> EDIT: Watching the points on this comment swing from negative to positive in the span of minutes is telling.

Please follow the site guidelines. You broke the second-last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(Btw, it's not "telling" of anything but that the topic is divisive, which we all know already.)

Didn't know that. Won't do again. Thanks. Passionate topic.

Appreciated!

Hey dang. I think this post need to be taken down. I've followed this drama before and after reading a lot from both sides, it's pretty clear in my eyes that there is an ongoing harassment campaign from Pasquale. I was really shocked to see this getting so highly voted on HN.

I think this post covers a lot of what is happening - https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/vcbrags-pasquale-mit...

Well you've certainly convinced me that this is a drama that I will never rightly apprehend—it's like looking into a kaleidoscope while on acid. But does that mean the post should be taken down? I'm not sure. A post being on HN's front page does doesn't imply either that it's true or that we're in any way officially condoning it. At most it implies that there's an interesting discussion to be had. If you want an official position, here's my take after a minute of skimming: there are at least two sides to every story, and I have no idea what really happened.

It's to be predicted that nearly everyone commenting will take a side based on their pre-existing view on the pre-existing issue. I say "nearly" for form's sake, but actually I'm not sure there is a single exception.

From an HN moderation point of view the question is whether the general phenomenon is interesting (there the answer is clearly yes, even if no one knows what to make of it) and whether the specific post can support a substantive discussion. On the latter point I'd say it's borderline.

Do you have something better to show harassment? That post doesn't appear to. As far as I can tell it's about an account that replied to people patting themselves on the back with clap symbols, which seems rather benign. Although I may just be too removed from twitter and people who use twitter culture to get it.

I don’t know about any of this drama but that post is unreadable. What is it actually saying? It spends like half the time talking about prior versions of itself with long detailed explanations of why it changed.

Seconded.

Here's an example[1], from his blog post, about the interaction one of these women defined as "creepy".

If this is the bar for unacceptable discourse between men and women, without being a mind-reader, I'm not really sure how one is ever supposed to win.

[1] https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazo...

That's his receipt. Not hers.

Is that really 100% of the interactions they've had?

You seem to be pretty confident there's only his side of the story.

Then she should share receipt of the alleged creepy messages. The burden of proof is on the accuser, not the accused.

Yeah, the only "evidence" brought by the women are screenshots from anonymous Twitter accounts with no proof they're associated with Pasquale. Surely someone must have a harassing message from the guy?

Also, not proud of this, but I used to have a weird troll dating account. I sent weird messages to women that I didn't know, but nothing offensive (to me). I googled my username once and found that someone had thought it was her ex. She posted it on Reddit in an alcoholism subreddit, and anyone in the thread questioning her was then also accused by her of being her ex under an alt. It was insane.

Burden of proof for what? To charge him with a crime? Sure.

But random people are free to make whatever conclusions about him that they want, with as little or as much evidence as they personally require to render their judgement. You don’t get to tell other people how they should form their opinions.

It isn’t fair, but there is no other way for the world to work. Everyone has their own criteria for judging people... we can put legal requirements on some things (like what criteria you can use to determine if you hire someone, or rent them an apartment, or let them into your store), but people are free to dislike someone for whatever reason they want.

We're in a weird space that previous models don't map very well to. For example, the legal system doesn't map because virtually none of the things people are doing on social media are illegal, and probably shouldn't be. On the other hand, the previous social models, such as gossip ("random people freely making whatever conclusions they want") don't apply because their potential for destructive effects are relatively circumscribed.

Maybe one analogy would be the way that gossip and rumour in a very small town could harm a person, such as by affecting their livelihood, their family, and so on. Now that we have the global village, the "small town" is basically everybody. I see the current debates about "cancel culture" or whatever as a messy attempt to work out norms for this new space. We're probably still in the early stage of those getting worked out.

You can tell someone what good criteria are for wines, why not forming opinions? They're not obligated to listen to you, but I don't get saying that you can't advise.

Beyond that though, when our opinions have consequences, we have an obligation to form them carefully when they affect others. Not being able to force someone to behave well doesn't mean there aren't reasonable criteria available for them.

What consequence does my choosing to believe either side in this story have?

Now, if I (or someone else) harass the guy over the accusation, then that is a problem (and there should be consequences), but belief is personal.

What do you call a mob of people piling on someone and causing them to lose friends, opportunities and a healthy state-of-mind? A belief system?

You're free to believe whatever you want, but if you are wrong and they didn't do it, someone was just publicly executed for the wrong reasons.

You're also free to not care about any of that, but some people want to be cautious not to pile on without evidence.

Are you really arguing it's fine if I accused you of something and convinced everyone of that, without ever providing any evidence? And when you said "no, I didn't do that, here's some evidence," people should shrug it off because why does if matter what side they believe? After all, they are free to judge you based on anything they want, as long as they're not threatening your life or firing you, right?

No one was arguing you can't judge people based on any arbitrary thing you can come up with. It becomes an issue when you use that belief to actively destroy their life, possibly for no reason at all.

"...publicly executed..."?

While I did not mean that and just failed at English, one can easily find documented instances of actual murders and lynch mobs directly caused by lies being spread on social media, so, yes?

The question was about how someone should form their opinions, and whether we can tell others how they ought to do that. Lots of our opinions do affect others (e.g., if they should be hired, if one should help them, how we treat their reputations), so it's appropriate to point out what good and bad criteria are.

If an opinion being held doesn't have any practical ramifications for others, it's not really a big deal to have opinions formed on a questionable basis, except that good judgment tends to be a habitual process, so doing it with bad criteria with low stakes could affect how we form them when the stakes are higher.

> Burden of proof for what?

For me to believe their accusations. It's not just something that exists in the courts, it's a principle that many (most?) people adhere to in their lives. If you have one co-worker who accuses the other of stealing their phone, would you punish the accused without first asking how they know they stole it or looking at camera footage of the time of the alleged theft?

It's not illegal for you to believe unsubstantiated accusations (not just unsubstantiated, but unsubstantiated in the face of exculpatory evidence). It's not illegal for a boss to fire an employee over an unsubstantiated accusation. Legal, but still harmful to society.

Punishment or firing is different than believing or not believing. I agree you should have a higher burden of proof before doing those things.

But you are free to believe whatever you want.

Personally, I don’t hold a belief either way about this person. I neither believe or disbelieve them.

Why don't you believe either way? If the "he's creepy" side had provided their "curated receipts" would you believe them?

As it stands, he's provided receipts and the other side hasn't, so for me any reasonable person believes the person with the receipts.

And sure, we can't force people to form opinions in one way or another, but we absolutely can (and arguably should) criticize people who form their opinions in a way that is best modeled after a lynch mob, in the exact same way I would react to a... real life lynch mob.

How would your perspective change, if it all, if the accuser came forward and said that those were in fact the only DMs exchanged?

> Unfortunately, if some guy walks up to a woman at an event and acts creepy, this demands that a woman record every moment of her life in case she has to defend herself if she calls him out...

We're throwing away "innocent until proven guilty" with this. I'm sure you agree how dangerous that can be.

Though, as you point out, recording every moment is not feasibly or desirable. Do you have any ideas on how we could solve this problem?

Making it easier and cheaper to file defamation suits wouldn't help as in this case there was no evidence.

I think in most of these cases, the accusations are correct. But some of them aren't correct and we must protect the innocent as well.

And me, as an outsider on the internet, has no business trying to pick a side or work out who should be punished. That's the job of the legal system.

Why do you think most accusations are correct?

The majority of people are not malicious and would not make this stuff up. Some obviously are and will but my feeling is that these people are the minority.

Not sure the math makes sense on that.

Assuming a two-party interaction, for every person that makes a true accusation of abuse, there is one malicious actor (the abuser). For every person who makes a false accusation, there is one malicious actor (the accuser).

Regardless of the ratio of true to false accusations, the number of malicious people in the world remains unchanged.

This was an interesting thought but I think the difference is that the defender has a much greater incentive to defend than an accuser has to accuse. There is no downside to not falsely accusing someone but there is a major downside to not falsely denying an accusation.

So it would be expected that almost every accused person would defend themselves when they would not lie if the sides were reversed.

There is an assumption you're making that is missing from your analysis. Yes, it does seem likely that an abuser or what have you will be highly incentivized to defend themselves, more so than you'd expect people to falsely accuse people. What is in question is how likely you think someone being an actual abuser/creep/etc is in the first place. You're not comparing apples to apples.

Because effectively you are saying that this kind of bad behavior is more likely than the bad behavior where one person would lie about another. And it is not clear why you think one type of antisocial behavior is more common. People lie every day, oftentimes to their own detriment. Likewise people are creeps every day, again often to their detriment. I think it is far from clear at this point which behavior is more common.

This is still bad reasoning.

In a pool of one hundred people, where one is an abuser and nine are false accusers, you'll have one false denial and nine real denials.

If it's nine abusers and one false accuser, you'll have the opposite ratio.

Without demonstrating which toy world applies, you can't know what's going on.

There's quite a bit of irony in the number of HN commenters who are prepared to side with the OP instantly & without any apparent consideration as an innocent victim of... people online instantly & without apparent consideration siding with accusers.

His story didn't quite add up to me - no explanation, even speculative, of why several people in his life, who he thought he was friends with, might suddenly decide to attack him - so I found this interesting: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/vcbrags-pasquale-mit...

I don't have a lot of sympathy for VCs who have access to actual capital but feel like an anonymous Twitter account making fun of them is "punching down", and it's not obvious that the non-OP people in this story are all behaving well, but we don't have to pick sides here, and it seems like there's plenty of reason to be cautious about fitting this into a narrative about online "mobs" "lynching" innocent victims.

> three random unrelated women

They may be unrelated but the events here weren't independent. He was accused of anonymously harassing someone thru a meme twitter account (actually run by someone else). This caused him to be virtually dog-piled. None of us know what would have happened without the initial false accusation.

Don't judge people on what your emotions tell you is most likely what that type of person usually has a reputation for doing according to the selectively reported news. That's how racism works, or in your case, it's sexism.

Right, which is why you refuse to believe the accusers, right?

All we have here is judgement. There's no meaningful evidence except testimony from the people in conflict. You made one call, grandparent made another.

Why should only one be sexist?

What has been stated so far is not 'judgment'. SavantIdiot has merely stated a prior that applies to any and all accusations of some sort, regardless of the evidence. The fact that OP can provide evidence of unambiguously positive exchanges, while not dispositive as has been pointed out, is at least enough on its own to overcome the prior.

Alternatively: three similar accusations of different events by different people without any other relationship seems like that should be enough to outweigh a nice text message that got sent once, no?

I mean, maybe not. You disagree. But you disagree because you JUDGE the evidence differently, not because of any fundamental truth.

To wit: get off your high horse. You're doing the same thing you called another poster "sexist" for doing.

Person A accuses Person B of sending creepy text messages. Person B shows a message history of what they claim to be the entire conversation between them, with no creepy messages in it. Person A refuses to share any text messages.

How is it sexist to believe that Person B is innocent? I think someone is being sexist or racist in this situation if their judgement changes depending on the race or gender of persons A and B. That's what the root comment wrote, or at least how plenty of people are interpreting it: it makes more sense to them that Person B is guilty and Person A is truthful by virtue of the fact that Person B is a man and Person A is a woman.

You are getting at it when you write this:

> But you disagree because you JUDGE the evidence differently,

Correct, but the deeper fundamental aspect is that they making their judgement based on the evidence. As opposed to making judgements based on the gender/race of the people involved.

> How is it sexist to believe that Person B is innocent?

Good grief. It's not! For exactly the same reason that it's not sexist to believe Person B is guilty, as exporectomy did above and as zozbot234 and you defended. Judgement calls aren't sexism.

But FWIW: by typical preponderance of evidence rules, multiple corroborating testimonies by unrelated witnesses sit way higher than "here's a screenshot of an unrelated event". I submit that the reason you're clinging so hard to that is that you really just don't WANT to believe this guy is a creep.

Which, fine. It's a judgement call, and you judged. Just don't tell the rest of us that you aren't.

You're not even presenting an accurate picture of the accusers side though. Two of them are apparently know each other literally because the original accuser told another accuser[1] that Pasquale was to blame.

[1] https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazo...

That's not at all how racism and sexism work.

Racism and sexism depend on power imbalance, and calling out centuries of existence of either when exploring if there is a power imbalance at play is not related.

Saying "This race is inferior" is vastly different than saying, "This race was and is still exploited by power structures." Do you understand difference?

Racism depends on making assumptions or judgements about other people based on their skin color. It has nothing to do with power. Minorities don't have a free pass to be racist towards White people, and women don't have a free pass to be sexist towards men.

For social media outrage, women seem to have more power than men (eg. this article), so your claims about men are sexist due to the power imbalance. I'll also demonstrate the equivalence of your statement to racism by changing some words:

"What makes more sense? Some black person has been violent and only showed the positive side in his defense, or three random unrelated white people -- who he claims only ever had lovely, adoring exchanges with him -- decided to destroy his life for no apparent reason."

all major social media companies are literally owned and run by men

Can you connect that claim with a conclusion using some logic? For example - and I know this probably isn't what you're implying but I don't know what it actually is - "They are run by men and the sex who's members run them is the one with the most power, therefore all men have more power than all women.

Yours is neo-nazi thinking: "Look at all those banks and media companies, so many Jewish last names..."

Anti-black racists have the same mindset: "Hmmm... what do all those looters and criminals have in common?"

Of course, your mindset totally ignores the millions of people that don't fit your stereotypes.

-isms are a belief that "$group does $thing, so $person who is a part of $group probably $thing" held or supported by a large enough group of people that it out-powers $person.

Saying only long-held -isms somehow pass your bar is gatekeeping and not ok. Victims don't need your approval.

The smallest, most vulnerable, most powerless minority of them all is the individual. So parent's point is still very relevant.

The women clearly aren't unrelated if they are referring to each other in their tweets about why so-and-so is a creep.

If he is only showing the positive side in his defense, wouldn't it be super easy for anyone who received his creepy side to show it? If he says "these are the only DMs we exchanged", and then someone can show more DMs that were exchanged, wouldn't that destroy his defense? Yes, clearly the messages can be photoshopped, but if none of the accusers are pushing back against the claims, which would be simple to do, one could assume they are true.

My question is, why is this any of your (or my) business? Why do we feel it necessary to involve ourselves in a situation we have neither the context nor the authority to have an opinion?

Because nature tells us :

"Women are saying that a guy had an interaction with them"

So all our brain emergency signals flare up. That's because somebody who is not ourselves having interactions with women triggers an immediate response...that guy is, in fact, an enemy from a reproductive standpoint. Deeply rooted in our brains there is the idea that WE should be interacting with those women and that we must destroy that guy because he's ahead in the reproductive race

This happens subcounciously.

Even standup guys like Bill Gates aren't immune to it, if you want to hurt a guy reputation and you have nothing, absolutely nothing on him...well just say that he's a playboy and a philanderer.

If you claim those things you immediately ruin his reputation with women and with smart/family men. All he's left with the approval of less smart men who are no use for guys who have ambitious goals such as Bill Gates or even the Pasquale VC of the main article. They'd have lost so much "approval rating" among smart men, as well as men who are capable of reading the room and don't want to be associated with a guy who is under attack by the mob.

> or three random unrelated women -- who he claims only ever had lovely, adoring exchanges with him -- decided to destroy his life for no apparent reason.

Seems he dated two of them? I guess we all know who ended the relationship now. (hint: not them!)

I agree with your curiosity about this.

I’ve noticed that the blog post doesn’t really dive into “what could have possibly caused this to happen?” so we’re all left to speculate as to what circumstances (if any!) led to this.

It seems like quite a few comments are rather uncurious about that and have decided to focus on a phenomenon called “the mob” as if it were a monolith that manifests uniformly like the apparition of a bogeyman that’s entirely disconnected from cause and effect aside from going after the best and brightest.

You know, this seemed like an interesting case study right up until he quoted Scott Adam's take on "being cancelled."

How come?

Scott Adam’s says some pretty bizarre things in public on his blog and on his podcast. He wrote about causing his readers to orgasm via his words.[0] The tone was not that of a person with a healthy attitude towards sexuality. I found it unpleasant and gross.

He’s also expressed some pretty odd ideas. From the same link:

> Regular readers know that I used my background in hypnosis to accurately predict nine-out-nine political events in 2015, while most political professionals got zero right. That makes me the best political pundit of the year.

The podcast QAnon Anonymous (which reports on conspiracy theories; it’s not pro-conspiracy thinking) did an episode about him.[1] It’s been a long time since I listened to it, so I won’t try to sum it up because I’d do so poorly. He came off as an unpleasant person who doesn’t seem admirable to me. I wouldn’t link to him in a post about character assassination.

[0] https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/12/31/hypnotizing-you-to...

[1] https://m.soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/episode-43-scott-ada...

Even if you don't like Scott Adams (And I don't particularly like the guy myself), I don't think that should invalidate the specific statement that the article quotes, which should be able to stand on its own regardless of the background of the person saying it.

See also: ad hominem, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/character-attack/

Remember what happened to ProJared?

Isn't he the dude who cheated on his wife and solicited nudes from fans?

No I don't. Not sure what side of the arg ProJared is on.

But I do remember what happened to Vanessa Guillén, and an entire military that tried to cover it up, and many, many others like her. (Should I enumerate GamerGate's victims and the way their real accusers said it was BS, when it wasn't?)

Jared was accused by his ex of some shitty things, then a bunch of randos straight up lied about him to pile on. It's 40 minutes but he explains what happened to him here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBywRBbDUjA

Both things can be wrong. ProJared didn't victimize Vanessa Guillen so it's a category error to put the military cover up that happened with people lying about ProJared and him showing receipts on how he wasn't victimizing people.

Exactly. Like it or not, accusers have the right to make accusations. Obviously all the predominantly straight, anti-woke men here are going to sympathize with the guy and other people won't. But at the end of the day, what's the solution demanded here? You shouldn't be able to call someone out for being an asshole? What about the people whose accusations are true?

> You shouldn't be able to call someone out for being an asshole?

I don't think it's a new concept that 'calling someone out' should have something behind it: evidence, credibility, or at least plausibility. The problem is that regardless of the truth, evidence is not often likely to exist, who is credible on social media has become wildly subjective, and plausibility is easily back-filled with further innuendo.

Just like any false accusation: it has to go to court.

The truth is life is a fuckmess right now and there is no instantaneous black/white gratification. And if your success is predicated on a large social-media following, I'm afraid there's nothing you can do when it turns on you. At this point at least.

Not to digress, but holy hell: I mean look at the fuckmess social media has created, of disinformation and conspiracy theories. Flat earth? Pizzagate? Q? For real?

> Just like any false accusation: it has to go to court

What? This makes no sense. There is no crime being alleged here. No one is trying to send this guy to jail, so what would there be to try in court?

Someone said this guy was creepy. Guy says he isn’t creepy and provides some evidence. Everyone is free to look at the situation and make their own judgement.

The idea that we are only allowed to believe things proven in court is asinine.

> Everyone is free to look at the situation and make their own judgement.

Except people who believed the accusers. Those people are an "internet mob" who must be condemned. You forgot that part. Only the guy who wrote the blog post is supposed to be believed.

It sounds like a joke, but there's a real "it's only bad to believe people without evidence when YOU do it" vibe to the posters here.