Yes, this is a problem, but come on, after Hardwick was reinstated, is it really discouraging abused women to come forward if one concludes that maybe the investigations found that Dysktra’s accusations may have been exaggerated or lacked mitigating context? Else, realistically, why was he reinstated?
Oh, I have no doubt false accusation happen and can be damaging. Even of wealthy powerful men. It’s just not the way I choose to bet. Case in point:
If it’s citing Johnny fucking Depp as a false accusation, hell yeah it is.
You doubling down on this ridiculous strawman is both boring, and renders it obvious to everyone else here that you don’t really have an actual argument to make.
With the exception of your first phrase, that’s pretty much what I said here:
But I disagree with the first phrase. I think that social media is a very powerful enabling tool for cancel culture. The people who spread lies for whatever reason – and there can be a lot of motivations for doing it – are enabled both by the ability of social media to rapidly spread defamatory lies, and by the bias of cancel culture to uncritically believe them.
Let’s see that quote again, or kindly make a retraction. Because I never said I personally knew “many” individuals who were falsely accused in social media.
Because in “he said/she said” situations, there often isn’t enough information for an outsider to know for sure what happened, and so the one who is more valuable to the investigating organization is likely to “win”. There are lots of cases of real abuse that are never provable.
So yes, it damn well is discouraging. And your certainly that he’s innocent and she made shit up is part of what’s discouraging.
You don’t think a headline in the New York Times stating, “Chloe Dykstra makes false accusations about sexual abuse” would affect her future career opportunities? Like, folks looking to hire her wouldn’t Google her name, see that, and think, “What if we hire her and she starts making false accusations against people in this office?”
You said “many lesser individuals have not [been restored like Hardwick]” and when directly challenged “Name them”, you came up with your Canadian Girlfriend evasion of “cases of which I have first-hand or indirect knowledge”.
So no, no retraction from me. You definitely said “many”, and then intimated they were ones you knew personally. Backpedal all you want, but that’s the chain.
Unless the defence here is going to be “Weee-elll, I only know one actually first-hand … and ‘indirect knowledge’ means I read it on Reddit”?
Holy Hastur : do you not see the difference between that article saying “Hardwick denies claims” and the hypothetical “Dykstra makes false accusations” one? They are in no way “exactly” the same. Unless “pretty much” is doing so much weasel-wording it could temporarily take over Toad Hall.
That article did lead me down a rabbit hole, to find out that Dykstra faced such organized hate and threats online that it almost drove her to suicide. So maybe this is an example of cancel culture after all: once again, rightwing misogynists are trying to cancel women for speaking up.
So the two archetypal examples of “cancel culture” lauded in this thread (Hardwick and fourteen-year-old I can’t be arsed to look up) didn’t actually result in “cancellation”.
I’m not backpedaling. “Many lesser individuals” was a reference to a general phenomenon in social media today, as per the numerous cites you can find (I gave you three) describing defamation in social media as a rampant problem and how to fight back against it. The cases I know of first-hand or indirectly (indirectly meaning second-hand, through trusted friends) I have never characterized as “many”. The “intimation” is yours and yours alone. But I doubt I’ll ever get that retraction.
Yes: right-wing misogynists use social media to cancel Chloe Dykstra, using arguments similar to the ones you’re using here. Is that the point you’re intending to make?
Fyi, here is an example of giving evidence for a claim of “what you’ve seen it heard from close friends” without revealing a lot of information online:
Once again - if it’s so general, you would be able to. Name. Them. Only one of your “cites” does so and I’ve already addressed - and dismissed - those three cases as being 2 having zip to do with social media and one being Johnny fucking Depp.
They were raised in reply to my just asking “Name them” and nothing else. The intimation was entirely yours. Backpedaling now is definitely what you’re doing.
Not as long as you keep playing whatever game of denying that your posts are in any way sequentially linked, you’re not.
No, the point I’m intending to make is that AFAICT (I don’t do social media) the “Chris Hardwick responds, saying Chloe Dykstra is lying” post came from exactly the same source – TMZ – as the original headline published on TMZ. Just posted on their Facebook account instead of their website.
If you’re implying a contradiction, I don’t see any.
I would, however, acknowledge that “Dysktra tried to smear Hardwick with unsubstantiated accusations” was a bit strong and just conjectural on my part. More accurately, as I said later, there’s reason to believe that both were at fault to some degree, but I think it’s reasonable to infer from Hardwick’s reinstatement that at least some of Dykstra’s claims were exaggerated or lacked appropriate context. I totally agree with what @Spice_Weasel said upthread, which I think is a very reasonable assessment:
@Wolfpup accuses Dykstra of engaging in “cancel culture slurs” and of “libeling him [Hardwick] on social media” and of engaging in the “venting of a bitter ex.” with claims that he “wouldn’t consider…to be credible” and behavior “not characteristic of someone who genuinely wants the full truth to come out.”
@Puzzlegal says that he’s “acting out the very cancel culture he derides.”
He denies this, saying that “nothing I said here could be materially damaging to Dykstra’s career.” Here I advise folks to look back at the quotes in point 1.
@Miller argues that a NYT headline accusing her of false accusations would damage her career.
@Wolfpup denies that it would, because “that’s pretty much exactly what happened,” only instead of linking to a journalistic headline saying things like he said in post 1, he links to an article containing Hardwick’s denials, headlined “Chris Hardwick Breaks Silence, Denies Sexually Assaulting Chloe Dykstra”
When @MrDibble points out the difference, @Wolfpup doubles down by showing how shitty people on Facebook are to Dykstra in response to the article–bizarrely supporting @Miller’s point about how Dykstra would be affected by claims like @Wolfpup’s.
As an aside, looking at Dykstra’s article, she claims that Hardwick tried to have her blacklisted, and also, she has very little work listed on her Wiki page either before or after her essay was published. She may well have been blacklisted, or she might just not have made it in entertainment, like most people who tried.
So what we’re seeing is that when women speak up about abuse, hordes of misogynists tend to descend on them. If cancel culture operated here, surely it was against Dykstra, not against Hardwick, that it brought its most egregious excesses.
I think the problem here is @wolfpup avoiding one of the main issues from the OP:
Some other poster also demanded that we don’t talk about how the right wing (and he who should not be named) is weaponizing the cancelling, and at the same time pushing a framework (Again, that is coming from the right too) that one should not point this in discussions like this one here. It ends up as making the old ‘they are the same’ false equivalence argument, or that we should talk only about the issue and ignore the exaggerations the elephant in the room made to justify the huge weaponization of cancelling that many do see now.
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