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>women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse I think you have to be careful with the vocabulary here. If a white man is being abused o
by qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
>women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse
I think you have to be careful with the vocabulary here. If a white man is being abused online, and he complains about it, his complaint may be rendered illegitimate on the basis of being "tone policing". He may be told that "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences". He may be told that the people abusing him are under no obligation to educate him and are doing "unpaid emotional labor".
"I call out bad behavior, they are trolling, you engage in targeted online harassment."
If anything, I've noticed that women and minorities seem to have more of a blank check to get really crass and say things like "go fuck yourself", etc. I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color". Gendered/racialized equivalents of "toxic masculinity" and "whiteness" aren't as widely employed.
(Agreed that social media can be terrible; I hope this initiative makes it better.)
- butt_hugger 6y agoHow did I know something like this would be the top comment?
- statstutor 6y agoI would take "go fuck yourself" to be a clear request for personal disengagement and, if that is as far as it goes, is crass/profane but not abusive (in the sense intended here).
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y agoIn the case I have in mind, the woman of color who said GFY initiated the interaction
- statstutor 6y agoThat seems unlikely.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y agohttps://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1346940524603858944 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1346940524603858944 She initiated the interaction by quote tweeting him
- statstutor 6y agoApologies, I thought you meant they initiated by saying "GFY".
- abadcwm 6y agoTrue, but it is mostly white men who engage in sexist and racist behavior online, at least in the predominantly US English parts of the internet. Perhaps related to the internet's heritage as a white man's space. Therefore it's mostly women and colored people who get targeted for this sort of abuse, being not men and not white.
- monksy 6y agoGot evidence for this? (I'm not calling you wrong here.. I'm just pointing out that it's very hard to correlate a user with a real identity.. there are a lot of people out there)
- abadcwm 6y agoNo, just vibes. But I know it's something many others have observed too - it's not like I'm inventing this out of nothing.
- hellomyguys 6y agoGo play any popular game with voice chat and say you're Black.
- api 6y agoA friend of mine got on a programming forum once and pretended to be female. The result was far cringier than I would have predicted.
- abadcwm 6y agoSimilarly, I remember seeing some pretty awful comments on HN threads regarding female programmers. Comment after comment shitting on their achievements, presumably from mediocre men who feel threatened by a successful woman in the field. Not just here either. It's an industry-wide problem.
- adjkant 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhG7SnDyUYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhG7SnDyUYQ
- jMyles 6y agoIf you were an alien visiting our planet and getting a snapshot of our culture, I can totally understand your take. It's very real and mirrors my experience also. However, you aren't. There's a history here that you seem to be ignoring. > I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color" Wowza. Has it occurred to you that centuries of colonization and slavery have rendered marginalized groups in such a way as to be viewed with mediocrity as a default? And territorial, warmongering, profiteering people (among whom, white men have become most wealthy and "successful") are rendered as great?
- adjkant 6y agoIt seems the core issue of your anecdotal case is that the people you see as being victims here are seen as harassers / antagonists by others. So the direction then goes from "don't harass" to "don't engage with people targeting you". I'm disappointed but unsurprised that this becomes the focus of the conversation rather than the core purpose, which is to prevent harassment generally. Unless you're coming with stats (not anecdotes that are potentially actually about harassers) that show that the claims in the article about who is most targeted for abuse, you're both creating division and distracting from those who are in need of more help, for what?
- cobraetor 6y ago"Tone policing" was the rationale behind Linux Foundation kicking out of Charles Max Wood from their conference. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484347
- hellomyguys 6y agoWhy do you think they've been given that blank check? Doesn't have anything to do with hundreds of years of oppression?
- leesalminen 6y agoTwo wrongs don’t make a right and all that...
- hellomyguys 6y agoI prefer to subscribe to "punching up vs down..." as my simplified take
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y agoMy great-grandparent harmed your great-grandparent, and now I am convicted in response? At the very least this sentence would appear to violate statute of limitations :-) But the bigger problem is that the punishment has no deterrent value--there is no way for me to change my great-grandparent's behavior. And it is straightforwardly unjust to convict me for a crime I didn't commit. I think this is actually a pretty racist idea--that because you share genes with someone, you are partially responsible for crimes they've committed. It would be like if someone in a small town committed a crime, and the town responded by having the police begin always harassing every member of the criminal's race.
- hellomyguys 6y agoYour comment ignores the fact that oppression based on gender and race still exists today.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y agoAlright... so my 3rd cousin twice removed did something to oppress your 4th cousin once removed, and that's your justification for abusing me on the basis of my gender/race? What is being accomplished here?
- bmarquez 6y ago> I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color" I've been called an "entitled white dude" even on Hacker News (for not wanting my face to be used by Airbnb "anti-racist" algorithms.) The funny thing is, I'm not even white. I just like privacy. It opened my eyes to tone policing.
- pessimizer 6y agoI've been followed around forums by stalkers that were afraid I'd go a day without being called an ape. The fixation of a some members of a particular demographic on minorities and women can be completely overwhelming online. It's not unique, try being Armenian, Kurdish, or Palestinian on twitter. It's intense, and you're outnumbered.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y agoFair enough! Sorry to hear about that.