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Humans love mobs. It makes them feel empowered, and gives them greater "authority" than they would otherwise have. We have seen mobs throughout human history ca

Humans love mobs. It makes them feel empowered, and gives them greater "authority" than they would otherwise have. We have seen mobs throughout human history cause all sorts of horrible incidents. But the difference between a physical mob and an internet mob, is that in a physical mob you can be identified, you are still risking some of your own safety, and you can usually immediately see the consequences of your own actions. In an internet mob you can remain anonymous, you don't need to actually carry out any of the threats you make (others may do it for you, eg calling for somebody to be fired), and you aren't risk any of your own reputation. I absolutely loath seeing mainstream media write about what happens on twitter/social media. It magnifies the mob far beyond reason. "Twttier in an outrage", "Internet blows up" it's just insane. Not only does it give the impression that vast majority of users on a platform are on the same side (they're not), it gives them pseudo-credibility. And unfortunately, the next step is for corporations to take them seriously. The more I see these stories and see how social media has shaped and is shaping the 21st century, the more I wish it was never created. It was fun at first. But the dark side of humanity has been given a power it should never have had.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
"Humans love mobs." I am a human and I don't love mobs. This article is all about incorrect assumptions. If I am not mistaken, the parent comment just made another one. The part about the media amplifying what is on social media I absolutely agree with. I have always thought there is some strange irony in news outlets writing about something that is, at least in the case of newspapers, killing their own business. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/columbus-statue-in-baltimore-torn-down-and-thrown-in-harbor/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/columbus-statue-in-baltimore-to...
- Thorentis 6y ago
  I made a generalization which I still think is true, regardless of specific exceptions which will always exist for all generalizations. Humans love to feel like they belong and they like to feel validated in their opinions. This doesn't always play out in the form of a mob. Even just "ganging up" on a friend in a group conversation is a result of these traits. Mob mentality shows itself in many ways. Perhaps I should've been clearer about mob mentality vs. the classic "mob". What we see happening on social media is I think a result of the majority of humans being susceptible to some form and some degree of mob mentality (groupthink, if you will).
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  Crazy model that just popped into my head: If we think of humans as variable tribalism waveform propagators, then a mob is simply an incidence of intense constructive interference. Perhaps you emit less tribalism energy than the average human, but it's still possible that in certain scenarios you, like any of us, would contribute to the constructive interference :) Edit: Hmmm... I think we can actually extend this model by describing social media as a transform on these tribalism emissions that tends to heavily normalize, distort and exaggerate the signal into one of a relatively small set of outputs, thus greatly increasing the odds of constructive interference.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Companies already take them seriously to avoid the shit storm that comes after. See the VS code "santa gate" where microsoft removed the santa hat on christmas because one person opened a issue saying the santa hat was as offensive as a swastika to them.
- TravHatesMe 6y ago
  Wow I was not aware of this. The original github issue: > The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 I didn't know that Santa Claus was a religious symbol, I celebrate with Santa and I do not affiliate with any religion. But the status quo is to accommodate every single person. People believe they are entitled to it: "Make it your top priority" -- OK boss! There needs to be a balance. Complete stubbornness is not good. Bending over to every single request, regardless of its merit, is not good either.
  - zo1 6y ago
    I'm further very disturbed at how that issue, and a bunch of other issues posted to their repo in response to the Santa takedown are all fully locked for discussions and reactions. It's messy all around, and I don't envy anyone being in that decision making tree. They're pretty much screwed all around, and the best they can do is pick the not-so-middle ground that happens to offend the least amount of people.
  - Thorentis 6y ago
    Never mind combating the historical inaccuracy - somebody is offended! Take action now! Absolutely pathetic.
  - mmm_grayons 6y ago
    As I recall, the guy said it was a troll. The PC Police are enough to make people take shitposting seriously. Further examples include stuff like the "okay sign" being a hate symbol.
linuxftw 6y ago
> The more I see these stories and see how social media has shaped and is shaping the 21st century, the more I wish it was never created. I don't see how you can come to this conclusion when in the preceding paragraph you accurately portray the mainstream media as the actual manipulators. The media loves to televise drama, it's what sells. When there's no actual drama to be had, they manufacture it by highlight nonsense on social media or other means. It's all so contrived now. "X say Y on Twitter! Here's a 5 minute diatribe about why that's outrageous with sarcastic analogies and something about true <insert country> values!"
j-c-hewitt 6y ago
There are good arguments in favor of taking away section 230 immunity and probably better arguments against it, but the best possible argument for getting rid of the immunity is to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  You'd still have social media but then they couldn't moderate it at all and you'd have all the same problems plus 500,000% more spam.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    Which means the discourse dies and the media is no longer social.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      It only dies if it's out-competed by something else. When you make a change to the law that everybody has to follow, you can end up just turning everything to shit because nobody is allowed to do better.
      - dwaltrip 6y ago
        It also dies if nobody uses it anymore. If all of social media was like 4chan, usage would drop by at least 90%.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        Once again, people only stop using it if there is some better alternative. It's not as if people are going to stop communicating with each other.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
doom2 6y ago
I'm surprised there hasn't been much mention (at least for US-based folks) of at-will employment. People are getting fired for old social media posts, but people get fired for all sorts of other stupid reasons: the boss was in a bad mood, you missed work to go vote (again, US-specific because elections days aren't holidays here), the bus was late. Meanwhile, the EU has much stricter regulations regarding employment and the conditions under which employees can be let go.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It's because at-will employment isn't the problem unless your boss is unreasonable, and if your boss is unreasonable then you should celebrate the opportunity to collect unemployment while you find a new job instead of having to quit or continue working there in the meantime. But canceling everybody is problematically increasing the number of unreasonable bosses.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    I don't understand why mobs don't form against the employers who fire people because of internet mobs. They often have a lot of supporters if it's a partisan political issue. The employers are the ones doing the actual harm while everyone else is just saying words.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      One guess would be that opponents of cancellation are calm intellectuals who write kindly-worded letters that corporate secretaries chuck in the bin without anyone else taking notice of them whereas angry internet mobs are full of crazy extremists sending death threats and bomb threats, doxxing people, SWAT-ing and that sort of thing which victims often yield to in order to make it stop.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    "Celebrate the opportunity to collect unemployment?" Spoken like somebody who's never done so. Even if your erstwhile employer doesn't contest the claim, the whole process is a clusterfuck at the best of times - to say nothing of these times - and typically yields somewhere around minimum wage, often approaching it from below. If you have a solid savings base, it's a trivial amount. If you don't, it's better than nothing, but usually not enough to make a meaningful difference. And that's if whoever fired you in the first place doesn't make a fight of getting it at all. I agree that Twitter cancel culture is well out of hand; in fact, I'll go further still and say that the behavior is often not meaningfully distinguishable from 4chan brigading of old. But there should still be a better option for dealing with unreasonable but not actively criminal bosses than getting fired anyway, with the chance of a bare minimum consolation prize.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

"Humans love mobs." I am a human and I don't love mobs. This article is all about incorrect assumptions. If I am not mistaken, the parent comment just made another one. The part about the media amplifying what is on social media I absolutely agree with. I have always thought there is some strange irony in news outlets writing about something that is, at least in the case of newspapers, killing their own business. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/columbus-statue-in-baltimore-torn-down-and-thrown-in-harbor/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/columbus-statue-in-baltimore-to...

Thorentis 6y ago
I made a generalization which I still think is true, regardless of specific exceptions which will always exist for all generalizations. Humans love to feel like they belong and they like to feel validated in their opinions. This doesn't always play out in the form of a mob. Even just "ganging up" on a friend in a group conversation is a result of these traits. Mob mentality shows itself in many ways. Perhaps I should've been clearer about mob mentality vs. the classic "mob". What we see happening on social media is I think a result of the majority of humans being susceptible to some form and some degree of mob mentality (groupthink, if you will).
dwaltrip 6y ago
Crazy model that just popped into my head: If we think of humans as variable tribalism waveform propagators, then a mob is simply an incidence of intense constructive interference. Perhaps you emit less tribalism energy than the average human, but it's still possible that in certain scenarios you, like any of us, would contribute to the constructive interference :) Edit: Hmmm... I think we can actually extend this model by describing social media as a transform on these tribalism emissions that tends to heavily normalize, distort and exaggerate the signal into one of a relatively small set of outputs, thus greatly increasing the odds of constructive interference.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

Companies already take them seriously to avoid the shit storm that comes after. See the VS code "santa gate" where microsoft removed the santa hat on christmas because one person opened a issue saying the santa hat was as offensive as a swastika to them.

TravHatesMe 6y ago
Wow I was not aware of this. The original github issue: > The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 I didn't know that Santa Claus was a religious symbol, I celebrate with Santa and I do not affiliate with any religion. But the status quo is to accommodate every single person. People believe they are entitled to it: "Make it your top priority" -- OK boss! There needs to be a balance. Complete stubbornness is not good. Bending over to every single request, regardless of its merit, is not good either.
- zo1 6y ago
  I'm further very disturbed at how that issue, and a bunch of other issues posted to their repo in response to the Santa takedown are all fully locked for discussions and reactions. It's messy all around, and I don't envy anyone being in that decision making tree. They're pretty much screwed all around, and the best they can do is pick the not-so-middle ground that happens to offend the least amount of people.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  Never mind combating the historical inaccuracy - somebody is offended! Take action now! Absolutely pathetic.
- mmm_grayons 6y ago
  As I recall, the guy said it was a troll. The PC Police are enough to make people take shitposting seriously. Further examples include stuff like the "okay sign" being a hate symbol.

linuxftw 6y ago

> The more I see these stories and see how social media has shaped and is shaping the 21st century, the more I wish it was never created. I don't see how you can come to this conclusion when in the preceding paragraph you accurately portray the mainstream media as the actual manipulators. The media loves to televise drama, it's what sells. When there's no actual drama to be had, they manufacture it by highlight nonsense on social media or other means. It's all so contrived now. "X say Y on Twitter! Here's a 5 minute diatribe about why that's outrageous with sarcastic analogies and something about true <insert country> values!"

j-c-hewitt 6y ago

There are good arguments in favor of taking away section 230 immunity and probably better arguments against it, but the best possible argument for getting rid of the immunity is to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
You'd still have social media but then they couldn't moderate it at all and you'd have all the same problems plus 500,000% more spam.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  Which means the discourse dies and the media is no longer social.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    It only dies if it's out-competed by something else. When you make a change to the law that everybody has to follow, you can end up just turning everything to shit because nobody is allowed to do better.
    - dwaltrip 6y ago
      It also dies if nobody uses it anymore. If all of social media was like 4chan, usage would drop by at least 90%.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        Once again, people only stop using it if there is some better alternative. It's not as if people are going to stop communicating with each other.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]

doom2 6y ago

I'm surprised there hasn't been much mention (at least for US-based folks) of at-will employment. People are getting fired for old social media posts, but people get fired for all sorts of other stupid reasons: the boss was in a bad mood, you missed work to go vote (again, US-specific because elections days aren't holidays here), the bus was late. Meanwhile, the EU has much stricter regulations regarding employment and the conditions under which employees can be let go.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
It's because at-will employment isn't the problem unless your boss is unreasonable, and if your boss is unreasonable then you should celebrate the opportunity to collect unemployment while you find a new job instead of having to quit or continue working there in the meantime. But canceling everybody is problematically increasing the number of unreasonable bosses.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  I don't understand why mobs don't form against the employers who fire people because of internet mobs. They often have a lot of supporters if it's a partisan political issue. The employers are the ones doing the actual harm while everyone else is just saying words.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    One guess would be that opponents of cancellation are calm intellectuals who write kindly-worded letters that corporate secretaries chuck in the bin without anyone else taking notice of them whereas angry internet mobs are full of crazy extremists sending death threats and bomb threats, doxxing people, SWAT-ing and that sort of thing which victims often yield to in order to make it stop.
- throwanem 6y ago
  "Celebrate the opportunity to collect unemployment?" Spoken like somebody who's never done so. Even if your erstwhile employer doesn't contest the claim, the whole process is a clusterfuck at the best of times - to say nothing of these times - and typically yields somewhere around minimum wage, often approaching it from below. If you have a solid savings base, it's a trivial amount. If you don't, it's better than nothing, but usually not enough to make a meaningful difference. And that's if whoever fired you in the first place doesn't make a fight of getting it at all. I agree that Twitter cancel culture is well out of hand; in fact, I'll go further still and say that the behavior is often not meaningfully distinguishable from 4chan brigading of old. But there should still be a better option for dealing with unreasonable but not actively criminal bosses than getting fired anyway, with the chance of a bare minimum consolation prize.