How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs? Seems like they can bully and intimidate any organization from universities to corporations to GitHub projects to kowtow to their demands. Their demands are usually to fire, boycott, or boot people with opinions that run afoul of the mob.
Not a healthy precedent to set. We will regret this later if we continue down this path.
the problem is that prestigious institutions are run by bureaucrats wearing its skin. For example this article says "MIT buckled", when in reality some campus admin buckled because to them it's not worth risking their comfy job over a speaker. The bureaucrats have no skin in the game, they don't benefit from thinking about long term damage to MIT or society in general. From their perspective it's logical to bow to Twitter mobs and collect their paychecks
A pervasive lack of backbone among individuals in institutions is key to this. The shunning and shaming tactics used by online mobs are a very particular form of human aggression. Speculating on a correlating factor among the people in these institutions who seem so consistently vulnerable to it may be itself, problematic, but it's as though the organizations are missing anyone with the instinct to challenge or deflect hysterical twitter mobbings, and where we are now is a result of that absence of resistance at all.
The most memorable example of "lack of backbone" for myself was Evergreen State College president, George Bridges.
There was a large protest in 2017. The administration met to discuss the situation. Students prevented the administrators from leaving the meeting room unless they had an escort to ensure the administrators came to a resolution.
The president mentioned his need to use the restroom to one of the protest leaders. The student responded, "Hold it."[0] He finally went to the restroom a couple of minutes later, but he was escorted by some of the protesting students.[1]
I'd politely ask the person holding me prisoner for his name, and if he doesn't step aside I'll inform him that I'll be charging him with kidnapping. Regardless of what the AG does.
After all, what do you think will happen to you if you hold someone prisoner?
>I'd politely ask the person holding me prisoner for his name
"no"
>and if he doesn't step aside I'll inform him that I'll be charging him with kidnapping
You, as an individual can't charge people criminally. Civil suit is an option, but I suspect you won't get much in the way of financial compensation from a broke college student.
>After all, what do you think will happen to you if you hold someone prisoner?
Infliction of violence? Even if the AG doesn't make your life a nightmare, the optics might be bad enough that you'll lose your job.
Individuals cannot press charges, only a prosecutor vested with the authority of the state may file charges. This is an extremely common misconception largely generated from popular media. Individuals can report a crime to the police, cooperate with prosecutors, and sue privately.
>It'll be enough to matter to him. Future wages can be garnished.
civil judgements can be discharged via bankruptcy.
>I don't want a job where I'm required to be a milquetoast.
Isn't that the problem? There will always be someone who is willing to be a milquetoast, hence why institutions are caving to the slightest pressure from twitter mobs.
>It's to make it costly for him to commit crimes against me.
That only works if he doesn't think the cost is worth it. If you've already gone through the trouble of planning/executing this, I doubt one of the hostages telling you about the potential financial consequences is going to make you change your mind.
You may call them kidnappers for blocking a door in a public space, they'll accuse you of assault and file a lawsuit too (and unlike you, they'll have many buddies witnesses). The judge will dismiss both suits and tell you to not waste the court's time.
> “A pervasive lack of backbone among individuals in institutions is key to this.”
the raison d'être of most organizations, particularly bureaucracies, is to hide decisions behind a shield of indirection, to deflect individual responsibility elsewhere, which selects for and conditions the spineless. that those folks, when the spotlight shines on them, will cave, is thoroughly unsurprising.
> The shunning and shaming tactics used by online mobs are a very particular form of human aggression.
I just realise how similar the Twitter mob and 4chan harassment mobs are. They are basically 2 sides of the same coin. Even using the similar tactics like digging up dirt and more or less organise the same way, as impromptu mobs that just organically form.
Basically modern lynch mobs who never have to face the consequences of their actions protect by semi-anonymity, their numbers, and often their distance from their victims.
The only way to stop mobs is to reveal each individual in it and hold them accountable. How can we organize to unmask and reveal the individuals of these mobs? I bet we would find some of these accounts are the Russian accounts specifically built to divide Americans.
According to the upstream article posted in a sibling comment [1], the decision was made by the department head for EAPS, themselves a scientist AFAICT [2].
That doesn't necessarily change anything (and I'm not weighing in here), but given your assertion it seemed worth pointing out.
That's an odd generalization to apply when we're talking about an individual whose significant academic record is easy to find [0,1]. Many department heads are more senior, taking on organizational responsibilities that would be more of a burden to younger faculty. Perhaps that is what you're referring to. But in the scheme of things EAPS is - and always has been - high on the rigor scale and low on the bureaucracy scale.
Why does this sound like, MIT doesn't know how to use rhetoric? Isn't that the point of their job as administration, to be the interface between the public and the institution?
> the problem is that prestigious institutions are run by bureaucrats wearing its skin
Universities are run by their professors. Invited talks are regular academic business. A 'campus admin' does not invite or disinvite anyone to give an academic talk.
As someone who left a job in academic administration recently and who is also faculty at another university, this is not true. Administrators can invite and often can disinvite or make other decisions about talks. This kind of day-to-day running of the university has been largely ceded to administrators.
The power they have isn’t over us, it’s over institutions and businesses who seem to bend to the will of the mob.
I’d like to see some data on whether a Twitter storm in a teacup has any measurable negative consequences for a typical large organization, and whether they need to listen as often as they do.
They don't have any power, other than to annoy the institution. The only power here is the power that MIT has over the people they book to speak, and since MIT doesn't want to be annoyed, they canceled the speaker.
The problem with cancel culture is a problem with bad employment law, and a problem with cultural institutions without any core ethical beliefs.
> They don't have any power, other than to annoy the institution. The only power here is the power that MIT has over the people they book to speak, and since MIT doesn't want to be annoyed, they canceled the speaker.
The ability to get others to do what you want them to is absolutely a form of power.
A large number of US universities make signing a DEI statement a precondition for employment. Some also require an annual progress report on DEI targets. Dorian Abbot had the temerity to propose an alternate framework, MFE. Some factions can't tolerate alternative perspectives, and thus Dorian had to be cancelled.
I agree. Absolutionistic ethics, of which I am a proponent of, would largely throw out “the paradox of tolerance”.
Cancel culture serves to highlight the inevitable orthodoxies that arise from proponents of “the paradox of tolerance”. Ultimately people need to ask themselves, “By what standard?”
It would be good to pass laws that make it illegal to fire someone over a twitter mob (or any kind of mob action). Anti-mob or anti-bullying laws. And/or initiate class-action lawsuits against twitter for encouraging this kind of behavior or failing to prevent it, resulting in significant damage to people's careers. It's far from being the first time this happens, so there's definitely a case to be made that twitter has known for a long time that this is a problem.
Yes, it is largely a labor law issue. Twitter mob is not just cause for terminating the employment of someone. Using anti-defamation laws against individual bullies is another possibility.
In general, in the US, there doesn't need to be a "just cause." Someone has become a headache or embarrassment for us--for whatever unprotected reason--is sufficient.
In the US sodomy was a crime too. Laws can change. Labour law is not written in stone.
And even with current laws, where there "need not be a just cause", there are protections against unjust causes (e.g. because they found out you're jewish, or you're fat, or whatever) and "because a mob campaigned against one" can be added to that. "But, under current law the business could just say they fired them for their own neutral reasons?" Sure. Let them defend that in a lawsuit, if it happened to coincide with a mob campaign.
You're arguing for something that in all likelihood requires a constitutional amendment.
Anti discrimination clauses only overrule the first amendments freedom of association due to the equal protection clause, and there's no reading that suggests that firing someone due to public pressure is implicitly discrimination.
But there is than the next obstacle in the US system: You need to have very deep pockets to actually take a case in court. "Justice" is only available to the rich in the US. (And this doesn't seem to be a construction error if you look closer. But that's another topic).
> "Justice" is only available to the rich in the US.
I disagree. I think we can all agree the government has a monopoly on violence which it is relatively inclined to use. The US system depends on the idea that someone will challenge the use of that monopoly in their particular instance, which we call precedent. It is true that people not-of-means may be subject to that violence unjustly but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent. The wrong person could be rich but they could also just be a person who catches public support.
>but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent.
Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?
This system seems to have worked wonders to prevent this from happening. Or maybe they just haven't messed with the wrong person yet, since Rodney King hardly changed anything, and Derek Chauvin's convinction wont either...
> Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?
That's not quite the same. Murder didn't need precedent, however, establishing some framework for grading police incidents retroactively does. What gets in the way of that is existing laws which protect police officers wholesale. If you're trying overturn an entire existing law for a new framework, that's a bit outside the bounds of precedent because you're not longer talking about interpretation.
And what about twitter mobs that point out legitimate fireable offenses (like police brutality )? Would the fact that a twitter mob raised the issue help prevent the legitimatw firing?
>Are you really comparing getting fired from your job to a lynching?
Blacks used to get fired (or not hired) from jobs, or thrown out of towns and establishments for being black on the demand of racist white mobs.
Is that serious enough for someone to make a comparison with a historical issue like lynching, or it should involve a hanging too?
Lynchings didn't always involve death, sometimes it was "just" beatings, not to mention the term has had a metaphorical issue for collective violence/threats, even merely verbal, for a century now.
And the "right to work" (not to mention feed yourself and your family) is as important as the right to live.
Lynching was part of a framework of racial terror that kept (and by its legacies, continues to keep) black people from attaining social and economic equality. I'd say that very few things meet a sufficient standard for comparison with lynching, least of which is the occasional (and generally management-class or higher) white person losing their job.
> And the "right to work" (not to mention feed yourself and your family) is as important as the right to live.
"Right to work," at least in the US, is a series of laws designed to curtail labor rights by weakening unions (i.e., the institutions that usually keep people in their jobs, particularly in at-will countries like the US). Are you sure that's what you meant?
Nobody was lynched here so anti-lynching law would not apply. Given we're discussing mobs getting riled up over the wrongs of the "other", it also seems appropriate to place the actual outcome in a less exaggerated way.
Kind of ironic that people are getting offended over my choice of words here, but we could call these anti-mob or anti-bullying laws instead. The point remains, it might make sense to make it illegal for institutions to fire people over the call of a mob.
They surely are not equal, but I find them very comparable. When twitter mobs try to get people fired they're trying to prevent them from making a living, what are they after? Do they want the target to kill tthemselves?
Also "comparing" by definition can be done between any 2 things, even if they don't have the same "value". I can compare oranges and dogs if I want to.
I think there some subliminal need for people to mention lynching when it's innapropriate. Happens far too much to be coincidence.
Guy gets protested because he says 'providing support for historically discriminated-against groups in America is just like the Nazi regime' and you can almost guarantee someone is going to call it a lynching. I initially thought people were doing it to be intentionally provocative, but it appears to be some unintended impulse, probably the same 'imp of the perverse' thing that drove the initial guy to bring the Nazis into a discussion about affirmative-action as if that was going to add some clarity to his approach to the topic.
The more decoupled an organization's or its leaders' incentives are from the "market" - the more risk averse they become. Everything is about keeping your head down and avoiding controversy.
The goal for many orgs now is not to make customers happy anymore, it's to avoid the ire of a small group, and keep rent seeking.
As we move towards post-capitalism this will only get worse.
On one hand, keep the speaker. The potential downside: social media outrage that may escalate and get covered on MSM if it gets big enough. You and your dept / uni get a lot of bad press or if things go really sideways, your job could be on the line.
The potential upside of this decision? People go to a talk and consider some issues, but it’s not like you (the committee / administrator / dean etc) get any real tangible incentive from this outcome. You basically just did your job, if you’re lucky, everyone just moves on.
On the other hand, cancel the speaker. The upside: MSM will congratulate you or ignore it, but regardless, you’ll be seen as making the “right” decision by most people you interact with. Some free speech types (a dying breed it seems) might get upset but they don’t seem to have much power over the general public’s perception or decisions about firing made by the university.
So the decision is obvious and it’s the one that gets made time and time again. And it’s the way the Twitter mobs continue to hold sway, especially because so much of the MSM lives on Twitter.
A similar rubric occurs in a large corporation by the C suite. Once the mob forms, there is everything to lose and almost nothing to lose by taking a stand on an issue seen as unwoke. If this is to change, incentives need to change, mainly creating disincentives for cowardly execs / deans and incentives for those who make principled and/or courageous stands.
(None of this is a carte blanche endorsement against activism, it’s just to say that there are reasons that no one stands up against Twitter mobs and we may want to explore ways to change this dynamic unless we desire a future ruled by mobs)
It's not that simple. We have a collective action problem. The first mover sticks out like a sore thumb (or tall poppy) and takes all the heat from the mob. If everyone simultaneously became sensible and simultaneously refused to bend to the mob, the problem would go away, but it's difficult for heterogeneous agents to coordinate in this way. Being brave and taking the first step entails a lot of private cost and a lot of public benefit, which is why so few choose to do it.
Exactly. Considering Twitter accounts and likes and retweet’s can be bought amplifying a particular message might only represent less than 10 actual people.
Additionally I’ve never discussed with someone in real life, person to person, about a single Twitter “cancelation” effort. If these issues were truly significant, they would engage the (actual) media, engage (in this case) with official university complaint systems, etc.
These things take more time and effort than retweeting a hashtag though, and most people won’t follow through with it. Which tells me they’re really not all that bothered about it in the first place.
I thought it was because, if the mob doesn't get their way, they single out the 'admins' as the next target. At least that's what I remember before I cut out on following twitter as a first party platform.
I had the same thought. Maybe the mob is just the excuse the administrators can point to to do what they wanted to do already. Perhaps they both understand their role.
That could be part of it. According to surveys the administrators are very left-wing, even more than the professors who are already almost completely left-wing themselves.
Yeah. Over the years I've seen a number of incidents where (someone in) the Harvard administration assumes that the student body, professors, and alumni universally share their view that Affirmative Action is an unquestionable good and then gets caught off guard when this turns out not to be the case.
IIRC, Netflix used to have voting until Amy Schumer's special was mass downvoted. Comments wouldn't be practical I guess. But I'd imagine his opinion would be the same, really.
This appears to be driven at a basic level by a desire for justice. Having had some thousands of years of experience with the quest for justice we can say with some level of certainty that effective justice seeking has some particular characteristics without which justice remains elusive.
There must be a clear statement of the injustice which must be corrected. There should be a hearing where all involved can state their view of the situation. The accused should be allowed representation. Judgements should be made by persons who are at some level uninvolved with the conflict and committed to balanced interpretation of evidence. Any punishments should be related to the nature and scale of the injustice. And so on--of course someone with more direct experience could summarize this and make it happen better than I.
The point is that mob justice is not justice and all you have to do is give it some basic rules and constraints and it either gets deflected or gathers up into something that has actual meaning.
yep, you need due process. Other replies referencing metoo and MLK make an excellent point - that mass movements are usually a response to 'due process' that is in practice deeply flawed and biased to the point that it is ineffective. But a) Unlike metoo and civil rights, afaik a formal process that even aspires to fairness to decide issues such as speaker cancellation doesn't exist in the first place, b) even in the case of issues like metoo, surely the ideal outcome is to fix the structural biases and flaws in the processes so they work in practice, rather than rely on ad hoc journalistic investigations indefinitely (aside from preventing such crimes from being committed in the first place, of course)
This is basically it; the normal mechanisms don't work properly, and nobody in the mob has any faith that engaging with any formal process is going to achieve a result, so they complain in public.
(This specific incident sounds like a storm in a teacup, but there's far more serious and less visible problems with racial discrimination in academia)
Similar to #metoo. Reporting sexual harassment, assault and even rape quite often isn't taken seriously by either employers or the police. And in the entertainment industry there was a tacit understanding that reporting it would be a career-ending move. So the route that people have started taking is to complain publicly, in an attempt to shield themselves from retaliation and compel the system to address the complaint.
Dr. King put it best: "a riot is the language of the unheard."
Some portion of the mob on Twitter is people chasing clout and performing social justice. For example: I've been attacked for "generalizing nonbinary people" by cis people while describing my own experience as a nonbinary person, so I don't doubt people like that drive a lot of the discussion, but the vast majority is sincere if sometimes misdirected anger at genuine powerlessness. A Twitter riot is much like a physical riot: some agitators, but mostly just angry people denied a voice taking one by force.
The context of this quote is in a speech that is largely anti-riot. It's a warning to the government to not be complacent, but the woke left treats as if he was condoning rioters.
Vote in or appoint new leaders who do not give a damn about them. May backfire if too callous people are the winners.
Another method, create a formal method for processing complaints from Twitter that diverts the hateful energy from individuals towards a larger decision-making body. Let us say that a random 24 people jury of MIT peers had to decide by secret ballot whether the researcher in question gets approved or disinvited, and that the result is 14:10 to keep him.
The Twitter mob cannot really do anything with such result, if individual voting behavior was anonymous.
Unfortunately that last point is not strictly true so long as the mob can get their hands on the list of 24 people and then badger them to each make a public condemnation of the speaker or be assumed to be a wrongthinkist like the speaker, and hence one of those who voted incorrectly. So you'd better hope that the other 10 will stand strong and not out the 14 wronguns in their mix.
Yes, nothing is foolproof, but badgering 24 people is quite a lot of work. One of the reason why Twitter mobs are so efficient is that they can concentrate on a single target or two without too much effort.
Edit: also, the show where all 24 people ritually condemn the person while everyone fully knows that 14 of them voted "yea" would be absurd enough to make some people think twice.
This is actually the first constructive idea I've heard that seems at all likely to address this issue in a just way without infringing on the free speech rights of the people protesting campus speakers. Well done.
The one question I have here is whether the average member of MIT faculty would now thing that an anti-affirmative action essay would be beyond the pale. It doesn't seem too surprising to me if 50%+1 members of such a committee would still vote to withdraw an invitation from this guy. But at least you would be defocusing the external outrage campaign a little, which does not seem like a bad thing.
This may be part of the solution, though, as other mentioned, juries can also be pressured on Twitter.
Part of the problem is that people with visible status engage in public harassment of their colleagues on Twitter with no consequences. Unless there is a cost for appalling behavior, the problem will continue to degenerate.
I am pretty sure the mob would go after the entire group: those who vote for it for voting for it, and those who didn't for being part of such a group.
> Vote in or appoint new leaders who do not give a damn about them. May backfire if too callous people are the winners.
You're literally talking about appointing a group primarily based on their quality of not listening to people; in the ideal case, they're callous.
The trap is that you'll really just appoint a bunch of right-wingers who won't cancel right-wing speakers for not being "politically correct" but will cancel every mildly-left wing speaker for being a terrorist or supporting terrorism.
The "listening vs. not listening to people" is a spectrum and while I think it would be unwise to pull the gauge completely to the side of callousness, more resistance against mob justice might just be necessary.
Currently, Twitter mobs have a lot of power, but none of the responsibility. This is a hellish combination, almost guaranteed to bring out the worst in people.
This needs to be reined in somehow. I am not claiming that utterly callous leaders are the solution - in fact, I made a "may backfire" comment right after my first sentence.
The jury method seems to me more democratic, anyway.
The problem is that some amount of people think this is activism. I call it amateur activism. As long as people find this to be an acceptable form of activism it will still go on, and anyone you hold accountable within the mob for their actions will be considered a martyr.
I'm a veteran, there's a ton of outrageous posts I can make on social media that might gain traction. The fact is, those kind of actions don't really fuel any kind of partnership between me and people on the other side of what I perceive as a problem. It does fuel fear though, fear in administrators and representatives that they could be unhirable in a capitalist economy where your desirability as a worker is tantamount to your existence. I don't really desire a paradigm where I'm threatening someones life for my own desires and happiness. So, instead, I pay professional activists to help by being part of the discussions I don't want to have with people, and more importantly remove potentially tenuous discussions and convincing I'd have to do of regular people who don't understand the veteran world or experience. They're called lobbyists.
It would be simple if you would just shadow-ban those mobs.
Then they can go to implode inside their own bubble. Nobody would get hurt.
Giving those people a broad stage and all that publicity gives those mobs power in the first place.
The problem is: Services like Twitter literary make money on any drama those mobs produce.
As long as it's profitable to gather attention of the masses with whatever shit gets thrown at the fan there will be an incentive to give those mobs a big stage.
Let's face it: The incentive to be a drama multiplier needs to disappear. As this won't happen in a natural way regulatory steps need to be taken. The whole business model of FB, Twitter, and Co. is obviously harmful to society so this whole business model needs to disappear. Case closed once and for all. Simple as that…
The only way to dampen the toxic impact of social media’s radical vocal minority on the real world is to create tools that help decision makers easily contrast what they are seeing there with overall sentiment in the real world. In this case, 74% of Americans agree with the views that got this speech canceled. Had administrators been able to instantly see this fact when they saw all the angry tweets, perhaps they would have realized that the uproar they were seeing online was incongruous with the views of people in the real world.
I wrote and run a DeFi arbitrage bot for a living. There are hundreds of thousands of “pair” contracts to trade given coins through. The prices in different pairs for the same coin can vary wildly, as pairs only see their own balances, and can thus only make pricing decisions based on the rules and information within their own little silo. Arbitrage bots like mine make a profit by quickly balancing coin ratios among all pairs, which ultimately lowers the risk that a retail trader will pay an outlandish price for a given coin from a given pair.
We need the equivalent of arbitrage bots that can help balance the views of radicals on social media with those in the real world. They have tried this with fact checking, but unfortunately that, too, has been weaponized by biased actors. There has to be a better way that is provably unbiased.
May be a precedent for MIT. UCLA [1] already had theirs and many more who didn't get the press coverage.
Luckily the Universities in UK have remain somewhat firm on the issue ( at least as far I am aware ) but are also under similar threat.
I am also glad this is the top upvoted comment. It wasn't that long ago majority of HN were not on the same side, I think the big tech censorship, while often hard to pin point the right and wrong of it, was a wake up call to a lot of people.
This story is only two hours old. You have to wait, at least until the U.S. west coast wakes up and enters the ring. Stories like this often swing wildly.
IIRC the top comment on the "GitHub, fuck your name change" article was reasonable from my point of view for a very long time, until eventually one telling us that using the word master somehow implies subconscious racism "won" (the saving grace is that most of its top replies vehemently disagreed with it).[1]
Yes I deliberately left that point out and try not to provoke some ( or even more ) negative reaction.
My thought and observation is that there are silent majority on HN who usually dont get into these sort of discussions but are now vaguely aware of the consequences.
Also worth pointing out today is Sunday so on HN it tends to be a quiet day. Just like twitter as if anger only works from Monday to Friday.
I wish there was a safe and convenient way for those of us who agree to meet and brainstorm how to improve the situation. But I’m not sure how to accomplish that.
imo the issue is journalists living on Twitter. Journalists are becoming "creators" and trying to build their brands on social media like every else in an effort to parlay name recognition into more money/power.
How do you get more popular on Twitter? Well, you write (in an opinionated way) about Twitter controversies. This we are bombarded by news and articles that are primed to be controversial and that the majority of people in this country don't actually give a crap about.
Hard to imagine a legal approach that does not impermissibly infringe on the free association rights of all the various participants. The question is whether any other mechanism would be sufficient. If Twitter were interested, they could do something to inhibit the flow of the outrage mechanism, but there are strong free speech arguments against doing this. Also it is of course not in Twitter's own best interest.
If we rule out government and Twitter's action, the next idea is to convince enough mob participants themselves that it's not a good idea. This actually does seem feasible. I mean cancel culture itself is only five or six years old, at least as we think if it today. Another broad shift in perspective seems possible.
Twitter management stopped caring about free speech years ago. They are no longer the "free speech wing of the free speech party". Instead they actively promote a particular brand of US progressive politics, and ban anyone who steps out of line.
Given the amount of right-wing tripe I find in my twitter feed, I'm going to say that Twitter doesn't ban people who don't agree with progressive politics. I think the only ideology they really have is money.
Yes . . . that was my point. There is not a legislatable way to compel Twitter to stop this behavior without violating Twitter's and protestors' free speech rights.
> No. I'm saying nothing that twitter can do would infringe on freedom of speech.
I understand that that's what you're saying. But you're responding to my comment implying that I'm disagreeing with that point of view, which I did not.
This is a free speech context right so surely the answer is to convince the mobs that this current approach is counter-productive?
Edit: I’m also unsure if this was caused by people on Twitter or staff and students at MIT who are also on Twitter. It seems like the latter is more correct and the Twitter side of things might be a red herring.
I don’t think it’s been confirmed that these people are left wing authoritarians. It also seems like a dangerous way to think about this as a problem rationally. You’re basically deciding the facts of the matter outside of any actual evidence or argument.
Further writing people off sounds pretty authoritarian.
I regret making such a sweeping statement. I do think there are many decent people that get caught up in the cancel mob who are primarily motivated by genuine egalitarianism, and these people can surely be reasoned with.
However, at the same time I do believe that some (perhaps a small minority) of the agitators are cynically motivated by narcissism and sadism, and there's quite a bit of research which points in this direction. For example, the close connection between virtue signalling and grandiose narcissism. Reasoning with this particular subset (however small they may be) is probably not going to be productive because their actions aren't coming from a place of real egalitarianism.
That's the problem people on all colors of the political spectrum, followers are influenced by minorities with too much rage and anger. Sometimes this rage and anger comes from an important societal issue, but that's not an excuse for shitty behavior you wouldn't like the another political opinonated mob to use.
I'm generally very "pacifist" (not that this is violence, but I don't like attacking people in any sense of the word) and "live-and-let-live" on principle, but I also follow the "reverse golden rule" - i.e. I assume others are following the golden rule. Therefore:
Bullies deserve to be bullied (and, yes, let's call out this behaviour by what it is - bullying).
In most cases the right thing to do is to ignore the intolerant. They benefit from a divided society with lots of hate, the less hate the less power the intolerant instigators have. Sometimes you need to put them into prison to protect others, but as Popper said we should leave that option only as a last resort since ultimately intolerance breeds more intolerance so it isn't a good way to create a tolerant society.
I think Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan are setting the standard for ignoring cancel culture, and are being rewarded for it. I think most moderate people are sick of cancel culture and will support those that won’t buckle to it.
Unfortunately, that standard seems to be “you can ignore cancel culture if you are independently wealthy”. You can try and ignore cancel culture as some regular working man/woman, but that won’t get you far when your employer caves and fires you, and no one will hire you, because of the Twitter mob.
I only hope these will not be the voices of the opposition of cancel culture. As much as I don't want to see cancellations like that, I found that these two are not elevating the debate either.
Ignore their demands (as an enterprise, business, institution, government, etc.), mock and derise their members (as a society), and stop publicizing them (as media).
Or just someone who made a stupid joke or otherwise set off someone with enough followers. The corresponding antibody reaction of a lot of institutions, especially companies, is to make the offending thing go away before the next news cycle--especially if the person involved isn't senior. Easier to fire someone than have to publicly defend their behavior. And, if the organization is going to take any other sort of material action, might as well fire the person anyway as they're done with the organization.
Isn't this exactly the world that free speech / pro-liberty advocates want?
I don't have any power to fire someone from their job; I'm not their boss. But I do have the right to make my views about them freely known. That's my right to free speech. And I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not. That's my right to economic freedom - to not be in an authoritarian society where the government tells me what I have to spend my money on. And their boss has the right to decide whether to employ them or not. That's the boss's economic freedom and at-will employment.
If I'm threatening the boss with physical harm (violating the NAP, as some would say), then I'm clearly in the wrong. But if I'm making my opinion known, and their boss agrees, isn't that the intended effect of discourse? What is the point of free speech if there isn't the possibility that people might be influenced by listening to that speech?
I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty.
(In any case, in the article at hand, "Twitter mobs" isn't a fully accurate descriptor. The quoted tweet was from an alum. The ability for alumni to contact their university and make their opinions known - and have their opinions be taken with more weight than those of the general public - has existed long before Twitter and will exist long after.)
> Isn't this exactly the world that free speech / pro-liberty advocates want?
No. The main consequence of speech that is being opposed should be… speech, not action to get that speaker's speech curtailed, whether by speech or other means.
> I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not
These people didn't have to turn up to the talk. That's not the same as cancelling a talk because someone said they don't want it to happen.
> And their boss has the right to decide whether to employ them or not
> …
> But if I'm making my opinion known, and their boss agrees, isn't that the intended effect of discourse?
Did MIT change its decision to host the speaker because of a well-reasoned argument - as you point out, one of the intended consequences aimed for via free speech - or was it due to some other kind of pressure?
This post, like many in this thread, misrepresents what free speech is. Free speech protects us from government retribution, nothing more. I agree that it's bad form to lobby the university directly, but it's their right to do so, and the university has a right to change which speakers it invites. Having it any other way would be an attack on free speech.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The purpose of free speech is to prevent the government from punishing people for their views. A similar imposition on citizens would violate their 1st amendment rights.
Free speech is an ideal where you are judged by what you do and not by what thoughts you express. USA named one of its laws after that ideal, but the American law isn't what the ideal is. The ideal would be that the first amendment applied to everyone, so nobody could punish anyone for views they express. But that is in no way enforceable so it doesn't exist.
It means that a guy can say X. Then twitter mobs can say that guy X is an idiot and should get fired. Both of those are fine. But firing the guy because he said X is where the free speech line is crossed. As long as it all just remains speech it is fine.
> What do I do about {contrived example X}?
What does the government do? The government does a ton of stuff, like hire people, fire people, run a lot of organizations etc. If they can do it without violating the ideal of free speech then so can you.
I disagree that free speech is/ought to be free from other people judging you on the contents of that speech.
I openly and intentionally judge people based on their speech/thoughts they express. Say smart, curiosity-invoking things and I think more highly of you. Say closed-minded, racist things, and I think less highly of you. I find it hard to imagine that most other people don't do exactly the same thing (possibly with a different fitness function, but updating their opinion of someone based on thoughts expressed nonetheless).
If I say something that makes you think I'm an asshole, I think you should update your opinion of me in that direction without waiting for me to make some physical action to that effect.
The government, by definition, holds the monopoly on legal violence. This is the fundamental difference. It isn't a big corporation.
But firing the guy because he said X is where the free speech line is crossed.
There are people who argue employers have the right to fire anyone for any reason because of their own rights. The current reality in the US is that people are routinely fired for even mentioning the concept of a union in the workplace. I agree that is against the ideal of free speech, but not the law as it exists.
The thing I have noticed over the past year is that many of the same people who think it's great to fire people for collective action suddenly get very imaginative about free speech when it happens to people they agree with.
There's free speech in legal term as coded in US constitution which have nothing to do with Non-US citizen like me. Then there's free speech as in universal value that every member of civilized modern society should uphold. I think GP is talking about the later.
> "Free speech protects us from government retribution."
It is so embarrassing to hear fellow Americans quote the First Amendment as being the definition of freedom of speech when even a casual perusal of history points to the First Amendment being inspired from the more general principle of freedom of speech originating in the Enlightenment. We really need to have better education in this country.
I’m not American nor do I live in the US nor am I subject to US law - is free speech impossible for me and all the billions of others in the world who are also in this same group, or is it perhaps you that has misunderstood and misrepresented what free speech is by conflating it with a legal provision in one jurisdiction, designed to help protect it from one entity?
>This post, like many in this thread, misrepresents what free speech is. Free speech protects us from government retribution, nothing more
This may be the case de jure, but de facto, the spirit of the concept of free speech, and why it is important enough to enshrine in amendment, transcends the relationship between the government and the governed. A society where speech is effectively no longer free because of authoritarian-like control of discourse by non-governmental bodies requires the same protections that it would against the government to remain free from authoritarianism. Particularly when censorious or retributive measures by these ostensibly apolitical actors almost all tend to align with the machinations of one political party.
So the fact that social media platforms (and cloud hosts and credit card companies, etc) effectively collude to control the modern, digital public square to preferentially suppress the political views of about 50% of the country is just as much of a threat as government censorship, since the outcome is the same.
> I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty.
An invited speaker could require a signed contract before accepting the invite. At a fairly small expense, some free speech advocate/org could have a contract drawn up that would protect invitees to some degree, pay to have a third party audit the contract (is contract auditing a thing?) to raise the chance that orgs with teams of lawyers find it acceptable, promote and market it, and then make it freely available to all.
That might or might not work, but there are many more ideas in the wings that could be tried.
No institution is going to sign a contract like that. There are more people who would be happy to speak at events like this than speaking slots. If you demand a contract that says "you can't disinvite me," they're just going to move to the next person on the list.
I don't disagree with your premise (as a libertarian)
But re:
> I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty.
You'll see many people here are suggesting that we just don't listen to the "mob". That would be a way to "cancel" them that is completely compatible with liberty.
One doesn't need to run to tell a teacher every time another kid is mean to them. This is exactly the same. The solutions isn't always interventionist, I don't see why that is funny. Do you really expect someone to step in and settle all your disputes for you?
The libertarian approach absolutely does lead to progressivism because people, broadly defined, want progressivism. You have to take a narrow subset of society for the libertarian approach to be genuinely popular, or you have to abandon the pretense that you're optimizing for the good of all people. Don't take my word for it, listen to one of the most successful libertarians in recent history:
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron. [...]
> The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country[...]
Thiel goes on to detail how his only hope of accomplishing libertarian ideals is by escaping to either cyberspace, outer space, or the sea, leaving behind all those people who if asked by libertarian means would reject his ideals. (And he's gone on to invest in companies like SpaceX that are working on bringing this plan to fruition.)
The whole reason you get articles like this is because libertarianism can't survive on the merits, and so (apart from Thiel's approach of escape) they have to argue that people aren't playing by the rules, that somehow universities do not have the liberty to rescind invitations or that if they do it's because they're bad people. But they are playing by the rules and they're exercising their liberties.
So having a list of people who called for witch burning and distributing social opprobrium might help.
Make the only cancelling appropriate be for cancelling cancellers. So focus cancel energy on itself.
Personally, I will review job applicants social media history and if there is any “Reeeee” I take that into account as part of reference checks and whatnot.
It seems like someone posting “I’m an MIT alum and I demand this speaker be cancelled” would reflect as lack of critical thinking and reasoning.
I fear that this leads to islands of organizations where there are groups that don’t like this Twitter mob tactic and groups that do. God help those in orgs that think Twitter mobbing is a good thing.
Companies and institutions just need to realize that Twitter is not the general population. How many TV shows are regularly trending on twitter but have no audience? How many products are vilified but still sell just fine?
Marketing firms have been selling the lie that they analyze twitter to build campaigns, pr, etc. Their customers just need to realize that it's just BS.
Neuter the power of Twitter mobs by not using Twitter. If you don't like a thing, don't hold your noise while doing it, just stop doing it. For many people, I know Twitter seems like it's an eternal, undying force that will never go away, and we must learn to live with it: it's not. I promise, it will die if you stop feeding it.
> How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs? Seems like they can bully and intimidate any organization from universities to corporations to GitHub projects to kowtow to their demands.
Don’t play the losing game. Just don’t be on Twitter.
Start collecting data projecting the actual harm these people can cause if stood up to. I suspect it's minimal if analyzed rigorously. Then publish it. Promote it to data analysts. Blow away the paper tiger.
Delay showing a public post P from person X to viewer Y until time T has passed, T defined as a time proportional how long a physical letter from X to Y would take to travel.
Are these "mobs" organized (which by definition flirts with not being a mob)? Or do they manifest and are fed by the algorythm? Or a bit of both?
The point being, there seems to be a steady stream things that get a free pass. On the other hand, seemingly random - and often less impactful - things / people get canceled. Mind you, the media is often guilty of the same disconnect. But they too are driven by engagement and profit.
There are a few rich people who's sponsoring this by running "open foundations" that donate (or not donate) to universities and legislatures. MIT's got addicted to recurring donations, so the big contributors can tell MIT how to run things. Same story with mob leaders who are in it for the money. The rank and file mob members do it for free, though (for feeling being right and being part of something big and important).
If the end beneficiaries change their mind, or find another hobby, this "movement" will fold overnight without donations.
I suspect we've reached Peak Woke already, and the tide has started turning. With Trump out of power, they've lost the unifying hate figure to rally against, and many SV companies (mostly prominently Coinbase, but more quietly the FAANGs as well) are starting to show the loudest extremists the door.
All that said, academia is where this all started and where it's also going to stay on the longest.
People need to learn that the nuts (of any belief system) are always the loudest, and therefore give a distorted impression of actual consensus.
Who are the loudest people on the left? Mobs and trolls who imagine grievances everywhere, which is sort of the leftist equivalent of conspiracy theory.
Who are the loudest on the right? Qanon, Nazis, and theocrats / dominionists who think we should return to Old Testament law.
The nuts on either side aren't the loudest by their own virtue. They are amplified by their opponents. "This is the left," say the right wingers, pointing to the easiest-to-criticize, most ill-informed example of a leftist... and vice versa.
I hope by blocking everybody they think are in support of other points they will pupate and stay forever in their tight circle, so the problem will solve itself. In the mean time, spend less time on Twitter is also a good idea.
Maybe there’s no way to do it. Perhaps Twitter and other social networks were designed this way specifically to be immune to social control (and by consequence, to exerce social control) over well-established institutions.
Why Tiktok? 95%+ of these incidents came from Twitter. FB, Tiktok, Instagram, for all their shortcomings, is rarely the place where these incidents happen.
I do hope we would all move on to better things than those massive social networks. They have impacted really negatively the lives of many around me, and continue to do so.
The Internet, and all existing services, is based in physical locations, subject to local and international laws, governed by the decisions of real people with diverse motivations, and capable of influencing real-world outcomes on many scales.
That is missing the point; it's not about you are or aren't on Twitter, it's that they are. Twitter encourages contextless "outrage", and things escalate from there. Sometimes justified, sometimes less so.
You shouldn't, right up until the point you wrote something that for some reason takes off on Twitter and then you get your unrelated lecture cancelled or your employer gets calls or whatnot. And then you have no choice.
The twitter mob in this case could have a legitimate impact on MIT donations. Quoting a tweet included in the article:
As an alum, I’m asking you to fix this—now. Totally unacceptable and sends a message to any student that isn’t a white man that they don’t matter and that EAPS isn’t serious about (and is actively hostile towards) DEI
Presumably MIT cares what it's alums care about since they are a major source of donations. I express no opinion on anything else in the article, just that alums being mad is a negative outcome for MIT.
Not a healthy precedent to set. We will regret this later if we continue down this path.