https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/opinion/cancel-culture-social-media.html In March, Alexi McCammond, the newly hired editor of Teen Vogue, resigned following backlash over offensive tweets she’d sent a decade ago, beginning when she was 17. In January, Will Wilkinson lost his job as vice president for research at the center-right Niskanen Center for a satirical tweet about Republicans who wanted to hang Mike Pence. (Wilkinson was also suspended from his role as a Times Opinion contributor.) To debate whether these punishments were fair is to commit a category error. These weren’t verdicts weighed and delivered on behalf of society. These were the actions of self-interested organizations that had decided their employees were now liabilities. Teen Vogue, which is part of Condé Nast, has remade itself in recent years as a leftist magazine built around anti-racist principles. Niskanen trades on its perceived clout with elected Republicans. In both cases, the organization was trying to protect itself, for its own reasons. That suggests a different way of thinking about the amorphous thing we call cancel culture, and a more useful one. Cancellations — defined here as actually losing your job or your livelihood — occur when an employee’s speech infraction generates public attention that threatens an employer’s profits, influence or reputation. This isn’t an issue of “wokeness,” as anyone who has been on the business end of a right-wing mob trying to get them or their employees fired — as I have, multiple times — knows. It’s driven by economics, and the key actors are social media giants and employers who really could change the decisions they make in ways that would lead to a better speech climate for us all. Boundaries on acceptable speech aren’t new, and they’re not narrower today than in the past. Remember the post-9/11 furor over whether you could run for office if you didn’t wear an American flag pin at all times? What is new is the role social media (and, to a lesser extent, digital news) plays in both focusing outrage and scaring employers. And this, too, is a problem of economics, not culture. Social platforms and media publishers want to attract people to their websites or shows and make sure they come back. They do this, in part, by tuning the platforms and home pages and story choices to surface content that outrages the audience. ..... This is not just a problem of social media platforms. Watch Fox News for a night, and you’ll see a festival of stories elevating some random local excess to national attention and inflicting terrible pain on the people who are targeted. Fox isn’t anti-cancel culture; it just wants to be the one controlling that culture. Cancellations are sometimes intended, and deserved. Some speech should have consequences. But many of the people who participate in the digital pile-ons that lead to cancellation don’t want to cancel anybody. They’re just joining in that day’s online conversation. They’re criticizing an offensive or even dangerous idea, mocking someone they think deserves it, hunting for retweets, demanding accountability, making a joke. They aren’t trying to get anyone fired. But collectively, they do get someone fired. In all these cases, the economics of corporations that monetize attention are colliding with the incentives of employers to avoid bad publicity. One structural way social media has changed corporate management is that it has made P.R. problems harder to ignore. Outrage that used to play out relatively quietly, through letters and emails and phone calls, now plays out in public. Hasty meetings get called, senior executives get pulled in, and that’s when people get fired. An even more sinister version of this operates retrospectively, through search results. An employer considering a job candidate does a basic Google search, finds an embarrassing controversy from three years ago and quietly moves on to the next candidate. ..... People should be shamed when they say something awful. Social sanctions are an important mechanism for social change, and they should be used. The problem is when that one awful thing someone said comes to define their online identity, and then it defines their future economic and political and personal opportunities. I don’t like the line that no one deserves to be defined by the worst thing they’ve ever done — tell me the body count first — but let’s agree that most of us don’t deserve to be defined by the dumbest thing we’ve ever said, forever, just because Google’s algorithm noticed that that moment got more links than the rest of our life combined. I think this suggests a few ways to make online discourse better. Twitter should rethink its trending box, and at least consider the role quote-tweets play on the platform. (It would be easy enough to retain them as a function while throttling their virality.) Fox News should stop being, well, Fox News. All of the social media platforms need to think about the way their algorithms juice outrage and supercharge the human tendency to police group boundaries. For months, when I logged onto Facebook, I saw the posts of a distant acquaintance who had turned into an anti-masker, and whose comment threads had turned into flame wars. This wasn’t someone I was close to, but the algorithm knew that what was being posted was generating a lot of angry reaction among our mutual friends, and it repeatedly tried to get me to react, too. These are design choices that are making society more toxic. Different choices can, and should, be made. The rest of corporate America — and that includes my own industry — needs to think seriously about how severe a punishment it is to fire people under public conditions. When termination is for private misdeeds or poor performance, it typically stays private. When it is for something the internet is outraged about, it can shatter someone’s economic prospects for years to come. It’s always hard, from the outside, to evaluate any individual case, but I’ve seen a lot of firings that probably should have been suspensions or scoldings. This also raises the question of our online identities, and the way strange and unexpected moments come to define them. A person’s Google results can shape the rest of that person’s life, both economically and otherwise. And yet people have almost no control over what’s shown in those results, unless they have the money to hire a firm that specializes in rehabilitating online reputations. This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but our lifelong digital identities are too important to be left to the terms and conditions of a single company, or even a few. Finally, it would be better to focus on cancel behavior than cancel culture. There is no one ideology that gleefully mobs or targets employers online. Plenty of anti-cancel culture warriors get their retweets directing their followers to mob others. So here’s a guideline that I think would make online discourse better. Unless something that is said is truly dangerous and you actually want to see that person fired from their current job and potentially unable to find a new one — a high bar, but one that is sometimes met — you shouldn’t use social media to join an ongoing pile-on against a normal person. If it’s a politician or a cable news host or a senator, well, that’s politics. But this works differently when it’s someone unprepared for that scrutiny. We would all do better to remember that what feels like an offhand tweet to us could have real consequences for others if there are hundreds or thousands of similar tweets and articles. Scale matters.
But again, while we do not perfectly understand all the mechanisms and causes, we have reams and reams and reams of direct evidence derived from actual real world results, of all but the most very recent innovations in trans care (both psychological and physiological) and there's clear and overwhelming evidence that "getting it wrong" is more rare in this field than in virtually any other. The regret rate for basically any function of transition is tiny, and those cases are dominated by external factors rather than having actually gotten the wrong treatment. True story for you. I had a Facebook friend. A doctor of not insignificant career success, married with two sons that were still pre-school when she transitioned. The transition was by any measure successful in terms of what was appropriate to her mentally and physically, she was well satisfied with the results and happy with herself like never before. BUT She lived in Alabama. Her career degraded to the graveyard emergency room shift as she became a pariah to many of her peers. Worse, her wife divorced her and sought - and received - soul custody of the boys and completely cut my friend off from all contact with her children as long as she continued to live as a female. The woman tormented her with this for years as the kids grew up year by year without contact with one of their parents and basically were trained to believe that "he" was so selfish that "he" would rather "pretend to be a woman"as be their father. At length, near suicide, she went in and had her breasts removed, cut her hair, and submitted herself to living as a male again at least until the boys were grown. For this she received the reward of a couple of hours of monitored visitation with the kids twice a month. Did she transition because anyone "got it wrong" about her being trans? No. She was bullied into submission by a bigoted culture who refused to let her be the captain of her own life. As long as we suffer the narrative that it is the transition itself that fucks up lives - which is vanishingly rare, bordering on non-existent as a statistical matter - and not the way that society punishes people for transitioning that fucks up lives... Lives will continue to get fucked.
and this is separate from the bill that requires every public restroom to have a sign warning in very prominent and derogatory terms that a trans person might be in there. I read today that Arkansas has either passed or are still considering a total of seven - SEVEN!! - separate bills targeting trans people. Imagine being so invested in your bigotry, so obsessed, that in a world where all ***THIS*** is going on and needs your attention, you have time to fuck with trans people SEVEN different ways. (I think TN has 5 or more anti-LGBT bills)
No shifting of my view in the OP that what the right CALLS cancel culture, and how it's used as a partisan blunt object, doesn't exist. But the phenomena the term "canceled" originally referred to does exist, and not as a partisan weapon used by one side but in a scatter shot mess across and within partisan groupings - mostly as a function of the power of social media to elevate the voices of bad actors and mob movements (which CAN be weaponized by a prominent thought leader, but again is not exclusively a province of either the right or left) Here's an interesting discussion on the topic, from which I have to specific points I wish to amen or contradict, it's just a discussion stripped of all the bullshit about either the right or the left being the monsters behind "cancel culture" https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
The far right lost the gay marriage fight in spectacular fashion. The doom and gloom they predicted never came to pass. Instead of embracing “IDIC” they doubled down on their bigotry and hatred of fellow Americans. Egocentric victimhood is the current prevailing force for these folks.
When cancelling goes wrong.... So a "journalist" named Roslyn Talusan used her Twitter platform to call out a woman for writing a cookbook on noodles and dumplings The problem, you see, is that the woman is white Never mind that the woman has actually travelled to China and actually joined a noodle cooking school in Lanzhou and seems to have a genuine appreciation for the food and culture Yes travelling to China and spending your money to learn more about their ways because you have a genuine interest in them sure sounds like colonization to me.... Anyways, she received significant backlash for this and got pretty heavily ratioed and has since made her Twitter account private but not before asking for money to help her get therapy for the incident she herself created So to recap: She calls out a stranger as a racist appropriater, publicly disrespects her career with the hopes of ending/cancelling it, receives backlash, refuses to apologize, digs in deeper and then paints herself as the victim in the pile-on she started You hate to see it This is exactly what reasonable people are talking about when they say they dislike cancel culture. Hey, you want to cancel some genuine asshole racist? That's fine, knock yourself out - I'm on board with that. This however is wrong and just mean spirited and only serves to divide people Food, man - we should be celebrating every single kind of it with each other, always and everywhere
This "you're not allowed to enjoy my cultures clothes/food/music/anything" bullshit is a female minority equivalent of the male neckbeard losers that feel threatened by women and jocks enjoying the bands and films and franchises they found escape in growing up. I understand it, but it's still stupid and toxic and deserves to result in a backlash at every opportunity.
If you're so hardcore woke that you think a white woman can't cook noodles, then you damned sure better be Asian (and of the appropriate variety corresponding to the noodle type) if you're eating them. If they're not for her to make, then they're not for you to eat, either. Stay in your racial-cultural lane, puritan! Cultural appropriation is a good thing. Good ideas should spread, and even if confining an idea to a particular race or ethnicity made sense (it doesn't), it's doomed to fail in an ever integrating and mingling world.
We don’t allow gatekeepers in fandom, why should we allow it anywhere else, especially in culinary arts? Of course she called them Nazis, it’s the female @Diacanu.
She's not woke, she's bitter that at least one white kid was racist to her in grade school. She can try to hide behind wokeness to justify her bitterness, but I'm not buying it and neither should anyone else. Agreed. There's some stuff that's worth being annoyed about, like when the Kardashians appropriate yet another element of black style and the media acts like they just invented it, but I don't know what sort of response it merits beyond annoyance. Agreed, but let's not act like you're not trying your best to be one of those fandom gatekeepers when it comes to Discovery.
It's a little different when it's a colonizers culture, since they shared it themselves by force. I once had a date with a African woman that cooked me so-so pasta and tried to humblebrag by mentioning that her people made pasta extremely well because her country was once conquered by Italy.
IF all people meant by "cancel culture" is "some dipshit(s) got mad on the internet" no one would care. That's not how the term has been weaponized by the political class
This is seriously getting out of hand. You can’t even violate high school girls by sharing nudes of them without their permission without being labeled a creep and someone girls should stay away from. WTF!?!?? How did we get here?!?!
Random, but I caught a discussion over Glenn Beck talking about gender issues and he brought up the Chicken Lady character from Kids in the Hall in his usual barrage of slippery sloped absurdity. Now, there's a picture of ol Glenn accompanying Dude looking that much like Colonel Sanders shouldn't be talking about chicken ladies.
Can someone explain the problem with this? Do we not want consequences for our actions? Cancel culture is not avoiding people who scam nudes from you and then share them without permission. That is actually a good warning.
The corporation didn't go looking for decade old tweets to fire their employee though, did they? The fact someone did dig up these old posts and weaponized them is the definition of cancel culture. Yes, the employer has to be party to it, but they have no interest in it, they are responding to online backlash. And it is very possible that the person learned and grew in the corresponding timeframe. As to the GOP being advocates for cancel culture before it was unleashed on them, yes, absolutely. But it was wrong when they did it too. If it is something recent that's a different matter. But I sincerely believe people should be allowed to grow and change.
Michael Hobbes has as good a read on the moral panic of so-called "cancel culture" moral panic as anyone out there. Skip to 22:00 for the (first half of) the interview with Hobbes or listen to it all if you want. He's a great follow on Twitter too as he routinely points out the flaws in the daily "OMG!" The Feminist Present - Episode 37 - Moral Panic Mythbusting with Michael Hobbes (Part 1) | RSS.com
When Batgirl gets shelved, "it probably just sucked ". When it's a Jamie Foxx comedy "cancel culture!! ". Make up your fucking minds, folks.
Weird article, none of the people listed as involved appear to be "cancelled" and the point is even made that RDJ did a similar project a few years ago shortly before becoming one of the most popular and highest earning actors on the planet.
