By way of showing a little empathy toward that kind of thing, modern social media very often attaches your real name to your blatherings, and broadcasts them far and wide to people who ordinarily wouldn’t have heard them, and they can potentially stay online forever for a future boss, friend, family member, or romantic partner to find. Not just the thing you said, but exhaustive critique and mockery of it, and any ill-advised reactions you may have had.
I think a lot of people have a fight-or-flight response when they realize this has happened to them, and a lot of people double down into fight mode.
I have empathy for people getting hit by that intial social-media shame tsunami. It’s more than humans are equipped to deal with. I understand how it makes people want to double down, but I don’t empathize with people who do. Even though the criticism makes it harder and more humiliating to apologize and repent, you’ve still done a bad thing, and the same redemptive measures are still required even though it’s really hard.
I believe that preference for ingroup over outgroup is inherent to human nature. It’s something you can try to reduce and minimise, in yourself and in society, but not get rid of entirely. Since it became taboo to be bigoted towards the usual groups (foreigners, people of difference races or religions, etc) the ingroups and outgroups have become political tribes for many Americans. Hence why some will openly say they’d refuse to hire a Trump supporter, and others are desperate to ‘own the libs’.
That doesn’t mean bigotry is not a moral failing. Many things that are part of human nature are moral failings. I just don’t see it as a special kind of evil, different from selfishness, greed, cowardice, cruelty, etc. Serious bigotry, like the hypothetical Nazi coffee shop owner, is a grave moral failing. Thoughtlessly telling a racist joke is a minor moral failing. Bullying someone due to bigotry is no worse than bullying them because you just don’t like their face. Both are wrong.
Do you agree?
I don’t think so, given we are usually talking about getting people fired for something they said outside work, possibly on anonymous social media. If they had been acting inappropriately towards co-workers or customers, presumably they would already have been let go.
There are cases of people ‘cancelled’ for something they said years ago, based on views they no longer hold. And in those cases, they usually do apologise, and insist they have changed. It’s not uncommon for people accused of recent infractions to do those awful performative apologies too, though it seldom seems to help them.
Unless you mean ‘protecting people’ by stopping ideas from spreading, in which case we are back at the goal being censorship. My view is that the outcry against ‘cancel culture’ is mostly a pushback against that censorship going too far.
The evidence, coming from what the Right-wing is doing nowadays, shows that the left was correct about what the right was planning for exaggerating their “cancellations”.
Then, thanks to money from powerful people, they get also elected and then, whatever smells like good info, gets cancelled.
Systematic censorship of what they dislike indeed.
So far, we’ve had one post with examples of people who lost jobs due to bring cancelled, and it turned out most of that list was bogus. I don’t think “cancel culture”'s impact in bigots is anything like as big a problem as you think it is.
You know what, people who are bigoted, or selfish, or cruel who restrain themselves from acting on those impulses are everywhere, because yes, those are all common human failings. But when people act on their bigotry, their cruelty, their greed, then yes, the rest of society should rein them in. And we have both legal and social ways to do so, for most vices , depending on how badly you fall into them. I certainly wouldn’t hire someone as an actuary who had a reputation for exercising cruelty.
Whether she is or not (and it’s impossible to determine that without knowing exactly what she did and what the venue’s views on it are), getting banned for her behavior outside of the event itself is still unquestionably getting banned because of what she does rather than because of “who she is”.
A few of DemonTree’s remarks to that effect in this thread, none of them accompanied by cites:
This sort of vague virtue-signaling blather is ultimately impossible to argue with, not because it’s correct, but because it’s congenitally indefinite. Simply declare yourself to be fighting under the banner of some self-evidently noble principle like free speech and anti-censorship, and keep on claiming that some vaguely identified ideological opponents are constantly sabotaging this principle, without substantiating the claims with specific relevant examples or reliable quantitative data. Then no argument will ever modify your views, because they’re based on your accumulated “experience” of what you “seem” to be “seeing” through your thick lens of confirmation bias, rather than on any specific falsifiable assertions.
What we end up with is not a factually based description of any real-life party or ideology but rather just a psychological snapshot of the virtue signaler who claims to be opposing it. Not much to debate.
What sort of evidence do you believe would be sufficient to support DemonTree’s assertions? It seems to me that there could be quite a few isolated anecdotes, but my impression is that you’d consider these insufficient.
Most of the cases I’ve seen were not famous people, and it would be hard to find them again or dig up info. I could try: I do remember a few names, but it would be a lot of work. And based on past experience, very much confirmed in this thread, I think most people here would support the majority of those firings. That’s why I haven’t done that large amount of work. What would it really prove? You would all confirm your belief that there is no problem, and I would confirm my belief that (this corner of) the left supports censorship.
What do you think? Would it benefit the discussion enough to be worth the effort involved?
Meanwhile, the right never stopped supporting censorship, and now have far less restraint and more power to enforce their will. I had some small hope that the experience of once again being on the wrong end of the censorship equation, and the war in Gaza that caused an intra-left split on which views should be suppressed, would have changed a few minds. Not here, at least.
There are a few different problems with ‘cancel culture’. One is ‘social media amplifying someone’s bad decision and ruining their life (at least temporarily) over one mistake’. Maybe the person deserved some kind of censure, but the ‘punishment’ is grossly disproportionate to the ‘crime’. This could happen over any kind of vice, and I can think of non-bigotry-related cases. It’s primarily an issue caused by new technology.
Another issue is the innocent person who is falsely accused. That has always been a problem with community gossip; social media just vastly increased the size of the community. I don’t think anyone is going to defend this; the question is how much collateral damage you are comfortable with.
The one I am primarily concerned with is labelling non-bigoted beliefs and actions as bigotry, and non- or no more than usually bigoted people as bigots, to avoid having to defend your own beliefs from justified criticism, and to advance your political program. Here again, the people who are harmed are just collateral damage.
I don’t know how to address this when it has in fact been a pretty effective tactic. It’s tempting to fight fire with fire, but that just leads to a worse world in general.
Why is it such a large amount of work? You seem quite convinced this is a widespread phenomenon. If that were the case, you should already have notable examples at the top of your mind. I think you’re dodging the work because you know you’re out over your skis, so you’re deflecting it by saying we’re too stubborn to consider your carefully curated examples. That’s awfully convenient! It lets you hide behind vague sketches and strawmen.
I think we definitely have a problem with social media amplifying all sorts of things. That it amplifies the impact of being caught out for bigotry is far from the most serious problem. Personally, i think the amplification of bigotry is a far greater problem caused by social media. But social media does make cancel culture more more obvious.
This is a really neat trick. It implies that others are unjustifiably censorious based on evidence that they’re not even allowed to discuss, and we’re expected to let it slide because “it would be a lot of work” for you.
If you were simply fabricating examples from whole cloth, how would that look different from what you’re doing here?
Does it? Is he really “cancelled”? Does he appear to have missed out on any educational or employment opportunities due to his actions? Because it seems to me that he’s done quite well for himself, and his future prospects have done nothing but improve since he first showed up on TV.
He was a 14 year old boy. Someone took a photograph of him wearing a MAGA cap and looking a bit smarmy as he smirked at an old man. For that, he became an international hate figure. Literally, the firestorm of abuse he suffered was reported on by the BBC. Just think about how crazy that is.
There’s no nice way to say this; thousands of American leftists saw that picture and went temporarily insane. Some of them were celebrities with commensurately large followings. IIRC, Kathy Griffin, Reza Aslan, and at least a couple of other public figures publicly encouraged people to dox Sandmann and beat him up. I don’t like the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, but the progressive left’s reaction to that photo was TDS. There’s just no other term that fits. It certainly wasn’t justified by Sandmann’s actions. There’s video footage showing that all he did was smirk at an old man. You did worse than that when you were his age. So did I. So did every single person who spent the next fortnight harassing him.
I say all this to make the point that, if Sandmann is thriving and successful now (as I fervently hope he is) it’s very much in spite of the cyberbullies who tried to destroy him. I can’t imagine how traumatic that level and nature of attention must’ve been for a child his age. Kids have killed themselves over far less.
So frankly, I don’t care how successful he might be now. He could be a billionaire for all I care. An attempt was made, by leftists - thousands of them, working in unison - to destroy his life over absolutely nothing, it very easily could’ve succeeded, and if it had succeeded I’m sure they’d have been very pleased with themselves. As far as I can tell, that’s the kind of thing DemonTree is talking about.
Does it stand to reason, then - and I’m not saying this is your position - that nobody should ever face public shaming for any reason, barring, say, a legal conviction?
I would hope we can agree that what happened to that boy was unconscionable.
Is there anything that warrants public shaming? Are there cases where public shaming serves a useful societal function? Or is it always bad?
Oh, not at all. I remember a few years ago there was a video that went viral of some guy in a fast food place going apeshit at this poor Asian girl behind the counter over some trivial thing or other. He was twice her size, screaming in her face, and being racist to boot. Cancel that fucker all you like. I don’t think cancellations are bad per se, but I do think there have been a lot of bad cancellations, and often the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. And to be clear, I don’t think it’s an exclusively left-wing phenomenon. I’ve seen right-wingers do it too. My impression is that it does seem to be a predominantly left-wing phenomenon, but that could just be a reflection of the fact that leftists tend to be younger and more online.
I don’t think it’s predominantly a left-wing phenomenon. Maybe it used to be, but there are plenty of young, online rightists these days. Since the left-wingers decamped to Bluesky, I rarely see left-wing cancellations any more. All the examples I can think of are from a few years ago. But libsoftiktok highlights people in a way likely to get them harassed, and possibly get them in trouble with employers, and I’ve seen right-wingers go after academics studying sexuality, especially paedophilia. I mentioned that earlier in the thread, but no one was very interested.
I think who cancels more depends on the balance of power. The left had, and in some ways still has, a lot of institutional power, but the American right has grabbed the reins of political power and is using it to attack institutions that, in their view, are controlled by their enemy. And they are doing a lot of damage to the country and even the world in the process.