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What it's like to be cancelled

noahbradley.com

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Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#511

Post by username90 »

avs733 wrote: post #444
robocat wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe every man is a liar? Can a man change their spots? Is it acceptable to attack someone in the court of Twitter, victimise them, hurt them, and hurt their friends and family? Should society try to help everyone learn to be better, or should society righteously punish those who trangress the invisible boundaries of decency? His narrative is certainly believable, although I am in no position to judge your…

> Do you believe every man is a liar? No, I believe we are all our own unreliable narrator > Can a man change their spots? Absolutely > Is it acceptable to attack someone in the court of Twitter, victimise them, hurt them, and hurt their friends and family? begging the question. I am merely commenting on the credibility of accepting an argument about victimization from someone who demands that we bifurcate that from…

You are victim blaming here. If you have good reasons to believe the victim was attacked for a good reason then state it, otherwise don't blame the victim.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#512

Post by pdonis »

aeturnum wrote: post #486
pdonis wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day no one has an obligation to like you. It is not up to the perpetrator to decide what the appropriate restorative process is. We do not need a legal system to give us permission to dislike someone. I agree with this, but here we're not talking about just disliking someone. We're talking about cancellation--someone's livelihood is taken away (he was fired, from multiple jobs). Just disliking som…

I believe he does have legal recourse against false accusations. Slander and libel law is pretty old and well-established. Also, outside of protected classes, we have a legal system that assumes people do not have a right to be hired. I think each employer would need to make their own decision. There is nothing in his account that would make me uncomfortable working with him. But, I think your critique really points…

> I think each employer would need to make their own decision.

I agree. But the decision should be based on reliable information. What's more, I would say it should be based on reliable information that is related to the person's job performance.

> I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections.

To the extent that "cancel culture" has an impact on people's employment, the two are related. Of course a company isn't going to come right out and say "we fired this person because we were afraid of being shamed on social media". That doesn't mean there isn't causation involved. Would Bradley have been fired if there hadn't been a social media firestorm? If someone had just privately informed Wizards of the Coast (or any other company he was doing artwork for) about what Bradley had done in the past? That's the key question, and I'm not sure it's addressable by more robust employment protections, since there's no way to prove causation even if it's there.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#513

Post by xupybd »

happytoexplain wrote: post #415
xupybd wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying being against freedom of speech is toxic. I'm saying getting put on a hate speech list for being pro freedom of speech is. I've had great discussions with friends and family that disagree with me on free speech. On Twitter people don't seem to treat each other as people, but as representatives of a given ideology.

I understand all that, and agree. Separately, I'm saying that labeling people on one side of this issue as "against free speech" is a common quip, and is also toxic. It's similar to labeling pro-choice people as pro-murder. I expect people on Twitter to fall into that hole, and I don't engage with Twitter for that reason. I have more respect for HN users. For example, the sibling to this reply refers to me, saying "T…

Ah, I see now. Sorry I didn't understand that when I replied. On re-reading your comment, that is on me. You were clear.

Sorry if that term offends I didn't realize it did.

Here we don't have "Free Speech." As such, we have freedom of expression in our bill of rights. "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form." So to use the term "Free Speech" in New Zealand can be seen as an attempt to advocate for an American version of free speech. Many are actively against that.

That said, I'm sure many simply want to place new boundaries on speech and feel the result still maintains free speech. To them, I can see how it would be offensive to be accused of being against free speech.

Also, thank you for your willingness to get to the bottom of this. You have opened my eyes to how my comment could have been read. HN is a much better environment.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#514

Post by wvenable »

a1369209993 wrote: post #475
wvenable wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your job requires you to put on a public performance on social media -- do exactly that .

Key word there being "performance". Lie.

The key word is definitely performance. But people generally don't call actors liars for doing their job.

One should not pretend that social media is a place to broadcast your unedited inner-most feelings. It's media. Even if you are honest, it doesn't mean you're good enough at expressing yourself that what you intend to come across actually does. If you don't feel you'd be confident expressing yourself millions of people on prime-time television, you shouldn't feel confident expressing yourself to millions of people on twitter.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#515

Post by xwdv »

caeril wrote: post #508
xwdv wrote: post #12

If you find yourself the target of a cancellation attempt, never give in. Never apologize. If you do, the problem isn’t going to go away, it will get worse. No apology is ever enough. No punishment is ever enough. There is no way to redeem yourself in the eyes of the public. Apologizing is making yourself humbled and vulnerable to a mob that does not deserve it. You will roll over to expose your belly in submission a…

Not really sure why this is downvoted, as it is absolutely correct. Human beings are still barely-evolved monkeys, with a keen sense for, and penchant to exploit, perceived weakness. Apologies to third parties never make things better. Rather, they signal weakness to the mob, which emboldens them to pile on harder. Absolutely, you should apologize to the specific people you've hurt, as I gather the original poster di…

If you apologize to a person you hurt it needs to be done privately, without any way for them to produce evidence that you apologized.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#516

Post by jollybean »

prepend wrote: post #11

I think the biggest problem with Twitter is that we can’t determine a denominator. Twitter knows, but we don’t know. 100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on. We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or…

Likes and shares give us a reference for that.

The problem with twitter is that it's 240 characters of 'whatever' and that's not enough to arrive at any truth.

It's usually an emotional loaded de-contextualized statement and that's that.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#517

Post by kyleee »

tasuki wrote: post #467
spoonjim wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at Andrew Cuomo. Dozens of women accused of him of lewd behavior and he said "whatever" and the media have moved on.

From Wikipedia: > Liss said Cuomo called her "sweetheart," touched her on her lower back while they were at a reception, and also once kissed her hand after she stood up from her desk. There are worse accusations too, but surely this is closer to light flirting than to lewd behavior? Compared to this, a certain recent US ex-president should have been cancelled a dozen times over.

The person you've responded to said dozens; so what are the other accusations?

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#518

Post by tptacek »

koheripbal wrote: post #500
tptacek wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's accused of more than being a jerk in social situations, but being a jerk in social situations is by itself absolutely grounds for being fired. The list of things you can do that aren't illegal but will reliably get you fired is long.

> being a jerk in social situations is by itself absolutely grounds for being fired. That runs contrary to most companies I've worked at.

I'm not sure I can think of a team I've worked on with more than 10 people on it where someone didn't get let go for noncriminal bad behavior that wasn't simply work incompetence. Obviously, it happens all the time. That there are extreme assholes that manage to retain (or even improve) their positions isn't evidence against my argument, because it's not my claim that there's a consistent standard; in fact, the lack of such a standard is part of my point.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#519

Post by clucas »

caddemon wrote: post #487
clucas wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, try reading my comment a little more generously, please. I specifically said the current iteration of cancel culture is going overboard. I was not praising cancel culture. My main point was that cancel culture arose because of a real gap in our society's ability to handle certain types of people doing certain types of awful things... you mentioned that a lot of it could be handled by the legal system, but the r…

Yeah sorry, I know you were saying it has gone overboard, I didn't mean to present your comment as praising cancel culture in its entirety. But I did read it as praising some aspects of what these mobs can do, which the person I was replying to claimed wasn't a thing at all. More to your point, I get that there have been some positive applications, but I'm just not sure it is possible to avoid much of the bad (which…

> I get that there have been some positive applications, but I'm just not sure it is possible to avoid much of the bad (which IMO outweighs the good)

If people could just grant everything else and get right down to this point, the discourse on this issue would be so much more useful and interesting. And much harder. Thank you for a thoughtful comment.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#520

Post by paulpauper »

koheripbal wrote: post #505
paulpauper wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing or saying nothing only helps if you're innocent until proven guilty. An apology just helps to clarify the situation once the issue cannot be ignored. It will not make the mobs change their minds.

Apologizing on social media does not diffuse anything. It attracts attention and those who missed the initial controversy typically try to use the apology to exact more "consequences". Public apologies should never be done. If you want to apologize, do it in private to the alleged victim - do not do it in public.

Clarify is not the same as diffuse. Of course an an apology does not diffuse
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