Twitter. Using your social presence to get someone to lose their job or damage someones career.
Recently an artist did a Batman cover for DC Comics. Said artist had also in the past done a cover for a guy who has a very bad reputation, so the Batman writer called the guy out on Twitter and tried to associate him with nefarious people in the comics scene.
Turned out the artist doesnt even have twitter. Knew absolutely nothing of ‘bad guys’ reputation or his associations. All he knew was that he did a cover for a guy who USED to work at DC. But it was too late, the artist was driving back from having just put his dog down at the vet…when he starts getting phone calls from DC comics and others asking questions.
Soon the Batman writer apologized, but it was too late. The artist had taken a major hit to his reputation and certain loud Twitter comics personalities still clamor for his head and demand some sort of purity test from the guy who just lives in THE REAL WORLD and not the high school drama Twitter one.
Is it possible to be “erased” if nobody knew who you were to begin with?
Let’s be very clear. There are people who have been shamed on Twitter. It seems to me that “erasure” implies something opposite from that, or at least very different. Is that agreed upon or not?
Or is “erased” being trotted out as a scare word because it sounds very Stalinist?
I think it’s worth being precise. Because when Stalin erases someone, no one heard or saw anything about em in any public medium after that. He wasn’t shaming people. He was removing them from the public record.
So a makeup vlogger with 4.8 million subscribers pissed off the fans of a rival makeup vlogger by appearing in a photograph in which four people are flipping the bird. As a result, 250,000 folks unsubscribed from es YouTube channel.
Manny Mua still seems to have a YouTube channel with 4.8 million subscribers. People are still writing celebrity gossip articles about em.
This is “cancellation”? This is “erasure”? This is a threat to our free speech? When some fans of Minor Celebrity A decide to stop being fans of Minor Celebrity B over a celebrity gossip kerfluffle?
This thread is titled “So-Called “Cancel Culture”, Social Media and Bullying”. The original question was whether cancel culture constitutes bullying, not whether it threatens free speech and erases people. YouTube stars cancelling each other and damaging each other’s careers are an example of the phenomenon.
Now, IMO the sort of cancellation that happened to Steven Pinker and Woman’s Place UK really are a threat to free speech, but they’re technically not on topic.
Then we have the answer – it’s mostly a very minor and mundane phenomenon, and just a carryover from humankind’s capacity for petty obnoxiousness with the power of mass-communication via the internet. Occasionally it might really harm someone, just like occasionally (relatively speaking) obnoxiousness in meatspace harms someone. When it harms someone it’s bad. Most of the time it barely does anything.
I think you’re missing the point that the obnoxiousness is no longer petty when thousands or millions of people are able to join in via social media. Being shunned and shamed is actually pretty damn harmful to one’s mental health, never mind the effect on careers, and now it’s happening on a grand scale and often for relatively minor reasons.
As for free speech, there’s a lot of people who’ve been kicked off Twitter for minor infractions, but that’s corporate or government censorship. And I see plenty of people saying they’re afraid to speak up on Facebook, at work etc for fear of the repercussions, social and otherwise. But that’s more to do with rising intolerance in society generally than with online mobs. There’s real life cancellation; trying to shut down meetings and prevent people speaking, but that’s off-topic, like I said. And there’s groups trying to censor scientists, which may be down to students or to the internet mob or to governments. That’s bad for all of us.
It’s the disproportion of the punishment to the alleged offence, and the fact it’s randomly meted out to whoever catches the public’s eye that makes it bullying, IMO.
Maybe this is happening. But most of the examples you and others have cited are basically nothing – minor inconveniences to wealthy and powerful people who like to whine when they get a bit of criticism.
Pinker has been criticized for saying false and ignorant things. So have other scientists and “scientists” who spread crap false science, such as the supposed inherent inferiority of black people.
This might be a real phenomenon, but the vast majority of the whining about it is just whining from privileged people about nothing.
In further interest of being precise; Is it your position then that short of Stalinist tactics, there is nothing to the cited examples of online mob mentality worth taking seriously?
And if that is not what you meant, then what did you mean, precisely?
You’ve expressed this sentiment repeatedly. Is it your position then that “privilege”, whether you define it by fame or fortune, gives others cart blanche to say almost anything they want about you and said “privilege” precludes you from “whining” about it? Additionally, is it fair to say that if a privileged person has sufficient wealth, they cannot be cancelled by public opprobrium, since they’ll never have to worry about where their next meal is coming from?
It’s my position that a very wealthy person going from very wealthy and influential to very wealthy and slightly less influential, when done unjustly by anonymous internet strangers, is about as minor a form of injustice as brushing by a person on the street without saying “excuse me”. A slight annoyance, and pretty much to be expected if one is a public figure. Sometimes someone steps on my foot and doesn’t say sorry. Shit happens. I don’t whine about it.
Why the heck are you bringing that into the discussion? I’m talking about scientists being afraid to investigate real phenomena because they are worried about the reaction.
As for Pinker, the open letter criticising him mostly brought up minor things that are still up for debate. Like we said before, it’s not going to stop Pinker speaking up about whatever he wants, but it will put a damper on less famous and successful academics’ voices.
If you are using a term like “erased,” which suggests extreme Stalinist practices, then what you’re talking about must be comparable to Stalinist tactics in some non-hyperbolic manner.
If you want to have a serious discussion about it, then use serious descriptive terms that reflect what is actually happening, not scare words like “cancelled” or “erased.”
I read Jon Ronson’s book back when it came out. It was a serious and thoughtful and considered exploration about the phenomenon of people being shamed on the internet. The current discussions are nothing like that, so I can’t take them seriously.
Futhermore, a public figure who makes es living based even in a small way on the public’s reacting in some way to what E says has zero basis for complaining if some number of people dislike what E has said and criticize em.
People who are public representatives of large concerns, like CEOs, are in a reputation-based and image-based position and should expect to have their statements scrutinized and realize that the companies they are the faces of have the right and responsibility to monitor their reputational associations.
So, if we’re talking about politicians, entertainers, or the faces of large corporate entities, it is entirely just that they should measure their words with an eye on their reputations. That’s not oppression. That’s just the public exercising their free speech rights.
If we want to have a conversation about people like Justine Sacco and Lindsey Stone, whose lives were ruined unjustly after posting small jokes that went wrong, then let’s talk about what happened there and what should or should not or can or cannot be done about that kind of thing.
Or let’s talk about people who actually are threatened by dangerous assholes on the internet, like what happened in Gamergate or what’s going on with QAnon.
And the basis of that conversation must start with the fact that people have the right to express their opinions about things that they see other people doing and saying.
But I don’t see serious conversations like that happening here. I see a lot of reactionary whining on behalf of people who have not actually been harmed in any way and have faced nothing but justifiable criticism from members of the public.
So you are not concerned about encouraging that kind of behavior by being dismissive of it? Online mob mentality as a societal phenomenon is not a threat to free speech, in your opinion, if it is directed at those who are privileged. They essentially give up some of that right based on their bank balance, including being subject to dismissal as whiners when they dare complain about that kind of injustice.
I think the real question was do these things constitute “bullying.” I think we’ve determined that they do but am certain you’ll let me know if I’m off-base.
Not my OP and not my terms. I prefer “online mobbing, bullying, piling on”. But in a world where “abolish” doesn’t mean abolish, “Cancel Culture” probably doesn’t mean Stalinism either. Let’s both agree that we understand what they mean without resorting to disingenuous pretense that we don’t.
Good. Me too. That’s what I’m hoping we can talk about. But some people assume that others are here to defend the rich and famous and thus woke-fully (my term) dismiss the arguments as unfounded whining. My argument is that while I don’t lie awake worrying about whether JKR can put food on the table if she is “cancelled”, the kind of dismissive attitude expressed towards the kind of (unfair) criticism she received is not limited to those we see as “privileged”, but as you note happens to those who are not privileged. We just don’t hear about it or, as I have tried to express, encourages a culture where online mob harassment is okay because the presumption is that since what you said has become widely publicized, you must be “privileged” in some way and therefore can stand with a little abuse and don’t you dare whine about it.