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Life after an internet mob attack

pasquale.cool

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Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#131

Post by [deleted] »

sequoia wrote: post #106
dvt wrote: post #3

The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc. The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, F…

+1. I did exactly this a few years back when I saw a prominent member of the Nodejs community get savaged for linking to an article (exploring the idea that campus speech codes might adversely impact autistic people). I thought "if they can (nearly) take down this guy (a Nodejs technical steering committee member) for linking to a blog post, what are they going to do to me, Joe Nobody?" I was primarily a consultant a…

[deleted]

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#132

Post by dylan604 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #123
dvt wrote: post #3

The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc. The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, F…

> The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media I've thought about that, but your reputation is being destroyed. You'll offer no defense? You'll let everyone who you value get that impression of you? You'll allow it to become permanent, public record for anyone who ever looks you up with a search engine?

People are going to believe what they want to believe regardless of information presented disputing. You can expend energy and effort and get frustrated by not changing anyone's mind, or not and have the same result. ???

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#133

Post by [deleted] »

betwixthewires wrote: post #119

1) be pseudonymous. People in my real life don't need to know what I do on the internet. Not like I'm doing anything untoward, but I am candidly discussing things with random strangers, including things some might view as beyond discussion, and you don't want some crusade against you for that. Your real life and your internet life don't need to overlap, and 99% of people get no benefit from them overlapping. 2) never…

[deleted]

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#134

Post by wolverine876 »

fairity wrote: post #111
dvt wrote: post #3

The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc. The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, F…

You're assuming that internet mobs only attack based on misconstrued online content, but that's far from true. I think the best solution here is to speak up on behalf of those who are unfairly attacked, in spite of the negative fallout from getting involved. The worst thing that can happen in cases like this is when nobody supports the victim. That can be profoundly traumatizing. For a more in-depth look at the impac…

> I think the best solution here is to speak up on behalf of those who are unfairly attacked

The reality is that there is no easy way forward, no simple answer:

You don't know the truth any better than the mindless mob. If someone is accused of sexual assault or harassment, do you want to risk defending them, only to find out later that you guessed wrong? When the video comes out showing the crime, do you want your name permanently associated with trying to protect them?

The witch hunt / lynching / mob attack is always the wrong act, regardless of what someone has done. Perhaps the best you can do is to point that out, but that is also difficult. People will not read the nuance and assume you are on the other side. And you only have so much social capital - when everyone blocks you after the first time you stand up, what do you do after that?

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#135

Post by throwitaway78 »

polote wrote: post #24

There are a lot of talks on HN about the toxicity of social media. And people are pretty angry against Google and Facebook. But to me the worse is by far Twitter. There are plenty of random people who have a disproportionate number of followers compared to the quality of their posts. And as a result can do these kind of mods. Which are amplified by retweets, something that barely exists in other social media. Random…

Read this comment earlier and nodded in agreement. Somehow ended up on Twitter looking at the trending topic "people questioning need for more Ted Bundy content." Oh ha, I agree, I'm sick of serial killer true crime murder ugliness too. Click the link. Immediately see this:

https://twitter.com/OhNoSheTwitnt/status/1397629835757883395

"No thanks, Ted Bundy movie. If I want a story about a white guy who murders women I’ll just watch the news."

Right. White guys, they are the worst. Why is it that I can go on Twitter and within 2 minutes find hate speech attacking the group I've been assigned to? Btw, this is pretty tame. I could find worse with very little effort.

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#136

Post by tolbish »

craigds wrote: post #50
dvt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, mea culpa . I mistook another screenshot in his post to be his own account. Yeah, 16k isn't that much; pretty sad.

> isn't that much 16 thousand people follow him. That's way more than enough to be considered a 'public person'

You can buy that kind of following for the price of a bottle of wine.

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#137

Post by skinnymuch »

ivanstojic wrote: post #56
dvt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, mea culpa . I mistook another screenshot in his post to be his own account. Yeah, 16k isn't that much; pretty sad.

Historically, even just a few decades ago, if you had reach of sixteen thousand (!!) people, you were incredibly publicly exposed. To think that we now file it as “not that much” is something I can’t wrap my mind around.

No one actually has the reach of their entire follower count. If there was a way to analyze your own followers to root out Bots and inactive people, who knows how much lower the number would be. That isn’t counting active users who don’t pay attention to you. And even if they pay attention to you, it might be in a non caring way. Outside of 16K being a big number. That number alone doesn’t mean much when it comes to modern social media.

A good easy contrast is the “phenom” of how flighty, not loyal, and weaker of a connection TikTok followers are. I believe it is very hard to go from being big on Tiktok to elsewhere. Contrasted by other social media.

Also. This is all coming from some one who has never had more than 200 of so followers on any social media.

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#138

Post by danso »

smoldesu wrote: post #4

This is why your identity online should never be traceable back to your real name. It's a pretty scorched-earth opinion on privacy, but the internet ultimately doesn't change if you use an alias. If you do so, employers will come back empty-handed when they try Googling you, and they'll have a harder time finding "that dumb Twitter post" that jeopardizes your job. None of this is to say that you should be a bad perso…

It’s a tradeoff. Adopting an abstract featureless identity for your Internet interactions can greatly limit your ability to cultivate relationships online, especially when it comes to producing and self-promoting your work/art

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#139

Post by rapht »

sneak wrote: post #125
rapht wrote: post #118

Cancel the mob: make platforms liable for publishing (or linking to) any accusations not established by a court relating to an individual's morals or ethics, except when those accusations are made by an accredited press organization. OK to call someone an incompetent, not OK to call someone a child abuser, or even just a sexist or a liar, except if you're making a stand as a media organization (which the accused indi…

There is already a mechanism for conveying liability to the publisher (not the platform, but the tweeter/poster, as it should be) when they publish false claims of fact (ie lies).

Precisely: this does not work in practice!

I see many reasons why, the first of which is just that most of the time the damage is already done by the time it goes to court, assuming you can find the real name behind the usernames that professed lies, and I'm not even talking about bots.

That's why the liability has to rest on platforms -- and that's in addition to the publisher's liability.

Edit: formatting

Re: Life after an internet mob attack

#140

Post by koheripbal »

kokanator wrote: post #44
polote wrote: post #24

There are a lot of talks on HN about the toxicity of social media. And people are pretty angry against Google and Facebook. But to me the worse is by far Twitter. There are plenty of random people who have a disproportionate number of followers compared to the quality of their posts. And as a result can do these kind of mods. Which are amplified by retweets, something that barely exists in other social media. Random…

>Random people can have too much power. So the common persons voice should be rate limited? Only those 'qualified' should be able to have a larger impact? Who makes the rules in this situation?

The issue is that the people in society with the most free time seem to have the most influence on social media.

Rate limiting people so that they could only post/vote/etc once per day, for example, or perhaps amplifying the vote by the account age might work to bring more attention to more mature voices.

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