Talking about "a cancer which positively reinforces outrage and amplifies misinformation" and using a tweet from Scott Adams is quite ironic.
Life after an internet mob attack
51–60 of 480 posts
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#52There 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…
Oh good, so now I can silence a critical voice by unleashing a horde of bots and I don't even need to drown their voice?
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#53The problem is previously we didn't listen to victims, and allowed them to be silenced. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and we are listening unconditionally, but (occasionally) bad actors are taking advantage of our good intentions. How do we find balance?
I think there's another layer here with the virtue signalling side of it, and that depends on the exact communities/movements that a person is a part of. Like, where is the cancellation of Marjorie Taylor Greene over the absurd Holocaust comments? Matt Gaetz claims to be "cancelled" but could appear on multiple prime time cable news shows basically whenever he wants [1]. It was a huge battle getting Bill O'Reilly off the air, and he walked with a $32M severance, more money than most normal people see in a lifetime— see the movie Bombshell for a dramatization of that story. These people aren't cancellable because they're already powerful, protected, and the audience they have doesn't care about the complaints (or revels in them).
Maybe it's something of a reaction to these frustrations that some progressive circles have adopted this knee-jerk zero tolerance stance, where no crime or perceived crime is too small to attempt to silence someone for. YouTube film commentator Lindsay Ellis went through a bunch of this recently, and basically dealt with it by making a 1.5 hour video where she itemizes everything she's been accused of, and drinks her way through explaining and apologizing for all of it (including, wretchedly, sharing about her own history with a sexual assault). [2]
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#54If/when any of my friends get attacked by the mob, I hope I'll have the courage to stand by them publicly. A good recent test was the doxing of Scott Alexander. I signed the open letter against it with my real name and was happily surprised to see the names of many people I know. We should have more of these small but visible acts of resistance that let like-minded people find you.
The post, and your comment, IMO wrongly frames this as courage .vs. cowardice in standing up for friends. However, that fails to take into account any context of the particular “cancellation”. eg, A situation with damning screenshots of lewd DMs are pretty ‘smoking gun’, and the barometer of “good friends would publicly support me” feels like an insane expectation when (in this hypothetical instance) the person did a…
My view is more like "a true friend would help you hide a body", or the short story "Friends in San Rosario" by O.Henry. If I abandoned a friend to the mob due to "screenshots of lewd DMs", I'd have a hard time living with myself afterward.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#55[flagged]
Right, and nothing really exonerated him beyond the one set of Twitter DMs which didn't seem suspect (assuming those were actually the only messages between them). Nobody backed down from their claims.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> OP has a huge Twitter presence (600k+ followers), He has 16k followers https://twitter.com/pasql
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.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#57From the linked Notion "Receipts" page: > I've struggled to understand why so many people have piled on to these absurd accusations without facts. I watched a similar situation play out in real time. A friend had to fire an employee who wasn't submitting work or even responding to communications. The employe retaliated by using their moderately large social media presence to disparage my friend and her company. Stran…
> I was stunned at how someone with zero evidence and an obvious axe to grind could rally such disdain for someone else with little more than a few unsubstantiated social media posts.
I feel that this is due to the weird place victimization occupies in our culture combined with how anti-social social media is.
It's extremely easy to issue accusations and threats and have them be read by literally millions of people. You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.
At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors. It's depressing to consider MORE litigation as the solution here, but I don't think we can depend on the good nature of people and rationality to ultimately prevail.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a pretty scorched-earth opinion on privacy I honestly always tought it was common sense. > None of this is to say that you should be a bad person online, or otherwise take advantage of anonymity. Being anonymous just gives you a healthy personal shield, and the option to "cash out" and walk away from that identity, if you so desire. I wouldn't call it anonymity. You can read all of the posts I've made on hacke…
I would love a feature where usernames get obfuscated once the posts reach a certain age.
I'm not sure I would like it here on HN but in general I can see why that's a good idea.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#59This 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…
I don't think that's realistic. The level of opsec required to actually do that, is realistically not going to happen for the majority of people.
I agree it's not realistic. The backwards arrow, however (i.e. you can get the real name from the handle easily, but you can't get the handle from the real name, or at least not easily) isn't hard to achieve and affords most of the protection.
If you're not going to be awful online, nobody will try to figure out who you are from a pseudonymous handle. But your employer/potential employer will certainly google your name.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#60After reading through the post on notion, I found it "impressive" that OP has dated with so many toxic persons over years. Is this normal? Or is OP self an outlier to have had so many toxic relationships?