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In all of the many arguments swirling around cancel culture, I have yet to see anyone raise what I think is the most important distinction: good faith. Open de

In all of the many arguments swirling around cancel culture, I have yet to see anyone raise what I think is the most important distinction: good faith. Open debate and public disagreement is a healthy vital tool of progress when the claims and argument are made in good faith. When both parties believe their position is true and is good for the world, and their arguments for it are genuine, then I think it slows progress to cancel them. But if you assume all arguments are in good faith, then you leave the public sphere ripe for exploitation. This is what white surpremacists and others have clicked to recently. A bad actor can exploit a presumption of good faith to add legitimacy to their position. "Look, famous person X rebutted me. My claim must be at least significant enough to be worth rebutting." Or they can use it to make the other party look bad by sea-lioning. "I am merely politely asking questions. Why are you so angry? Aren't you able to control your feelings?" "Cancel culture" and deplatforming are important tools to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication. The challenge is that as we get increasingly polarized and tribal and as the bad faith actors get more savvy, everything starts to look like a bad faith argument. And at some point, people start concluding that the only foolproof algorithm for determining if an argument is in bad faith is "does it disagree with me?" And then you start seeing the banhammer swung freely. That in turn increases polarization and tribalism because good faith dissenters, people with middle ground positions, and people who aren't sure where they stand self-censor to avoid taking friendly fire. It is a very nasty feedback loop we're in, exacerbated by the already bad feedback loops of social media AIs being trained to show us content we already agree with.

_bxg1 6y ago
> "Cancel culture" [is an important tool] to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication I would say it's more like a social cytokine storm. If distrust in general is an immune-system, we're reaching a point of autoimmune disease. But I do think deplatforming is an important tool. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, it's more like antibiotics. It reduces inflammation instead of increasing it, and while some non-destructive entities may get caught up in it, they're generally nonessential, it's generally a small portion, and they'll recover.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  That's a very interesting analogy.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    I've used this analogy in my head between bodily inflammation and social unrest for a long time. It's been very useful. And it explains some contradicting viewpoints that different people have on, say, riots. If social unrest is inflammation then it's easy to see how it's neither good nor bad without context. It incurs a cost, but in many cases that cost is worth the change that it creates. But not always. A fever can help kill an infection, but it can also kill or otherwise damage the host if it goes too far.
- ajhurliman 6y ago
  If we're using an autoimmune disease as the metaphor, may I suggest steroids as the analog to deplatforming instead of antibiotics?
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    But steroids only decrease the inflammation, they don't combat the original problem. If the inflammation is there because of a real pathogen, steroids are dangerous. Antibiotics decrease inflammation by tackling the original problem without a need to also increase inflammation. (It is at this point I'd like to point out that I don't have a medical background and may be going out of my depth for the sake of analogy :P)
    - lliamander 6y ago
      Steroids are a typical treatment option for auto-immune conditions. The steroid Dexamethasone has proven effective at decreasing the mortality rate among COVID-19 patients who experience a cytokine storm leading to severe respiratory illness. Sure you may want to use antivirals/antibiotics alongside, but I don't know if it's always necessary. I don't have a medical background but from what little I do understand, the cytokine storm is the result of a secondary immune response kicking into high-gear when the primary immune response fails to respond in a timely manner (perhaps due to poor health). Suppressing the secondary immune response enough to keep it from killing the organism allows the primary immune response to catch up and defeat the infection. In other words, clamping down on cancel culture will grant reasoned discourse a chance to convince people to abandon right-wing ideologies without imposing severe economic penalties. Of course, this assumes that right-wing ideology is a pathogen that is uniformly harmful to the body politic (which it may not be) but all metaphors have their limitations. EDIT: I should clarify that I see the deplatforming as the cytokine storm. I.e. an unhealthy immune response that is damaging to our social organism.
someone7x 6y ago
I had a lot to say, but you're right, Its optimal to avoid friendly fire. The final revision of my reply was "Cmd+A Delete" Good luck being reasonable out there.
CPLX 6y ago
This is a crucial point. Here is an absolutely excellent essay expanding thoughtfully on this line of discussion: https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/ https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/
- Animats 6y ago
  That has some good points. Remember the classic forum comment, "please don't feed the trolls". That worked until the trolls became too numerous. The latest idea comes from The Lincoln Project, which is funded by a group of anti-Trump Republicans. They read the Sun Tzu quote, "If your opponent is of choleric temper, irritate him." So they make very strong anti-Trump ads and pay to run them on Fox News during shows Trump is known to watch.[1] They're deliberately trolling Trump. The goal is to make Trump lose it (which he has, on Twitter) and make it safe for Republican politicians to move away from Trump (which is happening). This is boss level trolling. [1] https://youtu.be/bk6d4TgO2NY https://youtu.be/bk6d4TgO2NY
- NoodleIncident 6y ago
  > There’s a term for this sort of bad-faith argument: it’s called the justification-suppression model. The theory is that bigots refrain from directly defending their own bigotry but get hugely riled up justifying the abstract right to express bigotry. I doubt I'll remember it, but I was searching for some term to describe why this essay immediately set off alarm bells. I probably don't know enough about PG to know if he's really writing this essay in such explicit bad faith, but it certainly activated some neurons in my internet-trained mental spam filter. Now I have a name for that pattern
koheripbal 6y ago
> When both parties believe their position is true and is good for the world, and their arguments for it are genuine, then I think it slows progress to cancel them. This doesn't seem to be the case. Those who disagree are simply lumping everyone they disagree with into the big "racist" bag, claiming they are arguing in bad faith, dismissing the conversation, and then calling on others to censor it outright. I see no evidence that contra-theocracy dialogue is being tolerated at all. > "Cancel culture" and deplatforming are important tools to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication. I find this argument to be odd. Who do we allege we are protecting when we deplatform someone? Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments? Are we not adults? What gives you the right to decide for others what they should and should not see/read? This is the fundamental illogic of censorship. No one should have the right to tell others what to see or read.
- munificent 6y ago
  > Who do we allege we are protecting when we deplatform someone? Those harmed by the actions that follow from the beliefs of the deplatformed person. For example, if you de-platform who says that all green-eyed people should be thrown in the ocean to drown, you do so to protect green-eyed people. > Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments? The argument that green-eyed people should be thrown in the ocean is neither false nor true. It is an ought claim, not an is claim. The intent is not to protect people from the argument, it's to protect people that would be harmed if others believed the argument.
  - mrfredward 6y ago
    I think it's worth looking at how deplatforming happens here. Whether it is someone being fired or a tweet deleted or a community banned, the "cancellation" is almost always done by a company. Companies operate more like amoral optimization functions than they do moral beings. In this case, the incentive driving them is bad press...companies are terrified of being on the wrong end of a media cycle. The driver of bad press, in an era where tweets are constantly used as primary sources in news articles, is social media. The result of all this is that speech in society is now partially governed by twitter outrage. There is some benefit to this, as the loudest voices on twitter are willing to stand up to power (as opposed to letting the elites determine who should be fired for speaking out on their own), but it's also horrifying to think that twitter anger is, to a growing degree, governing speech in our society and setting the standard for right and wrong. Twitter mobs are incapable of handling nuance, and yet productive policy discussions can't happen without it. That's a pretty serious problem.
luckylion 6y ago
The obvious problem with this approach is that it's essentially "I'm on the good side, and I need to protect the platform/society/world from the bad people who are not arguing in good faith. I can judge this, and so when I censor this, I'm not doing this because I don't like hearing opposing view points ... I just don't like hearing wrong, evil people who make arguments to trick me and the audience".... which pretty much looks exactly the same from any angle, in any group and you just need to replace a word or two in the justification for the cleansing. It's really a long winded version "there is no orthodoxy, it's just that there are the right things and the wrong things, and the things I say are right and should we really spend time listening to things that are obviously wrong?", which is a good way to make the point of the essay, ironically.
Sniffnoy 6y ago
The way to handle argumentation that you suspect of bad faith is to handle both cases. You say "If you mean ... then ... but if you mean ... then ...". This doesn't apply to everything. But it certainly applies to just-asking-questions. You give both the actual correct answer; and you also say something maybe rude, but behind a conditional.
- munificent 6y ago
  I think you're underestimating the savvy of bad faith participants. Even doing that now lets them take control of the narrative and forces you to do twice the work to respond to their poorly worded message. That's time and effort you're not spending moving the conversation in a more productive direction.
  - Sniffnoy 6y ago
    This is all true, but the thing to note is that actual bad-faith participants are not so common. What is common is people perceiving bad faith where there is none; I'm trying to give them a way to handle that without turning conversations into disasters. :)
    - munificent 6y ago
      > This is all true, but the thing to note is that actual bad-faith participants are not so common. One of the unnerving things about the world today is that we really don't know how common bad-faith participation is in online spaces. We do know that state-sponsored and corporate-sponsored trolling and astroturfing happens. We can infer that those organizations wouldn't spend money on that if they didn't more than recoup their investment. That implies that there is enough bad-faith participation to affect real-world outcomes. But we really don't know how much. It's even hard to draw the line between bad-faith actors and good-faith ones. If a concerted trolling campaign persuades some to genuinely change their belief and then that person goes on to parrot those beliefs, are they acting in good faith or bad? It's also important to remember that the blast radius of even a single bad-faith actor is quite large. It doesn't take much malice to harm an entire community.

_bxg1 6y ago

> "Cancel culture" [is an important tool] to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication I would say it's more like a social cytokine storm. If distrust in general is an immune-system, we're reaching a point of autoimmune disease. But I do think deplatforming is an important tool. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, it's more like antibiotics. It reduces inflammation instead of increasing it, and while some non-destructive entities may get caught up in it, they're generally nonessential, it's generally a small portion, and they'll recover.

santoshalper 6y ago
That's a very interesting analogy.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  I've used this analogy in my head between bodily inflammation and social unrest for a long time. It's been very useful. And it explains some contradicting viewpoints that different people have on, say, riots. If social unrest is inflammation then it's easy to see how it's neither good nor bad without context. It incurs a cost, but in many cases that cost is worth the change that it creates. But not always. A fever can help kill an infection, but it can also kill or otherwise damage the host if it goes too far.
ajhurliman 6y ago
If we're using an autoimmune disease as the metaphor, may I suggest steroids as the analog to deplatforming instead of antibiotics?
- _bxg1 6y ago
  But steroids only decrease the inflammation, they don't combat the original problem. If the inflammation is there because of a real pathogen, steroids are dangerous. Antibiotics decrease inflammation by tackling the original problem without a need to also increase inflammation. (It is at this point I'd like to point out that I don't have a medical background and may be going out of my depth for the sake of analogy :P)
  - lliamander 6y ago
    Steroids are a typical treatment option for auto-immune conditions. The steroid Dexamethasone has proven effective at decreasing the mortality rate among COVID-19 patients who experience a cytokine storm leading to severe respiratory illness. Sure you may want to use antivirals/antibiotics alongside, but I don't know if it's always necessary. I don't have a medical background but from what little I do understand, the cytokine storm is the result of a secondary immune response kicking into high-gear when the primary immune response fails to respond in a timely manner (perhaps due to poor health). Suppressing the secondary immune response enough to keep it from killing the organism allows the primary immune response to catch up and defeat the infection. In other words, clamping down on cancel culture will grant reasoned discourse a chance to convince people to abandon right-wing ideologies without imposing severe economic penalties. Of course, this assumes that right-wing ideology is a pathogen that is uniformly harmful to the body politic (which it may not be) but all metaphors have their limitations. EDIT: I should clarify that I see the deplatforming as the cytokine storm. I.e. an unhealthy immune response that is damaging to our social organism.

someone7x 6y ago

I had a lot to say, but you're right, Its optimal to avoid friendly fire. The final revision of my reply was "Cmd+A Delete" Good luck being reasonable out there.

CPLX 6y ago

This is a crucial point. Here is an absolutely excellent essay expanding thoughtfully on this line of discussion: https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/ https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/

Animats 6y ago
That has some good points. Remember the classic forum comment, "please don't feed the trolls". That worked until the trolls became too numerous. The latest idea comes from The Lincoln Project, which is funded by a group of anti-Trump Republicans. They read the Sun Tzu quote, "If your opponent is of choleric temper, irritate him." So they make very strong anti-Trump ads and pay to run them on Fox News during shows Trump is known to watch.[1] They're deliberately trolling Trump. The goal is to make Trump lose it (which he has, on Twitter) and make it safe for Republican politicians to move away from Trump (which is happening). This is boss level trolling. [1] https://youtu.be/bk6d4TgO2NY https://youtu.be/bk6d4TgO2NY
NoodleIncident 6y ago
> There’s a term for this sort of bad-faith argument: it’s called the justification-suppression model. The theory is that bigots refrain from directly defending their own bigotry but get hugely riled up justifying the abstract right to express bigotry. I doubt I'll remember it, but I was searching for some term to describe why this essay immediately set off alarm bells. I probably don't know enough about PG to know if he's really writing this essay in such explicit bad faith, but it certainly activated some neurons in my internet-trained mental spam filter. Now I have a name for that pattern

koheripbal 6y ago

> When both parties believe their position is true and is good for the world, and their arguments for it are genuine, then I think it slows progress to cancel them. This doesn't seem to be the case. Those who disagree are simply lumping everyone they disagree with into the big "racist" bag, claiming they are arguing in bad faith, dismissing the conversation, and then calling on others to censor it outright. I see no evidence that contra-theocracy dialogue is being tolerated at all. > "Cancel culture" and deplatforming are important tools to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication. I find this argument to be odd. Who do we allege we are protecting when we deplatform someone? Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments? Are we not adults? What gives you the right to decide for others what they should and should not see/read? This is the fundamental illogic of censorship. No one should have the right to tell others what to see or read.

munificent 6y ago
> Who do we allege we are protecting when we deplatform someone? Those harmed by the actions that follow from the beliefs of the deplatformed person. For example, if you de-platform who says that all green-eyed people should be thrown in the ocean to drown, you do so to protect green-eyed people. > Are we protecting ourselves from false arguments? The argument that green-eyed people should be thrown in the ocean is neither false nor true. It is an ought claim, not an is claim. The intent is not to protect people from the argument, it's to protect people that would be harmed if others believed the argument.
- mrfredward 6y ago
  I think it's worth looking at how deplatforming happens here. Whether it is someone being fired or a tweet deleted or a community banned, the "cancellation" is almost always done by a company. Companies operate more like amoral optimization functions than they do moral beings. In this case, the incentive driving them is bad press...companies are terrified of being on the wrong end of a media cycle. The driver of bad press, in an era where tweets are constantly used as primary sources in news articles, is social media. The result of all this is that speech in society is now partially governed by twitter outrage. There is some benefit to this, as the loudest voices on twitter are willing to stand up to power (as opposed to letting the elites determine who should be fired for speaking out on their own), but it's also horrifying to think that twitter anger is, to a growing degree, governing speech in our society and setting the standard for right and wrong. Twitter mobs are incapable of handling nuance, and yet productive policy discussions can't happen without it. That's a pretty serious problem.

luckylion 6y ago

The obvious problem with this approach is that it's essentially "I'm on the good side, and I need to protect the platform/society/world from the bad people who are not arguing in good faith. I can judge this, and so when I censor this, I'm not doing this because I don't like hearing opposing view points ... I just don't like hearing wrong, evil people who make arguments to trick me and the audience".... which pretty much looks exactly the same from any angle, in any group and you just need to replace a word or two in the justification for the cleansing. It's really a long winded version "there is no orthodoxy, it's just that there are the right things and the wrong things, and the things I say are right and should we really spend time listening to things that are obviously wrong?", which is a good way to make the point of the essay, ironically.

Sniffnoy 6y ago

The way to handle argumentation that you suspect of bad faith is to handle both cases. You say "If you mean ... then ... but if you mean ... then ...". This doesn't apply to everything. But it certainly applies to just-asking-questions. You give both the actual correct answer; and you also say something maybe rude, but behind a conditional.

munificent 6y ago
I think you're underestimating the savvy of bad faith participants. Even doing that now lets them take control of the narrative and forces you to do twice the work to respond to their poorly worded message. That's time and effort you're not spending moving the conversation in a more productive direction.
- Sniffnoy 6y ago
  This is all true, but the thing to note is that actual bad-faith participants are not so common. What is common is people perceiving bad faith where there is none; I'm trying to give them a way to handle that without turning conversations into disasters. :)
  - munificent 6y ago
    > This is all true, but the thing to note is that actual bad-faith participants are not so common. One of the unnerving things about the world today is that we really don't know how common bad-faith participation is in online spaces. We do know that state-sponsored and corporate-sponsored trolling and astroturfing happens. We can infer that those organizations wouldn't spend money on that if they didn't more than recoup their investment. That implies that there is enough bad-faith participation to affect real-world outcomes. But we really don't know how much. It's even hard to draw the line between bad-faith actors and good-faith ones. If a concerted trolling campaign persuades some to genuinely change their belief and then that person goes on to parrot those beliefs, are they acting in good faith or bad? It's also important to remember that the blast radius of even a single bad-faith actor is quite large. It doesn't take much malice to harm an entire community.