Something ironic about your post being downvoted or cancelled depending on your point of view.

I think to an extent we seem to be heading towards a thought police society as evident by people losing their jobs over things they do or say that go viral online (if you need references I'll be happy to pull some up, but here in the USA at least its happened a number of times), this is often called cancel culture. We see it on HN all the time, sometimes I get downvoted to oblivion without a single response as to why. I come to HN for discourse and yet its too easy to shun out people without any consequence. I don't say things because I think every little thing I say is fact, I say it to share my view which now and then is unpopular so it holds me back from posting on HN a good amount of the time, I can assume there's other users with the same issue.

Society has always, always had social norms which entailed consequences if countered. And often times in the past, the norms were strict and dissent was punished by jail, torture, or death.

Today, we've much improved. If you express an opinion that is contrary to the norms, you get made fun or or ostracized by the community, you don't get killed. Which is how it should be, say what you want, but people are completely within their rights to shut you out, ignore you, or boo so loudly as to drown you out.

Freedom of speech protects you from people who attempt to silence you by jailing, torturing, or killing you. It doesn't mean people are forced to put up with your stupid and unpopular opinions.

Complaining about 'cancel culture' screams of entitlement to me. If you want to be heard, say something worth listening to.

> Society has always, always had social norms which entailed consequences if countered. And often times in the past, the norms were strict and dissent was punished by jail, torture, or death.

> Today, we've much improved. If you express an opinion that is contrary to the norms, you get made fun or or ostracized by the community, you don't get killed.

"Things are better now than they were at some point in the past" does not mean that we should stop trying to improve, since things have already improved by a nonzero amount. If I said "Deaths due to infectious disease now are much lower than they were 100 years ago and therefore we shouldn't worry about infectious disease now", my faulty logic would immediately be spotted and called out.

The general environment for free speech is much better today than it was in years past. There are, however, specific worrying trends now that did not exist in the past, and I think people are right to point them out. I'm not a huge fan of the term "cancel culture", because it implies a lot more intentional group behavior than I think happens, but the term does point to a real phenomenon where certain controversial speech gets amplified to absurd degrees, and a very small fraction of the people who see it and disagree with it try to cause disproportionate harm to the speaker (e.g. lying to their employer to try to get them fired, calling in false reports to try to get a highly armed SWAT team sent to their place of residence, sending death threats, etc.).

Complaints about "cancel culture" are not so much about people complaining about not being heard as people complaining about having something they said taken out of context and amplified to millions of people, and the consequences of the consequent rage of millions and actions of the most extreme dozens of people out of those millions.

Losing your job and getting death threats is an improvement over being jailed, tortured, or killed, but it's still not ideal, and we're still allowed to want better.

> Freedom of speech protects you from people who attempt to silence you by jailing, torturing, or killing you. It doesn't mean people are forced to put up with your stupid and unpopular opinions.

You (like many) misunderstand the debate. "Free speech" proponents aren't advocating for a prohibition of criticism--to the contrary, criticism is free speech. Rather, free speech proponents are arguing against intimidation (e.g., harassment, doxxing, petitioning one's employer to fire them for wrongthink or false allegations, etc).

Anyway, you concede that things have improved in the past, but you criticize people for opposing regression to a more limited-speech state. This seems remarkably overtly inconsistent.

EDIT: This is cancel culture: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/128148065056698777...

If I inform a corporation that I will not do business with them while a person is in their employment, am I oppressing that person or am I using my freedom of speech?

If I say "it would be unfortunate if something happened to your job", am I issuing a veiled threat or am I using my freedom of speech? It's possible that I'm not making a threat, but we know it's unlikely. Technically it amounts to intent (do you intend to ruin someone's livelihood or are you just making a bizarre statement for indecipherable reasons?).

I agree with everything you said. Can you comment on my question though?

I did. I said it technically depends on intent; however, in practice it's implausible that you weren't issuing a threat, and threats don't constitute free speech.

Ok I'm confused so can you please help me? My example was absolutely a "threat" in the sense that yes, I in that example would be serious about voicing my opinion and my intention to not voluntarily do business with that imaginary corporation while they employed that person. I would be "threatening" to do something which is entirely my freedom to do; to vote with my wallet.

But if I understand you correctly, this would be going outside my freedom of speech. Which implies that I do not have the choice to not do business with them. As in, I am obligated to purchase goods and services from them.

I am clearly misunderstanding this because that can't be right. Where did I go off track?

Of course you have the choice of whether or not to do business with them. Nevertheless, threats are not free speech.

I'm still confused. I am completely free to choose whether or not to do business with them, but I am not allowed to tell them about my choice? Or am I not allowed to speak about it at all, regardless of who listens?

Issuing threats is not free speech. You're still free to choose with whom you do business. Terribly sorry, but I don't know how to make it simpler than that. Good luck in your pursuits.

Ah yes, and of course whether or not something is a threat depends on intent. And who could be a better judge of intent than ... throwaway894345. Who I'm sure has an incredibly nuanced way of determining intent that doesn't boil down to "SJWs have bad intent".

You're extorting a company, let's even call it quid pro quo.

This would be hard to legally call extortion, since consumers are free to do business with who they please, and there is a strong history of boycott activity. Also if it were illegal, then many negotiating tactics become extortion. Is threatening to leave a company unless you get a raise now illegal extortion? Is demanding a lower cable bill or else you'll go to a competitor now illegal extortion?

I would consider these more ultimatums than extortion. Also extortion always includes quid pro quo, but not all quid pro quo is illegal. Context matters.

That freedom, like many others, is limited. You may also be dismayed to find that you aren't free to tell someone that you will do business with her on the condition that she sleeps with you. This is quid pro quo harassment.

I'm not dismayed at all, and would appreciate it if you could refrain from painting pictures of what you think my state of mind might be. Thanks.

Are you saying that I am breaking the law by telling a company that I will not do business with them as long as they employ some person? Just to head off future misunderstandings on my part I'd like to get this clear first.

It was a hypothetical. I wasn't speaking about you specifically. Anyway, I've explained in another thread as simply as I'm able. Good luck on your educational endeavors.

So a boycott?

Sure, is my choice to boycott a company also an act of oppression?

It sounds like you will protect free speech by suppressing certain forms of free speech?

I would not necessarily be against anti-harassment/doxxing laws, and stronger employee protections around firings. However, also stronger hate speech laws around protected classes. It's a double edged sword.

Threats and intimidation don't constitute free speech, even when veiled. Note that I don't think anyone is advocating for more/harsher laws to protect free speech (although these might be welcomed by some), only appealing for a cultural shift away from cancellation and toward free-speech values.

I believe free speech does not cover "true threats". I don't think a consumer complaint threatening to not do business is going to be considered a "true threat" against a company.

Free speech doesn't cover any kind of threats. We tolerate "veiled threats" to the extent that we can't confirm that they are threats, and they are difficult to confirm by design and definition. They exploit our presumption of innocence.

Threats of all kinds are made every day, and often in completely legal contexts. Threats of violence are often less tolerated, but even in some contexts protected under freedom of speech.

Take care not to conflate free speech principles with legal protections for free speech.

It sounds like you want people to censor themselves in a way you find appropriate, based on what you believe freedom of speech means.

I understand your point but can't get on board with it.

The main issue I have is that people make organized attempts to cause harm to others as part of the 'canceling' rather than a personal choice. Not wanting to work with me is one thing, trying to convince the whole world not to work with me might cause me to become homeless.

The second issue is that the "reasons" for canceling people are so often petty or outright not true. For example, the people that call Joe Rogan a Nazi or alt-right. Either they know nothing about National Socialism and the alt-right or they know nothing about the person they want to cancel.

And third, canceling people is outright stupid. You don't want people with evil ideas and intentions hiding in the dark and invisible to you. You want their bad ideas as visible as possible so you can avoid them or shine a light on them. Sending everyone with a bad idea to another website only serves to embolden them and gives them a way to say 'see, we really are persecuted!'

And this is completely skipping over the de-banking people. That goes into a whole new level that I think people don't fully appreciate.

On your third point, I want to reiterate something I've said before: Nazi's aren't stupid. They take advantage of people who want unrestricuted free speech without consequences and use it as a recruiting tool to radicalize more nazis. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23722215)

Kicking them off of a site raises the threshold for someone to be exposed to radicalizing factors. We have evidence that this is actually, really, effective at reducing rates of radicalization.

I don't really see how the example you've given of being downvoted can be equated to cancel culture.

You had and clearly still have the ability to express your views on this website so in what sense are you "cancelled"?

If people don't like what you say they're free to downvote it. It can be helpful if someone gives you some feedback on why they downvoted you, but its certainly not an obligation

I agree with this. I detest cancel culture, but downvoting isn't cancel culture. Cancel culture is about fostering a climate of fear that chills speech (specifically fear of harassment a la a concerted effort to petition one's employer to have one terminated). Downvoting is an expression of disagreement at worst, and it's perfectly consistent with free expression ideals.

EDIT: This is cancel culture: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/128148065056698777...

Being downvoted is not being cancelled. If people don't agree with what you're saying, they're welcome to exercise their own right to speak and tell you so.

It's a little different on HN since a comment that gets enough downvotes is made invisible to other people.

No, its visibility gets reduced. It's not invisible. You can see that it's there, it's slightly harder to read.

Flagging a comment can make it invisible, and even then, only if you haven't set your account to show dead comments. Flagging and down voting are different, and flagging a comment because you disagree with but is otherwise not breaking any rules it is considered inappropriate here, while down voting is not.

There's often a confusion between this. Disrespecting and disagreeing is not canceling.

downvote = disagree

flag = attempt to cancel

Which there are good reasons to flag: trolling, breaking rules, doxing, etc. Does flagging also get abused? Yes! The same is with "cancel culture." Do we boo people off stage that say stupid stuff? Yes. Do people try to prevent trolls from speaking at a school? Also yes, who needs someone intentionally antagonizing others? Do people abuse it? Yes. Do we also feature the abuse more than the good? Yes. In fact, your brain is also hard wired to remember those better too. But it is also important to remember that flagging is a form of speech too. You have the right to disagree. You have the right to say "this is inappropriate." But that doesn't mean you are right or that the person you are disagreeing with or flagging doesn't also have the right to say those things. I.E. you have the right to say racist and xenophobic things on Hacker News. Dang has the right to remove your comment too, because that is what we've agreed to here. If you disagree, well there are other communities with different rules. So you can work to get them changed here or go to a different community. (Please don't try to get racism allowed here)

> But it is also important to remember that flagging is a form of speech too.

Is a bullet a form of speech as well? Because flagging will essentially kill your account if done often enough, that's the same on every platform, that's why there's coordinated flagging. First you will get limited ("can only post once an hour"), then you'll get timed out ("can't post for a week"), then you get (shadow) banned: your posts are flagged by default, but you can't tell as long as you're logged in. All of this is pretty straight unless you have a hand protecting you in the form of moderators rejecting flags, but you don't want to rely on that, because political opinions of both you and the moderators might change - a modern state based on law is much more reliable than staying on the good side of the local war lord.

"But others can theoretically still read it if they set showdead=true, so you're not rally deplatformed" isn't a valid argument against it. You can theoretically generate your own electricity and get your water delivered by truck etc if the local utility companies decide that they don't want to do business with you because of arbitrary reasons. But we've pretty much all decided to ignore those "well, technically you can [but practically you can't]" and just force the utility companies to not discriminate.

But it's not you being canceled, it's the comment. The equivalent on HN would require a bunch of people getting mad at a comment you made a year ago, and then downvoting all your future comments so they get buried regardless of their content. While there's probably people who do that, it's not applicable to your average grey comment.

>Downvotes result in a ban

They do?

>Also votes were supposed to control quality, not agreeability.

That's a completely orthogonal problem. Regardless of whether downvotes are being "correctly", the "cancel" aspect is still there.

As another commentor said, once you have enough downvotes your comment disappears therefore my statement stands that it is technically cancelled. I think after 2 negative downvotes it should really be required to respond to a comment to downvote any further if they are in the negative.

Cancel culture is not about removing individual messages on a web forum, though. Someone who has lost their living, their home or their friends can start taking about being “cancelled”. Having ONE of your messages made harder to read is not “being cancelled”.

I downvote posts that are capriciously off-topic or intellectually lazy. People who post those kind of things regularly don't belong on HN in my opinion. Your post seems like an interesting view, especially given the argument that others share it.

(Just upvoted you. Thanks!)