article…

> Don't engage terrorists.

Right. Deplatform them, ban them, and prosecute them instead.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#122
post #52
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamergate was a harassment movement aimed at women in videogames that had some very smart people thinking of justifications and excuses to protect it in public.

That's conflating the actions of trolls with people that were critical of activists. Those are not at all the same thing. The former is NOT ok, the latter is ok and should result in healthy debate. But because Twitter doesn't like nuance, those get collapsed into a single, simple and most outrage-inducing format. A black & white hero/villain narrative. Which also avoids having to deal with any critiques, regardless o…

There is the possibility of conflating between members who are hateful trolls vs members who are honestly critical, and there is the possibility of any given movement being legitimately defined by hatefulness, by sheer membership and public expression alone. It's hard to draw a line between those two things, but I think, personally, based on tons of experience in the places Gamergaters were most prevalent, that Gamergate lay on the hateful side of that imaginary line, and in fact was not even particularly close to the line.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ambiguity was a deliberate strategy of Gamergate (and still is a deliberate strategy even today of those with similar disposition).

Do you realize you are employing typical defence of any conspiracy theory when facing the fact that an alleged conspiracy doesn't look consistent to be real? And I mean absolutely literally. That exact statement I heard from people who believe in ZOG.

You've in fact heard lots of reasonable sentences from conspiracy theorists, if you replace the nouns. I think it's less reasonable to believe in ZOG than to have the opinion that Gamergate appeared to be more about childish mockery and hatred than the more weighty concept of journalistic integrity. By the logic you're implying, we can't accept that anything is any more or less than exactly what it's most well-spoken proponents try to present it as.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#124

So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: Content that would demean people Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.

The problem is idealism. > “I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented,” Wetherell said, noting that he initially felt the retweet button would elevate voices from underrepresented communities. The problem is that it didn't register to him, or anyone, that "racists" were an "underrepresented community", as were sexists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-intellectuals, quacks, and so on. When attemp…

Well said. In addition to simply being naive, I think there is also the self-delusion that everyone subscribes to when they convince themselves that their job (no matter what it is) is somehow helping contribute something good to the world. I had a relative that worked as a telemarketer selling predatory debt consolidation packages to people on the verge of bankruptcy and when he described what he was doing, he enthusiastically framed it like he was helping the people from going bankrupt, even though he was just helping them dig a bigger hole.

If your company is a public corporation, your only purpose is to maximize shareholder value.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#125
post #62
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamergate was a harassment movement aimed at women in videogames that had some very smart people thinking of justifications and excuses to protect it in public.

That might be how the activists like to spin it but it became about much more than that when it blew up and went viral. It was really about an entire established lively and chaotic culture developed over multiple decades that people adored and got defensive over. So some heavy handed top down attempts to manually change it didn’t go over well. Then the villainization of anyone who disagreed with the activists approac…

Then the villainization of anyone who disagreed with this approach as people who simply think it’s okay to harass women only increased backlash.

Is it recency bias on my part to say it feels like this tactic is showing up in more places than it deserves to? The last American election cycle was terrifying to watch for precisely what you just described happening all across Twitter and elsewhere on social media.

Assent with {group_A} or be labelled complicit with {group_B} by default with little headroom for nuance or context.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realize you are employing typical defence of any conspiracy theory when facing the fact that an alleged conspiracy doesn't look consistent to be real? And I mean absolutely literally. That exact statement I heard from people who believe in ZOG.

You've in fact heard lots of reasonable sentences from conspiracy theorists, if you replace the nouns. I think it's less reasonable to believe in ZOG than to have the opinion that Gamergate appeared to be more about childish mockery and hatred than the more weighty concept of journalistic integrity. By the logic you're implying, we can't accept that anything is any more or less than exactly what it's most well-spoken…

A conspiracy theorist can say reasonable things, however this exact thing is a circular argument: conspiracy exists but our proof doesn't look convincing exactly because it is conspiracy.

There are no generalizations in my comment which you implied.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#127
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it truly possible to know if this was a deliberate strategy of Gamergate? I’ve heard this statement before and when I try to politely challenge it...the results aren’t as kind in return. Hoping that isn’t the case here, because I am perhaps inappropriately curious if an answer exists.

Yes, it's beyond possible. It's a certainty. Contemporaneous logs[0] revealed the deliberate efforts of mysoginistic trolls to pretend their motivations were more palatable. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/new-chat-logs-show-ho...

Trolls always try to wrap their attacks in semi-agreeable contexts so it doesn't get immediately dismissed and can enter mainstream channels. That's the whole idea. Similar to how activists try to wrap everyone who disagrees with them as mere sexists/racists/etc to give their arguments weight and credibility in those same channels - usually using the troll's purposefully provocative behaviour as their evidence and justification.

It's an increasingly popular phenomenon that we need to be conscious of as a culture and not give credence to the trolls while also not using examples from the fringe to pigeonhole the whole.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#128

So -- remove the button. No? Why not?

Fta: "A full rollback of the share and retweet buttons is unrealistic, and Wetherell doesn’t believe it’s a good idea. Were these buttons universally disabled, he said, people could pay users with large audiences to get their message out, giving them disproportionate power."

Now can someone unpack that for me?

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#129

Reading through some of the comments here, it occurs to me that there's a moral trilemma at play here: you can have power , you can have righteousness , or you can have impartiality , but you must pick 2 out of 3. If you bring something new into the world that gives new voice or new capabilities to previously disenfranchised groups, then you have a choice between explicitly selecting who you bestow this power on (in…

Interesting that only one of those three qualities is subjective. I also think you are incorrect about this being a pick-two situation. Righteousness, in addition to being subjective, is mutually exclusive with impartiality.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#130

Reading through some of the comments here, it occurs to me that there's a moral trilemma at play here: you can have power , you can have righteousness , or you can have impartiality , but you must pick 2 out of 3. If you bring something new into the world that gives new voice or new capabilities to previously disenfranchised groups, then you have a choice between explicitly selecting who you bestow this power on (in…

Interesting that only one of those three qualities is subjective. I also think you are incorrect about this being a pick-two situation. Righteousness, in addition to being subjective, is mutually exclusive with impartiality.

The way you remain both righteous and impartial is to never do anything consequential. That way, you can have the same effect for all parties while never doing anything you would find morally objectionable. It's essentially the trivial solution (magnitude of impact = 0), but is often implicitly advocated for in many debates here.

It occurred to me after writing this that there's a fourth variable: integrity, defined as your willingness to have principles and critically evaluate them against others' moral conduct. You could conceivably satisfy all of power, righteousness, and impartiality by assuming, in your value system, that everyone's values are morally acceptable and mutually compatible and hence there is no conflict between your values and everyone else's values. This is a position actually advocated by some philosophers, venture capitalists, and scientists! (There's a Tom Lehrer song in there somewhere: "Once zee rockets go up who cares where they come down / that's not my department / says Werner von Braun!") It's not a mainstream one within the general population, though; most people do actually have some feelings and pass some moral judgment on other people.

And yes, I was very deliberately trying to highlight the tension between objectivity and subjectivity here. (There's a lot of complexity over whether power is objective or subjective, too - power is your ability to enforce your will [subjective] over reality [objective], so it has elements of both.)

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