The terrifying thing about this article is that after all of this, he's still on Twitter, and still feels like he has to be on Twitter for the exposure it gives him.
What it's like to be cancelled
61–70 of 613 posts
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#62I 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…
Worth noting: Twitter's trending algorithm doesn't appear to have a concept of a denominator either.
A relatively small collection of people talking about one subject can trigger the trending analysis even though that group represents a fraction of a fraction of Twitter users. Once that happens, the topic becomes publicized to everyone using Twitter's UI.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#63History does not repeat itself but it rhymes. Rhymes with witch hunt and lynch mob.
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Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#64You can find his original apology here. https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...
Maybe if he wasn't so self-loathing in it the consequences wouldn't have been as extreme. When the mob comes for you its best to just ignore it rather than give in to their demands. He called himself a sexual predator, what kind of impression does that give?
A sidenote, this happened at the same time as the Smash bros community was experiencing a "metoo"-ish moment, and it dragged a lot of nerdy hobbies into the mix. Many innocent people were cancelled last June, and not all of them managed to get out from the hole like Noah sadly.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#65Honestly, the biggest mistake people make is issuing public apologies.
So far, we have very few examples of them actually working. On the contrary, any amount of admission seems to show weakness. The "controversy" around Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to have come nearly entirely from his apology to a very small group of disappointed fans.
There are even more examples of very publicly terrible people who have skirted worse controversies simply by ignoring them! There is no reward for being self-aware or apologetic. But there are rewards for unyielding self-righteousness.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#66Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to lists like "a list of people who tweet stupid things". It went on for a couple of days. The good thing is that I am a nobody - I am not known in any popular online communities, I am not famous and no one really cares who I am - so I could not be cancelled. But the amount of negative emotions and energy directed at me did affect me for a couple of days. After that event, I sympathize much more with people who have been cancelled (earlier I tended to support those doing the cancelling even though I did not tweet/comment myself).
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#67I'm a bit sceptical about this because it talks very little about what happened that caused OP to get "cancelled", and an awful lot about how they came back from it. I do understand, first-hand, the trauma that comes from being cancelled (although I have like 1500 followers on Twitter so you could argue the stakes are less) and there's no doubt that it is a bitch. But there is something to take away from it - or at l…
The post says that there isn't much learning to show because he's not that person any more, and being cancelled happened long after he had already stopped doing the bad behavior.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#68Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter. It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shuc…
I didn't see any libel mentioned in the article. The author seems not to dispute the claims made against him.
He loses work due to false accusations of rape. Wait, you say, they just misinterpreted his words! Well, they also accused his wife.
> The internet, though, misinterpreted some of what I had said and began accusing me of rape. No one has ever accused me of raping them. But twitter latched onto that narrative and couldn’t let it go.
> My womanizing at events predates ever meeting my wife. But people went so far as to call her a rapist, a sex trafficker, or at best a rape apologist. The online world expected her to divorce me and when she didn’t many more people who claimed they would support her, shunned her.
And, depending on what the media actually said:
> I think my low point happened when the story was picked up by some bigger online blogs. Not because they made things worse or that I have any delusions about their journalistic integrity (I was never asked for a comment by any media outlet or blog that shared this story).
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, don't be a sexual predator that assumes it will never lead to any consequences later in life.
What would you suggest you do when you have been behaving incorrectly? You can’t change the past.
That's an odd strawman. I... wouldn't behave incorrectly in the first place. It's not a difficult concept to understand for most people I hope, especially with sexual harassment.
Re: What it's like to be cancelled
#70Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter. It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shuc…
Who are “our laws”? Twitter is a global corporation.