I saw a recent meme that said "In the distant past we didn't have cancel culture, we had exile culture. You were just told to leave."

> People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.

And people still do -- Marjorie can start a blog on a vps and I'm sure most providers would be reasonably okay with it, unless she became a DDoS target (possible).

If you are upset because the people that gave her that platform said "you are doing it wrong" this happens in the physical world too. If you show up to a sports arena (a place with a large group of people that are captive) and hang a sign in the stands with an "unacceptable" message, the arena will ask you to take it down or force you to.

Platforms have a brand, and they are filtering for their own brand reputation.

I hate that our web is more "centralized" but all of these actions are going to enable more decentralization to happen because of it.

> If you show up to a sports arena ....

Poor analogy. A sports arena is one big room for sport, not messaging. If people stood on soapboxes and yelled their off-topic ideas at everyone in the arena, they would be asked to leave regardless of what their messages were.

Twitter's purpose is publishing messages on any topic. It is not one big room where everyone must hear everyone else. The equivalent "doing it wrong" on Twitter is not (or shouldn't be) dissenting views or objections to vaccines. Doing it wrong on Twitter should be confined to inappropriate use of the API or some other technical misuse that actually impacts other users. Or posting illegal material or hate speech.

I don't remember anyone asking Big Tech companies to act as helicopter parents, protecting readers via censorship from ideas that don't align with current public policy.

From the 1940s on there was a Fairness Doctrine for companies with broadcast licenses. The Republicans killed this off in the 1980s, saying private business should be able to do what they want. Hoisted by their own petard.

Humans are a social species, and a lot of what you refer to as "cancel culture" is a reaction to antisocial behavior like racism and sexism and homophobia that actively harms our societies. Some of this behavior has been going on for centuries or longer. People who support so called "cancel culture" simply think that a few millennia of racism and sexism are enough.

Reasonable people should not condemn cancel culture; reasonable people should support efforts to cancel racism, sexism, ageism, and the other -isms that cause profound harm to members of our societies. It's not really that difficult to not make racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks.

I realize now that I have a different definition of “cancel culture” than you and some other people here, which is OK.

I was thinking of what Bill Mahr, on his HBO show, talks about as far as cancelling appearances at universities of people who were invited to talk, and then some subgroup protested that they didn’t like their opinions. I am also thinking of cancelling people whose political opinions vary, and also in this case an elected Congresswoman who has some very wrong ideas about the dangers of vaccinations.

I think that racist, etc. remarks are easier to filter and discard than political ideas. I feel comfortable using automated filters to discard racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, but I am not comfortable discarding political speech.

< and then some subgroup

I'm going to assume that you have good intent here, but usually "some subgroup" is dog whistle for a repressed group such as persons of color or gay people. I hope that marginalized subgroups continue to protest and get people canceled, and I intend to continue paying and donating my time and effort to make sure they can get the canceling done.

< didn’t like their opinions

Very often these "canceled" opinions include one or more of the "big three": ideology that is sexist, racist, or homophobic. People espousing these beliefs should face consequences for their behavior; they should be canceled. Society does not have to accept the toxic notion that a system should be "fair and balanced" to accommodate poisonous, antisocial ideas and behavior.

The old system, the system that accommodated these poisonous, antisocial ideas was responsible for ruining many lives because people thought it was okay to say that people should not be able to get divorced, or go to college, or have birth control, or earn an equal living, or have a bank account or credit card. Or live in a certain neighborhood. And when it was okay to say it, it was okay to put it into public and private policy alike. You could be fired for being gay, or pregnant, or not hired. You couldn't live in a certain neighborhood if you were African American, unless you wanted to find burning crosses outside your house at night. You could be jailed for engaging in private, consensual gay sex in some US jurisdictions until 2003.

So forgive me if I take a little liberty here. I think it's totally okay for people to assemble and protest a speaker because they don't agree with their political views. It's equally okay for a university to cancel an appearance because they or their students or faculty don't agree with the political positions of the speaker. I can't remember a single instance in my life where I ever made political speech, or any other speech, that called for the repression of any group or sub-group of society simply because I felt like it, or because I read about it in some book written in the Judean or Arabian deserts several millennia ago.

Cancel culture is just the free market at work. I found that explaining it this way to conservatives helped them understand why it was necessary (and I am not assuming you are a conservative).

Is it a manifestation of cancel culture to enforce platform rules (a "code of conduct", if you will)? You can argument that the rules are politically charged. Whether that's okay is determined by whether you think Twitter is a private or a public space.

Strangely enough, MTG is actually a proponent of cancel culture. See: her calls to fire/blacklist athletes that knelt during the national anthems.

If you define cancel culture as angry k pop fans attacking people they don't like, then yes it is probably bad. If you define it as a service banning effective private propoganda machines spewing baseless conspiracy theories to people who are seemingly unable or unwilling to acknowledge reality, then I'm definitely for it. I don't have a lot of faith in people to discern reality from fantasy anymore. If Twitter can stop people acting in bad faith from manipulating people, with real world consequences, then I think that's their obligation, regardless of political alignment. In this case the ban is because of spreading COVID vaccine misinformation. Countless lives could have been saved if this nonsense had never been given a platform.

This isn't cancel culture. She violated Twitter's TOS and her account was suspended.

edit: one of two accounts. Her personal account, not her official account.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is entitled to create her own Twitter. Not to use someone else’s Twitter.

This leads to 2 twitters, one for each side of the political aisle. Filter bubbles enabled by social media are already bad enough, a complete fracture of the public space along political lines is a distinctly dangerous idea.

I don’t disagree with you, I am just ruminating about making a personal decision to stop using Twitter. I did that years ago for Facebook (now, less than ten minutes a month in FB).

I am having some difficulty deciding whether I think the major Platforms should be public regulated services or the property of companies that can do anything they want to with their property. My opinion changes on this…

> My opinion changes on this…

It's a fine orthogonal discussion. There are several things worth considering in my mind:

* Perhaps these social media platforms are defectively designed

* Section 230 may need to be amended so that billion-dollar companies have more to hold them to account when things spread on their platforms

* CEOs could be criminally prosecuted when their companies lie (e.g., Facebook's ad revenue fraud in promoting FB video)

I think there are far better reasons to consider leaving social media than them suspending the personal account of a known provocateur who breaks rules all the time (her official government account is intact).

Yes I agree with you too. The issue shouldn’t be whether someone can post whatever they want on someone else’s platform- how did so few platforms(of dubious quality) become the main channels for communication? How did our internet become theirs? How can we fix it?

If she did that, the infrastructure services would do the censorship, just like they did to Parler.

Then shouldn’t you be angry at the infrastructure services and not Twitter?