Re:Some Facebook Employees Unite to Challenge Its ‘Intoleran...
by BadassFractal on Tuesday August 28, 2018 @10:12PM
(#17864851)
In addition to the violence aspect, there's also total power asymmetry in bigoteering. Calling someone a Nazi, a white supremacist, a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a misogynist, a transphobe, a cultural appropriator, whatever other trendy moral shortcoming du jour, with no need for supporting evidence whatsoever, has no downside to the accuser. Accuse away. You're doing a service to society.
The entirety of the burden is always on the accused.
I couldn't agree more. I've seen both actual violence and extreme glorification of violence against people of the opposite political affiliation more and more over the past couple years. Many people seem to dismiss the calls to violence as "trolls", which is actually probably true, but I have to wonder if there is much of a difference between a troll who calls for violence and loves to see people get attacked at rallies, and a person who would actually be happy about these things if they became worse than they are now. I feel like there used to be a solid distinction, but I'm not sure any longer that there's really a hard line between all "trolls" and people who would actually enact these things, given the power (and given no significant threat to themselves, of course).