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Don't let social media think for you

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Re: Don't let social media think for you

#201

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

jfengel wrote: post #160
unethical_ban wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lone Star beer used to have images under their bottle caps as puns[1]. One of them used an image of a noose as part of the puzzle, which was completely unrelated to race, or death - it was simply using the word as a similar word to "news". Someone went apeshit on Twitter[2], and now all the puns are gone while Lone Star reviews them for sensitivity. I'm politically liberal, and I'm fucking ashamed of the fact that th…

There's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to death. That's what they're for. The puzzle may not be related to death, but the noose is. And in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race. They are being used, today, as racist threats. When a noose appears, lynching is the assumed meaning, and not just by black people [1]. So it's a good thing that Lone Star is taking a look at the entire p…

> in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race

People do frequently hang themselves, and there have been some stories of people tying nooses as jokes about suicide or overwork that were misinterpreted as racist threats.

I'm not sure if a joke about suicide is much better than a joke about lynching, and not being aware of the possible racist interpretation is tremendously ignorant at best, but it's clearly not as horrendous as an actual, real death threat.

We should strive to leave at least a little room for nuance and context, and making broad statements like "in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race" leaves none.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#202

Post by ta2162 »

jfengel wrote: post #160
unethical_ban wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lone Star beer used to have images under their bottle caps as puns[1]. One of them used an image of a noose as part of the puzzle, which was completely unrelated to race, or death - it was simply using the word as a similar word to "news". Someone went apeshit on Twitter[2], and now all the puns are gone while Lone Star reviews them for sensitivity. I'm politically liberal, and I'm fucking ashamed of the fact that th…

There's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to death. That's what they're for. The puzzle may not be related to death, but the noose is. And in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race. They are being used, today, as racist threats. When a noose appears, lynching is the assumed meaning, and not just by black people [1]. So it's a good thing that Lone Star is taking a look at the entire p…

>There's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to death.

There's no such thing as a skeleton that's unrelated to death.

>That's what they're for. The puzzle may not be related to death, but the noose is.

That's what they're there for. The puzzle may not be related to death, but the skeleton is.

>And in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race. They are being used, today, as racist threats.

Maybe if you suffer from American Exceptionalism, but nooses and lynchings transcend the US and specific races. The largest lynchings in the US were targeted against Chinese and Italians as an example.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#204

Post by sneak »

coldtea wrote: post #92

It'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…

> It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob.

The "mob" analogy is a bad one here. Sending mean tweets and a group beating someone to death in a town square are nowhere near equivalent.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#205

Post by jrmg »

cableshaft wrote: post #100
SamBam wrote: post #42

The 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…

Also, if you end up having to announce your take on every "bad" thing that happens, your feed becomes nothing but commentary on the bad takes, almost always identical to everyone else, and you dillute or lose what makes you interesting in the process. I've seen this in my own feed. Any time some "bad" person is exposed, I'm almost guaranteed to scroll past 30 almost identical takes on it by the same 30 people on my f…

The meme of "if you don't speak up, you're complicit" is part of this.

I appreciate the sentiment, but there are just too many (terrible!) inequities in the world to live by this and not have it be a full time preoccupation.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#206

Post by dahfizz »

unethical_ban wrote: post #149
unholythree wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed a unfortunate conflation of word lynching with racism motivated homocide lately. Even from authorities (newspapers, lawyers, some state ACLU) that have to know they aren’t always the same. I think the nuance of these specific injustices is important because the solutions are different. A killing could even be lawful but racist and therefor unjust, but that’s a distinct (albeit important) problem from mob…

Lone Star beer used to have images under their bottle caps as puns[1]. One of them used an image of a noose as part of the puzzle, which was completely unrelated to race, or death - it was simply using the word as a similar word to "news". Someone went apeshit on Twitter[2], and now all the puns are gone while Lone Star reviews them for sensitivity. I'm politically liberal, and I'm fucking ashamed of the fact that th…

It is the same way that "the mob" identified the ok-hand as a symbol of hate.

There is a real desire to be outraged. The mob members get awarded with internet points and smug self-righteousness when they are outraged. Combined with the zero downside they face, _any_ amount of mental gymnastics to be outraged at something is worth it. That's how they can think a completely normal thing, that millions of people do, is suddenly a symbol of fascism or whatever.

See also: wearing red hats is "bad" according the mob[1][2]. Its a perfect metaphor, really. They can't bother to look at the hat and see if its MAGA or not, they just see something vaguely similar to something they don't like and go off. This one in particular annoys me because I have an actual "red hat" baseball cap from redhat the linux company. Its a really cool hat but I get snide comments every time I wear it. Absolutely ridiculous that the mere color red "triggers" some people.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/style/red-baseball-hats-m...

[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/liberal-author-normal...

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#207

Post by parafactual »

jrmg wrote: post #205
cableshaft wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, if you end up having to announce your take on every "bad" thing that happens, your feed becomes nothing but commentary on the bad takes, almost always identical to everyone else, and you dillute or lose what makes you interesting in the process. I've seen this in my own feed. Any time some "bad" person is exposed, I'm almost guaranteed to scroll past 30 almost identical takes on it by the same 30 people on my f…

The meme of "if you don't speak up, you're complicit" is part of this. I appreciate the sentiment, but there are just too many (terrible!) inequities in the world to live by this and not have it be a full time preoccupation.

Also, is social media really the best way to take action against terrible inequity? I would think if one believes the uninvolved are complicit, they would also look for more effective methods than saying something is bad on Twitter.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#208

Post by parafactual »

randphys wrote: post #71
jonfromsf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because it makes money. Why would they want to stop it? People have a weird mental model where they think private companies are the government. They're just a group of people getting paid to make money for investors.

Is it really only the job of government to make ethical decisions? Surely companies and employees can and should try to be ethical. Just because there is profit involved doesn't mean that we should throw out our humanity.

They should, but they mostly don't.

And I don't think it's easy; I suspect corporations do bad things despite the good intentions of employees. Each one, driven by subtle incentives, makes a somewhat less ethically sound decision than they would otherwise. And the effects of those decisions are often abstracted away from the decision-makers. The status quo gradually becomes worse and worse.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#209

Post by parafactual »

barbacoa wrote: post #135
aantix wrote: post #102

I'm always perplexed at how engineers fall into these tribal traps. People that deal with complex nuance all day fully denouncing any idea from specific people. E.g. I've even seen things like "if you follow Uncle Bob Martin I'm unfollowing you".

It's because tribalism exists on a different domain than logic and intelligence. It occupies the same region of your brain and satiates the same primordial needs that organized religion once did. We used to circle around our priests and their sacred idols for our sense of unity, now we circle around our politicians and made up genders.

I don't think specifying "made up genders" makes much sense. The progressives and trans people I know, to the extent that they think tribally, do so with respect to ideology like anyone else.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#210

Post by [deleted] »

unethical_ban wrote: post #158
paxys wrote: post #76

There are so many comments here blaming Twitter while blissfully unaware that HN fuels the exact same online outrage. Almost every day there's a " did bad thing to me" article on the front page and people immediately pick up their pitchforks and join the mob. You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it.

Crucial distinction: * Individual identities are less important/influential on HN than twitter * The community is much smaller on HN than twitter * The conversation is more nuanced. We have paragraphs vs. 240 characters * We have voting to squelch really low effort or trolling. The informal guidelines of the community discourage downvoting an otherwise decent post because you don't agree. --- This all adds up to a ve…

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