Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER orbiting on Triptine and saying over and over, "Christ what an imagination I've got!"
Don't let social media think for you
121–130 of 266 posts
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#122The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right . So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did th…
Meh; the situation was pointed out to people like you at the time. All the drawing of parallels with events in history, all the calls for reason and rationality and all the highlighting of holes in logic didn't do anything to stop the problem.
Your words now will make as much impact on the people you hope it will as they would have had at the time on you.
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the mob can literally set you on fire, then you should be worried about the mob, but, crucially, the mob on social media can't actually hurt you ; they can only convince other people to hurt you. It's those other people , the people who hold positions of responsibility and authority -- your boss, your dean, anybody with the power to hire or fire you -- who are really responsible here. The shame of cancel culture…
No. 10,000 voices braying your name as an evil-doer itself does harm. This isn't a kid being told on a playground that "words will never hurt you," that's always been a lie. Here is a case [1] of a man being falsely doxxed for the assault on two kids on a bike path last summer. The voices calling for him to be brought to justice, calling him a racist, etc, numbered in the tens of thousands. The retractions from peopl…
I'm not so sure proof by counterexample is useful here. My point is that in most cases the people screaming at you seem like they're doing harm, but they can't actually do harm until somebody in a position of power in your life listens to them. [0]
I think you can mostly forgive the cowardly behavior of these authority figures up to about a year or so ago on the grounds that the social media mob sure feels like a real mob that can literally put tires around you and set you on fire. But we know now that that's a mistake. They can't do that. And so people in positions of power need to understand that in most cases they can actually just ignore the mob and nothing happens.
Every institution should have a "social media mob" procedure (i.e. what to do when a member of the organization becomes a target). If you plan to handle this in an ad hoc way, then you'll almost certainly make mistakes (because the ad hoc approach usually boils down to, "Ahhhhh! this feels bad! We have to do something! Quick, get rid of the person!") People should be thinking about how they'll handle it when it happens to one of their employees or members.
[0] I think I'd want to clarify that I actually agree that the braying mob does inflict its own kind of harm; it's merely that it's a harm I'd be willing to endure as a consequence of putting my ideas out there on a platform like Twitter, whereas nobody would be willing to endure getting kicked out of college or fired from their job just to have an argument on the internet. For example, my comment above is getting downvoted to hell. Feels bad! But it's several orders of magnitude removed from losing your job.
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#124The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right . So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did th…
"the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire".
A single person brave enough to think against crowds could have STOPped this atrocity from happening.
Reminds me of how Mahatma Gandhi was attacked in South Africa by a group of predominantly white-males, was literally being beaten to death, when just one white-female STOPped this atrocity from happening (source: Gandhi the Man - https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Man-Changed-Himself-Change/dp/...).
Most of us are too afraid to stop atrocities (Ex: Recently Muslims getting killed in Delhi while Modi was adulating Trump). But a few who do could may help save humanity.
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#125The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right . So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did th…
Meh; the situation was pointed out to people like you at the time. All the drawing of parallels with events in history, all the calls for reason and rationality and all the highlighting of holes in logic didn't do anything to stop the problem. Your words now will make as much impact on the people you hope it will as they would have had at the time on you.
[deleted]
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#126It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or "let twitter think for them". It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one getting kicked i…
>... and it's not discouraged... There are a lot of people who have been speaking out against "cancel culture", would that not be a form of trying to discourage social media mobs?
That depends a lot on the context of who's saying it, which leads back to the same problem of a lack of nuance and understanding.
If you're Donald Trump saying that people decrying the fact that you caused the attempted coup on January 6th is cancel culture, then no, you're not trying to discourage social media mobs. You're selfishly employing the cancel culture trope as a shield against any attack, by employing the logic that if a lot of people are attacking you, it must be a raging cancellation mob.
If you're OP, on the other hand, speaking out in an objective way about an event that you're not associated with, then yeah, you're trying to discourage social media mobs and good on your for that.
At this point, many of the accusations of "cancel culture" are from people who are trying to cancel people criticizing them. The only way out of it is for everybody to really understand the stuff they're talking about and provide well-informed thoughts that don't use buzzwords like "cancel culture."
How we achieve that, I do not know.
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#127The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right . So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did th…
HANGMAN: Now, you're wanted for murder.
For the sake of my analogy, let's just assume that you did it.
Now, John Ruth wants to take you back to Red Rock to stand trial for murder.
And if you're found guilty, the people of Red Rock will hang you in the town square.
And, as the hangman, I will perform the execution.
And if all those things end up taking place, that's what civilized society calls justice.
However, if the relatives and the loved ones of the person you murdered were outside that door right now, and after busting down that door, they drug you out into the snow and hung you up by the neck, that would be frontier justice.
Now, the good part about frontier justice is it's very thirst-quenching.
The bad part is it's apt to be wrong as right.
Well, not in your case.
In your case, you'd have it coming.
But other people, maybe not so much.
OSWALDO: But ultimately, what's the real difference between the two?
HANGMAN: The real difference is me.
The hangman.
To me, it doesn't matter what you did.
When I hang you, I'll get no satisfaction from your death.
It's my job.
I hang you in Red Rock.
I move on to the next town.
I hang someone else there.
The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man.
And that dispassion is the very essence of justice.
For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice.
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#128The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right . So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did th…
There's a weird biological thing at play here. As if we have a reflex to clean what too many people agree on.
But so many time it ends up being entirely wrong I really wonder why it's still at play.
We kinda had to invent justice structures to avoid blunt reactions.
Also who thinks internet focuses too much on endless debates and abnormal relations. Did we spend so much time arguing before ? I'm so jaded I just want sharing chitchat jokes and food and nothing more. And I kinda believe that it's a more balanced approach to society. But i'm kinda digressing (an proving the opposite of my point partly)
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is, by and large, a good thing. I don't agree that social media (qua social networks) has moved us in the right direction. Web forums and blogs were better. I don't think we need to find the missing piece. I think we need to remove the unnecessary, super profitable poison. Something like private, self hosted forums with universal log in, but no cross-contamination of "likes" and comments, and no algorithmic at…
> Web forums and blogs were better. I don't think they were inherently better. And don't get me wrong, I have a mostly positive experience with forums and blogs and an extremely negative experience with social networks, eventually I deleted every single account I am not required to have for work-related reasons. However, I believe the underlying reason is that pre-Facebook communities were more "selective". Being par…
I think I can break your point down into two smaller facets:
* the notion of voluntary association. How many social media users use social media because they think they're supposed to? Voluntary association facilitates the perception of good faith on the part of others by its nature.
* the type of user, e.g. an enthusiast vs otherwise. A lot of social media's problems stem from it's crazy scale, which, as a byproduct, increases the amount of bad apples and their visibility.
Forums and their ilk had similar problems with cabals and such, but the fact that they weren't the single destination to be made the stakes lower. I can see a future where we cede current social networks to the very online crowd and let them continue to play their power games in their own little sandbox while the rest of the world moves on.
Re: Don't let social media think for you
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the news media is a slower and more centralized outrage machine. The upside of social media is that it's harder to manufacture consent (h/t Noam Chomsky) as it consists of millions of voices. Though that's threatened by the coordinated censorship of big tech, as we saw with the lab leak hypotheses and people being silenced on twitter, facebook and youtube for challenging the approved narrative on that. It finall…
Idk - I think manufacturing consent may be easier rather than harder these days. The fact that it's now realistic to accuse people of being a bot (GPT-3) means that elites could just deploy large numbers of language models fine tuned and prompted correctly to AstroTurf and manufactur consent "from the ground up".
It's not even hypothetical; governments can and do fund astroturfers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27368214