edit: although tangentially relevant, this case in Canada is hair raising: http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchfor...
by their own admission and by the evidence, the plaintiffs however did engage in a pattern of behavior and organized others into the same pattern which resulted in a person not only being harassed but also losing their job.
it is not enough to say, 'I feel harrassed' or 'I feel hurt' - that does not meet the legal test. You have no right not to be offended.
by the token of 'feelings', I could say that your response is 'hate speech' towards me and that I 'felt' harrassed and I 'felt' that my personal safety was in jeopardy.
If I were to claim that, I should rightfully be pointed in the direction of a mental health professional, not a court of law.
If you hurt my feelings, that's neither a criminal nor civil offense.
"Sticks and stones..." silly me, I thought we all learned this in elementary school
Please don't speak for the majority of Canadians. I am not in agreement with this and I speculate that many people living in Canada would object to it as well.
One of the worst aspects of our country IMO. I wish we had millions of people willing to defend the basic right to say what you want.
What a horrible country. I hate it deeply.
How do you define hate, abuse and trolls? In certain countries atheists are considered terrorists. Those who blog about atheism are haters and a bigot. It's justified to hack them to death, imprison them or whip them.
In other countries female drivers are abusing the sensibilities of men.
Who is to say which ones are doing the censorship right, lol.
When he says that the "troll" label is overly used, that does not mean he is claiming it was inappropriate in any particular case, such as when applied to what was directed at Pao.
I'd be much more interested in seeing what the front page of /r/all was for that same period of time.
EDIT: I suppose you were just on /r/all, but still.
But it's more complicated than it looks. Pao and stuff are giving 0 cares about political correctness being a cancer far more evil than fat hate.
We don't need owners at reddit to act like priest or therapist spreading their "morality". It doesn't work.
Why are jerks like Trump surging? People have had it with the hypocriscy and suppression of truth.
You can't speak simple truths without staking your career on it. Armies on twitter claim to be harassment victims while themselves being criminally harassers [1][2]
[1] http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2015/07/02/the-fact-a... [2] http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchfor...
A demonstration of this is in the article:
"In May, the company banned harassment of individuals from the site. Last month, we took down sections of the site that drew repeat harassers. Then, after making these policy changes to prevent and ban harassment, I, along with several colleagues, was targeted with harassing messages, attempts to post my private information online and death threats. These were attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence."
On one hand, these people affiliated with reddit did not appreciate these alleged "attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence" when they were the recipients.
Yet these same people were perfectly willing, and perhaps even proud, to silence other reddit users, whether at an individual level or by eliminating entire subreddits.
In fact, the article in this case could very well be seen as an attempt to "demean, shame and scare" the alleged "trolls" into silence. It engages in the sort of behavior that it is deeming as unacceptable!
I did see lots of posts saying things like "Ellen Pao is LITERALLY Hitler", but not any overtly racist ones that I can recall.
Here's one. There were lots of others that used the term cunt or used racial slurs.
https://np.reddit.com/r/punchablefaces/comments/39dl6s/ching...
I mean, it's a comment on a thread in a sub called "punchable faces", the thread links to an Imgur image of Pao labled "ching chong ding dong", has 2,400 upvotes.
I would say we should not confuse an upvote with a post.
Is this a known/established fact? I see in the article a paragraph about how she received thousands of positive notes/emails but nothing about the # or volume of hate. It may not be documented here, but I'm curious if it was actually as widespread as implied.
We're still human beings, and even though we all abstractly know that throwaway accounts exist, when you're getting 10,000 PMs that say you suck, it matters. Besides, evidence from Twitter suggests that it's demonstrably more often an easily-led mob than hundreds of sock-puppets these days.
There's potentially a big difference.
I'm not defending the slur - it's abhorrent. But if the magnitude matters to you, let's try to be accurate when we describe what we're counting.
She was bullied and forced to resign. This is the standard operating procedure of many here on HN and on the Internet (Mozilla CEO anyone?): Someone just can't have a differing opinion. They need to be bullied, tormented, silenced, fired, and marginalized until they admit that their opinion is wrong.
It was all based on mis-information (many still don't know why the AmA employee was fired) and mob mentality.
Just remember this conversation when you get fired because someone does research on your your Internet comments and decides that one of your opinions is deemed "offensive". It will most likely happen someday.
I also find it a little funny that when someone in a git repository doesn't use specific gender pronouns, they are called out as biased (and bullied). But when hundreds and thousands of people call a woman racial slurs (so much worse), it's defended.
This is my point exactly: Most people talking about 'equality' are lying. They want equality when someone is against their own personal beliefs, but are just fine spewing the same hate and bigotry when the roles are reversed.
I suspect, possibly incorrectly, that it's being done heavily by people who have never tried to support a family and don't realize the extreme damage their "hobby" has on the world.
I don't LIKE that people get that kind of scrutiny... But I think it should be legal, and we have to live with the unfortunate consequences.
As to the graphic designer... I don't have a good answer for that. Keep your unpopular opinions at arm's length from your professional life...? :(
Did you read those words I wrote? Yes or no? Feel free to yell at someone, but it shouldn't be me.
I want accurate reporting, don't demonize me for that, okay. Units matter. If OP has proof that it was "thousands of people calling her a ching-chong cunt," then I'd like to see it. If instead, OP has proof that 2,400 accounts upvoted an image labeling her "ching chong ding dong," then report that.
We have laws against it, we punish murderers, but murder still happens! All of our attempts over thousands of years have failed to eradicate murder! There has to be more we can do! Do you have suggestions?
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In case my point isn't made clear: there are some things that are simply facts of life. You will not be able to solve them. People are emotional and will react on those emotions. Sometimes people will do terrible things while acting on these emotions. Sometimes we will fight with one another, sometimes we will throw fists at one another, sometimes we will call each other names. We'll bury each other 6' under ground. These are things that happen. We know they happen. We expect them to happen. While none of us wishes these things happen, we recognize that they will happen. That recognition of things that will happen is what makes those things normal. Normal things do not get our attention. We haven't been trained to care about expected, normal things.
I recognize that tomorrow morning, the sun will rise. It's a very special event. It means the sun is still burning and providing light and life to the planet. It's a normal occurrence though. The sun will rise the day after tomorrow. In fact, the sun will likely rise every day for the rest of my life. It's an expected occurrence. It's a normal one. I don't celebrate it. I don't pay attention to it, most of the time. Some days I might appreciate the sunrise and the beauty of it. Most days it gets ignored.
Some days I notice some terrible occurrence happening in the world. Those terrible things happen every day. They're normal. So most days. They get ignored.
There's plenty of question of how much we're willing to spend to solve the problem, of course (to give a terrible ad absurdium example, it's trivial to stop Internet bullying by shutting off the internet). But when we just hand-wave and say "Can't be fixed," we aren't helping.
In fact, personal abuse online has risen online and I blame people being so open with their personally identifying information. I made a related post on this issue here [0]. The solution is not one that people want to subscribe to. They'd rather share their lives on FB and Twitter for the world to see. "The world" includes nasty people and bullies. If people don't want nasty people and bullies to have access to this information, people need to stop sharing it with the world.
It is much easier to harass someone in a credible manner when you have information about them. No information? Nothing to attack. But so many people want to shove their name, gender, sexuality, religion, age, beliefs, and who-knows-what-else in front of everyones' eyes to see. So people who dislike _____ now have something to attack. People who dislike ____ will always and forever exist. Always. Until we remove the right for individuals to hold their own beliefs or have freedom.
There's nothing about human culture that's consistent except its inconsistency and adaptability. It might not be obvious within a few decades, but big changes do happen.
Opposed to the real world, wannabe bullies have zero chance of seeing a reaction from their victims if those do not react. Online bullies like there DO lose their interest. Just look at past outrages on reddit to see. People need to despise that these short-term hype shitstorms are not worth reacting to'. Maybe ask PR campaigners how they handle it, there should be decades of research.
I am obviously excluding actual stalkers, sociopaths etc. Those are hard problems but not one you can as easily treat and not a widespread problem.
It's weird that you object to the racial slur but ignore the sexual slur.
There were plenty of other threads for you to talk about the firing (not Pao) and failing admin relationship (not Pao) or censorship (not Pao).
And the hilarious thing is, the "trolls" didn't even "win". Reddit's new CEO is implementing even stricter censorship measures, all of it most likely in the hopes of making reddit more appealing for advertisers. If you stand back and look at this whole fiasco from a distance, Reddit higher-ups want to make more money, and in order to do so, they decide they need to curb their more "unsightly" elements. But attacking free speech is a dicey proposition, so what do they do? They hire a woman and make her do it. If redditors are dumb sheep and take it quietly, great. If not, wrap the whole thing around her neck and throw her under the bus (reminds you of the Bourne Trilogy deson't it), then come riding in on a white horse to "save" reddit from "chairman Pao".
And so far, it's working perfectly. The "trolls" celebrate their victory by having the sensationalist media blast them on their sexism, Pao's reputation is utterly destroyed and she's essentially too toxic to employ anywhere, and Reddit still gets to wipe the floor with free speech.
> Most smart people I know have decided to just not discuss anything sensitive because of the internet lynchmob looking for any slight mistake
> This seems unlikely to be a good development. At some point the conversations will only have the extremists left.
We need to talk about this, but without heavy moderation which will introduce a different set of problems, I don't see how.
However I don't think it's a great idea to put forth one's amateurish "insight" as discussion worthy in a public forum. It promotes the idea that any position is "valid" when many simply aren't. Having a "discussion", which everyone seems to think is oh so important, is absolutely useless if it's between people who don't have any clue about the topic they are discussing. So, if the "internet lynchmob" has stopped people speaking publicly about things which they have no business doing, I can't say I feel sad about it.
Framing advocacy as warfare is inaccurate and unwise. Appealing to people with your arguments and example and negotiating points of agreement are huge parts of effective advocacy.
Defining people as opponents to kill, disable or dominate isn't effective advocacy - and recent wars might even indicate that they aren't focuses for effective warfare, either. Furthermore, it tells your "opponents" that the only way to deal with you is to suppress you by force. When people get locked obsessively into these conflicts beyond reconciliation, it's sick and self-perpetuating rather than cathartic and it doesn't help anybody.
The defining trait of SJW is not that they are activists for a cause. If they were just trying to win hearts and minds so they could win at the ballot box, that would be one thing. The defining trait is that they use any means at their disposable to defeat their enemies: naming and shaming, purging, getting people fired, getting people banned from communities, lawsuits, criminal complaints, etc. That is the mentality of warfare, and deserves to be called as such.
Unfortunately, the people "on the other side" will tend to see things the same way. And our tendency is to define the enemy group vaguely, over-generalizing by including lots of people who are not really malicious or even wrong. Maybe our anger makes us hungry for targets. Or maybe we are just so upset about the disagreement itself that we are happy to have a list of bad things the other side does as a way of trying to discredit people who are not involved in those bad things, but disagree with us. Not everyone is honest about why they want to hurt the people they publicly declare as enemies. Sometimes it is just intolerance of disagreement, or simple sadism.
Even if the damage among the "combatants" didn't matter, it is often the "civilian bystanders" who are hurt. This is totally nuts. Even if these issues are worth being passionate about, they are not rationally comparable to warfare, they don't rationally justify war tactics. This isn't the Thunderdome, it's the civil society we all have to live in. And we don't have a real choice about whether that society includes people we disagree with, so it's better if we come to terms with that and find ways either to fence off or compromise in the common space, to mutual advantage.
For example, I think you're stacking the deck with your talk about "left-aligned mobs" and that you are intentionally eliding the history of right-wing fascism to make "your side" look better than "the other side." I'm a realist, I don't think people will usually be civil without special effort. So for all I know based on your rhetoric, you'd identify me as an enemy and a threat based on my views, and even kill me if you had the chance; I will defensively avoid testing that. But that's as far as I should rationally go. The important part is that whatever our disagreements, and they may be very deep, I don't need to assume that we are at war, that I am a warrior and you are my enemy, and focus on somehow figuratively "killing" you. In my view, that would actually be very silly and self-destructive. I don't actually benefit from trying to damage you, it's pointless, it doesn't help my causes and it pollutes the civil society I have to live in. (Of course it is another issue if you decide to literally threaten me and my lawful interests, but then it is a purely defensive and practical issue; I don't need to respond to that by declaring war on your "tribe" and I certainly can't pre-empt that by turning every disagreement into an intractable "war.")
For example, I think you're stacking the deck with your talk about "left-aligned mobs" and that you are intentionally eliding the history of right-wing fascism to make "your side" look better than "the other side."
I mention that because we were talking about social justice warriors, who are on the left. If there was a term "Right-wing Warriors" or such to describe right-wing people who wanted to dox, shame, purge, ban, and use any tactic necessary to fire leftists, then that would make sense. It would be completely appropriate to label such people as "warriors", if they are engaging as politics as warfare rather than as a way to convince people.
Aside from that, I do have an objection to the term: real advocates for social justice are doing something constructive. Literal warriors make war, which is destructive. That may have grim uses, but it isn't preferable to make our civil society as hostile as a war zone. Why do we need to appropriate the trappings of literal warriors, and why can't we embrace constructiveness instead of associating advocacy with destruction?