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The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and e

by SamBam 5y ago

The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread. Now I look back and see I was another participant in the mob. Look, the author described in the post absolutely did herself no favors. Her book may have been great, but the way she interacted with people on social media was absolutely not. But being the 10,000th person to tell her that is never necessary. That's just wanting to join a mob, because mobs are fun, because you're all justified in this act together. Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified. A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.

elliekelly 5y ago
> Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? This is how I felt yesterday reading the repl.it thread.
- mavsman 5y ago
  If you don't feel like it will perpetuate it, what thread are you talking about?
  - Andrex 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
throwkeep 5y ago
Twitter is a particularly well refined mob machine. No room for nuance, distribution at the speed of light directly into your feed and/or Trending, participants immediately rewarded for generating and spreading outrage. I get that a lot of this was unintentional, but the dynamic has now been known for a decade and has only gotten worse. Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? Instead spending their time creating tools and methods to censor non-mob participants? (e.g. those who were exploring the lab leak hypothesis) Why isn't the mob a top priority?
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff. Angry, pissed off, outraged users are, from the perspective of social media companies, the best users. They refresh constantly (so more ad views), they come back constantly, and if they've gone away for too long, you can just figure out what's likely to piss them off the most, send them a notification, and they're right back into the ad delivery mill, engaged and outraged. And all that means more money for the company. Which is their interest. YouTube's guiding goal (at least some years back, as I heard it) was to increase hours watched. Period. Hours watched was the metric they optimized for, above all else. And it showed in the various recommendations that looked very broken from the outside world, but those tended to add hours watched. I don't think the algorithms were nearly smart enough to know that they were recommending some conspiracy theorist gateway video, or extreme political content, or such. They simply knew, "If we get people to watch this video, they will then spend a lot more time on YouTube." So, the more people that watch that video one way or another, the more hours watched, problem improved! It's very "paperclip maximizer" seeming sort of algorithm. Given that it's been known for years how to "drive your users nuts to keep them coming back" and social media companies have refined this to near perfection (it's Vegas in your pocket, without any of the regulations and rules Vegas casinos have to abide by), I'm in favor of some regulation on this sort of stuff, but I'm not at all sure it will actually matter. :/
  - 1234letshaveatw 5y ago
    "So what if our AI is becoming self-aware and making questionable decisions? Or job is to win government contracts" - skynet employee, August 3rd, 1997 :)
dataviz1000 5y ago
Remember Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" from secondary school? [0] Fundamentally these coordinated social media attacks are witch hunts. When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist' as she strongly supported due process defending a male professor being accused of sexually impropriety is the moment when these modern witch hunts went too far. More so than when Reddit misidentified the Boston Bomber or other instances. The moment they attacked Margret Atwood they attacked the very idea of due process which she strongly warned women about in her book "The Handmaid's Tale". Nonetheless, it is part of the human condition how we organize into social structures whether being a small town in New England or a capitalist economy to join groups attacking someone else since it prevents the focus of the attack being on ourselves. The only way out is through due process and supporting it even for the worst of the worst. (EDIT: Weak downvoting this comment without responding with a counter comment.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible
- 0x737368 5y ago
  I can't speak for the people who downvoted you, but I'll bet you a USB stick that the reason you got downvoted is because of "When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist'". Some people have reached a point where not even disagreeing with them, but simply mentioning someone they don't like in a positive light or mentioning someone they do like in a negative light, no matter how factual the statement is, will get you downvoted. They can't even articulate it, hence why you didn't get any responses - they just got used to being in their echo chamber where their opinions are always echoed and fervently applauded. After a while, whatever the echo chamber promulgates becomes that person's ground reality. As soon as they see something that disagrees with this reality - it is an offense to them and their whole worldivew, but they can't argue for their beholden view or against the offending view, so they have an emotional outburst. I've met a few people who proclaimed themselves to be very politically educated individuals, but as soon as it came to a debate they'd get frustrated by failing to answer basic questions about their opinions and excuse themselves. No wonder, who wants their whole paradigm to be crashed in one evening?
  - 5y ago
dionidium 5y ago
When the mob can literally set you on fire, then you should be worried about the mob, but, crucially, the mob on social media can't actually hurt you; they can only convince other people to hurt you. It's those other people, the people who hold positions of responsibility and authority -- your boss, your dean, anybody with the power to hire or fire you -- who are really responsible here. The shame of cancel culture is entirely theirs.
- abnry 5y ago
  And what drives these decision makers to act so shamefully is the reputational economy. Yes, sometimes a boycott will damage the bottom line, but most often it is the damage to one's status within the wider society that is being protected by the decision to fire someone. If you personally want to avoid this, reduce your dependence on reputation.
  - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
    Reputation is also often the cause for corporations venturing into "anti-racism," and censorship territory. When the telecoms were buying up media companies and film/tv studios, suddenly all of their most expensive assets (actors & personalities) started falling out due to cancel culture. Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Rosanne Barr, etc., must have driven the execs at AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon completely nuts. The highest paid CEO used to be CBS's, until they also got him on cancel culture. If CBS's most profitable asset, Judge Judy, were a man, she'd already have been cancelled a decade ago. (She's fought with CBS execs over her exorbitant contract for over a decade now.)
- SamBam 5y ago
  No. 10,000 voices braying your name as an evil-doer itself does harm. This isn't a kid being told on a playground that "words will never hurt you," that's always been a lie. Here is a case [1] of a man being falsely doxxed for the assault on two kids on a bike path last summer. The voices calling for him to be brought to justice, calling him a racist, etc, numbered in the tens of thousands. The retractions from people who realized they had made a mistake for calling for the blood of the wrong person numbered in the tens. Beyond the psychological damage this may have caused, will this man ever feel safe submitting a resume for a job again? When he does so, does he need to attach a note saying "When you Google my name, all those mentions of me being a racist are false." If he does that, does he already subconsciously look distasteful in the recruiter's eyes? 1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get-doxed-for-taking-a-bike-ride.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get...
ourmandave 5y ago
The twitter mob can come for you too. If you're mis-identified and doxxed then your life can be in danger. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get-doxed-for-taking-a-bike-ride.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get... And the consequences for the accuser are nothing.
- throwkeep 5y ago
  > And the consequences for the accuser are nothing. That's a great point. Accusers are not only incentivized to whip up a mob, but have virtually no downside. No skin in the game if they're wrong. That asymmetry needs to be resolved somehow.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  I think there should be a bit less focus on the 'the mob' and a bit more on the platform. “We are seeking the public’s assistance in identifying the below individual in reference to an assault that took place this morning on the Capital Crescent trail. Please contact Det. Lopez with any information,” read a tweet sent June 2 from the department and shared more than 55,000 times. But the Park Police had made an error. “Correction, the incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020,” they wrote in a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares. [...] On Twitter, Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh [...] had asked all of Twitter for help finding the man in the video. “If anyone can identify this man, please let me know,” he said, and nearly 50,000 people retweeted him. [...] He sent a tweet confirming that there was a suspect and “it is not Mr. Weinberg.” (228 retweets.) Relying on people to amplify accuracy and context is doomed to failure because people react to sensation. You show a video of a person doing something awful, naturally there will be a big reaction. The follow up tweet specifying some overlooked but important detail is simply not emotionally activating the same way. However, it is within Twitter's capability to automatically propagate that additional context/correction to everyone who interacted with the original tweet. Indeed, it's within Twitter's capability to force them to look at the update and not proceed with using Twitter until they've acknowledged it. Another approach could be that when a public figure (especially an authority figure) makes a mistake like this, they should be billed for the cost of advertising the correction to an equivalently large audience.
slightwinder 5y ago
> But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? Size is power, and size comes from Engagment. Each voice gives more attention to the problem and prevents it from sinking in the ocean of meaninglessness of twitter. At least for the moment the topic is trending. > I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread. And now you are here; is this not the same? > Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified. Who says they are not? It's just one little voice. One of many, but still one. Whether it's justified is more a matter of perspective. In the end it's just people talking and gossiping, they have no real power. But people are giving them power by listening to them. But it's also questionable how many are doing this. At the end the mob is still a single voice of many, maybe moving something, maybe not. > A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt. Ok, that's definitly a different dimension than Twitter. That's not your typical cybermob. Though, there is also this insanity spreading from Virtual Places to real world. But this is not limited to Twitter. Reddit has their dark history in that area, as also facebook, discord, even ancient IRC and usenet had this crap.
- SamBam 5y ago
  > And now you are here; is this not the same? ...no, because I'm not participating in a mob here?
  - cindarin 5y ago
    It's not the actions that we need to address, just the number of people doing them?
    - SamBam 5y ago
      I'm confused how this comment relates in any way to the question of whether my existing on Hacker News is the "same thing" as participating in an online mob against a person.
cableshaft 5y ago
Also, if you end up having to announce your take on every "bad" thing that happens, your feed becomes nothing but commentary on the bad takes, almost always identical to everyone else, and you dillute or lose what makes you interesting in the process. I've seen this in my own feed. Any time some "bad" person is exposed, I'm almost guaranteed to scroll past 30 almost identical takes on it by the same 30 people on my friends list. I click them, and 80% of their feed is just their takes on the daily outrage du jour. I don't really know who they actually are as people anymore, unless this is the entirety of their being now. So now as a general rule I don't post anything about current events on social media, and stick with things actually about myself. I might make a comment on someone else's post sometimes, but not post about it myself. I will probably make an exception here or there about climate change, because in my opinion that subject is being way too glossed over by society as a whole and is a much larger and more imminent threat than "this person did a bad thing and we must shun them now".
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  That’s why I quit Twitter. I use to have four topic-specific accounts. However, it eventually ended up that I was seeing the same outrage du jour on all four and that’s when it was time for me to leave.
- jrmg 5y ago
  The meme of "if you don't speak up, you're complicit" is part of this. I appreciate the sentiment, but there are just too many (terrible!) inequities in the world to live by this and not have it be a full time preoccupation.
  - parafactual 5y ago
    Also, is social media really the best way to take action against terrible inequity? I would think if one believes the uninvolved are complicit, they would also look for more effective methods than saying something is bad on Twitter.
    - thewakalix 5y ago
ph2082 5y ago
Most of trends have less than 10k comments/likes/.... Etc. That means only 0.00014 percent people of the planet. Rest don't know or don't care. That realisation made me not to bother about latest outrage. Whole Twitter experience become so much better when you only keep to people you like. Don't think twice to unfollow someone.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Listening to only people you like sounds like a privilege to me. I bet, a few years down the road Twitter will stuff the feed of such purists with a more diverse set of viewpoints.
textgel 5y ago
Meh; the situation was pointed out to people like you at the time. All the drawing of parallels with events in history, all the calls for reason and rationality and all the highlighting of holes in logic didn't do anything to stop the problem. Your words now will make as much impact on the people you hope it will as they would have had at the time on you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rdudekul 5y ago
"the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire". A single person brave enough to think against crowds could have STOPped this atrocity from happening. Reminds me of how Mahatma Gandhi was attacked in South Africa by a group of predominantly white-males, was literally being beaten to death, when just one white-female STOPped this atrocity from happening (source: Gandhi the Man - https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Man-Changed-Himself-Change/dp/1586380559 https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Man-Changed-Himself-Change/dp/...). Most of us are too afraid to stop atrocities (Ex: Recently Muslims getting killed in Delhi while Modi was adulating Trump). But a few who do could may help save humanity.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  No, not necessarily. A single person can sometimes make a difference but in real life such people are frequently just pushed aside. It is more a matter of luck than morality about where they happen to be in the crowd, whether they can make themselves heard at a critical moment and so on. I mean sure, if you see an injustice taking place in front of you, you should certainly attempt to intervene. But there is absolutely not guarantee your intervention will be effective.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
HANGMAN: Now, you're wanted for murder. For the sake of my analogy, let's just assume that you did it. Now, John Ruth wants to take you back to Red Rock to stand trial for murder. And if you're found guilty, the people of Red Rock will hang you in the town square. And, as the hangman, I will perform the execution. And if all those things end up taking place, that's what civilized society calls justice. However, if the relatives and the loved ones of the person you murdered were outside that door right now, and after busting down that door, they drug you out into the snow and hung you up by the neck, that would be frontier justice. Now, the good part about frontier justice is it's very thirst-quenching. The bad part is it's apt to be wrong as right. Well, not in your case. In your case, you'd have it coming. But other people, maybe not so much. OSWALDO: But ultimately, what's the real difference between the two? HANGMAN: The real difference is me. The hangman. To me, it doesn't matter what you did. When I hang you, I'll get no satisfaction from your death. It's my job. I hang you in Red Rock. I move on to the next town. I hang someone else there. The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man. And that dispassion is the very essence of justice. For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice.
- unholythree 5y ago
  I’ve noticed a unfortunate conflation of word lynching with racism motivated homocide lately. Even from authorities (newspapers, lawyers, some state ACLU) that have to know they aren’t always the same. I think the nuance of these specific injustices is important because the solutions are different. A killing could even be lawful but racist and therefor unjust, but that’s a distinct (albeit important) problem from mob violence or murder.
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Lone Star beer used to have images under their bottle caps as puns[1]. One of them used an image of a noose as part of the puzzle, which was completely unrelated to race, or death - it was simply using the word as a similar word to "news". Someone went apeshit on Twitter[2], and now all the puns are gone while Lone Star reviews them for sensitivity. I'm politically liberal, and I'm fucking ashamed of the fact that this kind of stupid behavior is associated with liberal politics. 1. https://lonestarbottlecaps.com https://lonestarbottlecaps.com 2. https://www.mysanantonio.com/food/bars-drinks/article/what-happened-lone-star-bottle-caps-puzzle-missing-16210414.php https://www.mysanantonio.com/food/bars-drinks/article/what-h...
agumonkey 5y ago
There's a weird biological thing at play here. As if we have a reflex to clean what too many people agree on. But so many time it ends up being entirely wrong I really wonder why it's still at play. We kinda had to invent justice structures to avoid blunt reactions. Also who thinks internet focuses too much on endless debates and abnormal relations. Did we spend so much time arguing before ? I'm so jaded I just want sharing chitchat jokes and food and nothing more. And I kinda believe that it's a more balanced approach to society. But i'm kinda digressing (an proving the opposite of my point partly)
acituan 5y ago
> The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. There can be no mob without twitter's involvement. There are always two parts to social media; social media the people at scale and social media the recommendation engine with impulse driven features that actively rank orders and promotes what content meets what eyes. By definition internet brings the scale, i.e. the size. But size in itself does not create a mob. You could walk around in a crowded square and mumble all the controversial things to yourself; people will at most give a bad stare, but mostly ignore you, a mob will not form after you. It would take a shit-stirrer to actively salience the thing you said to the people in that crowd who would be most motivated to come after you. Twitter et al are the shit-stirrers that makes money every time they can make a person engage with a content, regardless of the thoughtfulness or the sentiment of the engagement.
jrm4 5y ago
But of course -- compared to what? Twitter sounds awful in a vacuum if described like this, and indeed it does have lots of problems. But, if we are going to have very huge and influential corporate sources of information, Twitter is MUCH more defensible than e.g. MSNBC/CNN/Fox, in that its significantly more "little d" democratic. The thousands of voices available there are far better than the tiny few coming from many other sources, and because the platform is generally "open" in that we can see what others post. I think Twitter is actually doing an excellent job, given the incredible difficulties involved with what it does, especially as compared to a Facebook, etc.
nszceta 5y ago
> Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. Ah, yes. Necklacing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing
- brailsafe 5y ago
  This is some liveleak shit I'm maybe glad I didn't see.
  - nszceta 5y ago
    Too graphic for LiveLeak. It would be on documentingreality instead. Also, from the wiki, in 1986, Winnie Mandela, then-wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, stated, "With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country", which was widely seen as an explicit endorsement of necklacing. Lovely.
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      It definitely wouldn't have been too graphic for liveleak a few years ago. There was plenty of cartel videos for example.

by SamBam 5y ago

elliekelly 5y ago

> Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? This is how I felt yesterday reading the repl.it thread.

mavsman 5y ago
If you don't feel like it will perpetuate it, what thread are you talking about?
- Andrex 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

throwkeep 5y ago

Twitter is a particularly well refined mob machine. No room for nuance, distribution at the speed of light directly into your feed and/or Trending, participants immediately rewarded for generating and spreading outrage. I get that a lot of this was unintentional, but the dynamic has now been known for a decade and has only gotten worse. Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? Instead spending their time creating tools and methods to censor non-mob participants? (e.g. those who were exploring the lab leak hypothesis) Why isn't the mob a top priority?

Syonyk 5y ago
> Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff. Angry, pissed off, outraged users are, from the perspective of social media companies, the best users. They refresh constantly (so more ad views), they come back constantly, and if they've gone away for too long, you can just figure out what's likely to piss them off the most, send them a notification, and they're right back into the ad delivery mill, engaged and outraged. And all that means more money for the company. Which is their interest. YouTube's guiding goal (at least some years back, as I heard it) was to increase hours watched. Period. Hours watched was the metric they optimized for, above all else. And it showed in the various recommendations that looked very broken from the outside world, but those tended to add hours watched. I don't think the algorithms were nearly smart enough to know that they were recommending some conspiracy theorist gateway video, or extreme political content, or such. They simply knew, "If we get people to watch this video, they will then spend a lot more time on YouTube." So, the more people that watch that video one way or another, the more hours watched, problem improved! It's very "paperclip maximizer" seeming sort of algorithm. Given that it's been known for years how to "drive your users nuts to keep them coming back" and social media companies have refined this to near perfection (it's Vegas in your pocket, without any of the regulations and rules Vegas casinos have to abide by), I'm in favor of some regulation on this sort of stuff, but I'm not at all sure it will actually matter. :/
- 1234letshaveatw 5y ago
  "So what if our AI is becoming self-aware and making questionable decisions? Or job is to win government contracts" - skynet employee, August 3rd, 1997 :)

dataviz1000 5y ago

Remember Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" from secondary school? [0] Fundamentally these coordinated social media attacks are witch hunts. When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist' as she strongly supported due process defending a male professor being accused of sexually impropriety is the moment when these modern witch hunts went too far. More so than when Reddit misidentified the Boston Bomber or other instances. The moment they attacked Margret Atwood they attacked the very idea of due process which she strongly warned women about in her book "The Handmaid's Tale". Nonetheless, it is part of the human condition how we organize into social structures whether being a small town in New England or a capitalist economy to join groups attacking someone else since it prevents the focus of the attack being on ourselves. The only way out is through due process and supporting it even for the worst of the worst. (EDIT: Weak downvoting this comment without responding with a counter comment.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible

0x737368 5y ago
I can't speak for the people who downvoted you, but I'll bet you a USB stick that the reason you got downvoted is because of "When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist'". Some people have reached a point where not even disagreeing with them, but simply mentioning someone they don't like in a positive light or mentioning someone they do like in a negative light, no matter how factual the statement is, will get you downvoted. They can't even articulate it, hence why you didn't get any responses - they just got used to being in their echo chamber where their opinions are always echoed and fervently applauded. After a while, whatever the echo chamber promulgates becomes that person's ground reality. As soon as they see something that disagrees with this reality - it is an offense to them and their whole worldivew, but they can't argue for their beholden view or against the offending view, so they have an emotional outburst. I've met a few people who proclaimed themselves to be very politically educated individuals, but as soon as it came to a debate they'd get frustrated by failing to answer basic questions about their opinions and excuse themselves. No wonder, who wants their whole paradigm to be crashed in one evening?
- 5y ago

dionidium 5y ago

When the mob can literally set you on fire, then you should be worried about the mob, but, crucially, the mob on social media can't actually hurt you; they can only convince other people to hurt you. It's those other people, the people who hold positions of responsibility and authority -- your boss, your dean, anybody with the power to hire or fire you -- who are really responsible here. The shame of cancel culture is entirely theirs.

abnry 5y ago
And what drives these decision makers to act so shamefully is the reputational economy. Yes, sometimes a boycott will damage the bottom line, but most often it is the damage to one's status within the wider society that is being protected by the decision to fire someone. If you personally want to avoid this, reduce your dependence on reputation.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
  Reputation is also often the cause for corporations venturing into "anti-racism," and censorship territory. When the telecoms were buying up media companies and film/tv studios, suddenly all of their most expensive assets (actors & personalities) started falling out due to cancel culture. Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Rosanne Barr, etc., must have driven the execs at AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon completely nuts. The highest paid CEO used to be CBS's, until they also got him on cancel culture. If CBS's most profitable asset, Judge Judy, were a man, she'd already have been cancelled a decade ago. (She's fought with CBS execs over her exorbitant contract for over a decade now.)
SamBam 5y ago
No. 10,000 voices braying your name as an evil-doer itself does harm. This isn't a kid being told on a playground that "words will never hurt you," that's always been a lie. Here is a case [1] of a man being falsely doxxed for the assault on two kids on a bike path last summer. The voices calling for him to be brought to justice, calling him a racist, etc, numbered in the tens of thousands. The retractions from people who realized they had made a mistake for calling for the blood of the wrong person numbered in the tens. Beyond the psychological damage this may have caused, will this man ever feel safe submitting a resume for a job again? When he does so, does he need to attach a note saying "When you Google my name, all those mentions of me being a racist are false." If he does that, does he already subconsciously look distasteful in the recruiter's eyes? 1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get-doxed-for-taking-a-bike-ride.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get...

ourmandave 5y ago

The twitter mob can come for you too. If you're mis-identified and doxxed then your life can be in danger. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get-doxed-for-taking-a-bike-ride.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get... And the consequences for the accuser are nothing.

throwkeep 5y ago
> And the consequences for the accuser are nothing. That's a great point. Accusers are not only incentivized to whip up a mob, but have virtually no downside. No skin in the game if they're wrong. That asymmetry needs to be resolved somehow.
anigbrowl 5y ago
I think there should be a bit less focus on the 'the mob' and a bit more on the platform. “We are seeking the public’s assistance in identifying the below individual in reference to an assault that took place this morning on the Capital Crescent trail. Please contact Det. Lopez with any information,” read a tweet sent June 2 from the department and shared more than 55,000 times. But the Park Police had made an error. “Correction, the incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020,” they wrote in a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares. [...] On Twitter, Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh [...] had asked all of Twitter for help finding the man in the video. “If anyone can identify this man, please let me know,” he said, and nearly 50,000 people retweeted him. [...] He sent a tweet confirming that there was a suspect and “it is not Mr. Weinberg.” (228 retweets.) Relying on people to amplify accuracy and context is doomed to failure because people react to sensation. You show a video of a person doing something awful, naturally there will be a big reaction. The follow up tweet specifying some overlooked but important detail is simply not emotionally activating the same way. However, it is within Twitter's capability to automatically propagate that additional context/correction to everyone who interacted with the original tweet. Indeed, it's within Twitter's capability to force them to look at the update and not proceed with using Twitter until they've acknowledged it. Another approach could be that when a public figure (especially an authority figure) makes a mistake like this, they should be billed for the cost of advertising the correction to an equivalently large audience.

slightwinder 5y ago

> But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? Size is power, and size comes from Engagment. Each voice gives more attention to the problem and prevents it from sinking in the ocean of meaninglessness of twitter. At least for the moment the topic is trending. > I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread. And now you are here; is this not the same? > Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified. Who says they are not? It's just one little voice. One of many, but still one. Whether it's justified is more a matter of perspective. In the end it's just people talking and gossiping, they have no real power. But people are giving them power by listening to them. But it's also questionable how many are doing this. At the end the mob is still a single voice of many, maybe moving something, maybe not. > A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt. Ok, that's definitly a different dimension than Twitter. That's not your typical cybermob. Though, there is also this insanity spreading from Virtual Places to real world. But this is not limited to Twitter. Reddit has their dark history in that area, as also facebook, discord, even ancient IRC and usenet had this crap.

SamBam 5y ago
> And now you are here; is this not the same? ...no, because I'm not participating in a mob here?
- cindarin 5y ago
  It's not the actions that we need to address, just the number of people doing them?
  - SamBam 5y ago
    I'm confused how this comment relates in any way to the question of whether my existing on Hacker News is the "same thing" as participating in an online mob against a person.

cableshaft 5y ago

Also, if you end up having to announce your take on every "bad" thing that happens, your feed becomes nothing but commentary on the bad takes, almost always identical to everyone else, and you dillute or lose what makes you interesting in the process. I've seen this in my own feed. Any time some "bad" person is exposed, I'm almost guaranteed to scroll past 30 almost identical takes on it by the same 30 people on my friends list. I click them, and 80% of their feed is just their takes on the daily outrage du jour. I don't really know who they actually are as people anymore, unless this is the entirety of their being now. So now as a general rule I don't post anything about current events on social media, and stick with things actually about myself. I might make a comment on someone else's post sometimes, but not post about it myself. I will probably make an exception here or there about climate change, because in my opinion that subject is being way too glossed over by society as a whole and is a much larger and more imminent threat than "this person did a bad thing and we must shun them now".

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
That’s why I quit Twitter. I use to have four topic-specific accounts. However, it eventually ended up that I was seeing the same outrage du jour on all four and that’s when it was time for me to leave.
jrmg 5y ago
The meme of "if you don't speak up, you're complicit" is part of this. I appreciate the sentiment, but there are just too many (terrible!) inequities in the world to live by this and not have it be a full time preoccupation.
- parafactual 5y ago
  Also, is social media really the best way to take action against terrible inequity? I would think if one believes the uninvolved are complicit, they would also look for more effective methods than saying something is bad on Twitter.
  - thewakalix 5y ago

ph2082 5y ago

Most of trends have less than 10k comments/likes/.... Etc. That means only 0.00014 percent people of the planet. Rest don't know or don't care. That realisation made me not to bother about latest outrage. Whole Twitter experience become so much better when you only keep to people you like. Don't think twice to unfollow someone.

akomtu 5y ago
Listening to only people you like sounds like a privilege to me. I bet, a few years down the road Twitter will stuff the feed of such purists with a more diverse set of viewpoints.

textgel 5y ago

Meh; the situation was pointed out to people like you at the time. All the drawing of parallels with events in history, all the calls for reason and rationality and all the highlighting of holes in logic didn't do anything to stop the problem. Your words now will make as much impact on the people you hope it will as they would have had at the time on you.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rdudekul 5y ago

"the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire". A single person brave enough to think against crowds could have STOPped this atrocity from happening. Reminds me of how Mahatma Gandhi was attacked in South Africa by a group of predominantly white-males, was literally being beaten to death, when just one white-female STOPped this atrocity from happening (source: Gandhi the Man - https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Man-Changed-Himself-Change/dp/1586380559 https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Man-Changed-Himself-Change/dp/...). Most of us are too afraid to stop atrocities (Ex: Recently Muslims getting killed in Delhi while Modi was adulating Trump). But a few who do could may help save humanity.

anigbrowl 5y ago
No, not necessarily. A single person can sometimes make a difference but in real life such people are frequently just pushed aside. It is more a matter of luck than morality about where they happen to be in the crowd, whether they can make themselves heard at a critical moment and so on. I mean sure, if you see an injustice taking place in front of you, you should certainly attempt to intervene. But there is absolutely not guarantee your intervention will be effective.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

HANGMAN: Now, you're wanted for murder. For the sake of my analogy, let's just assume that you did it. Now, John Ruth wants to take you back to Red Rock to stand trial for murder. And if you're found guilty, the people of Red Rock will hang you in the town square. And, as the hangman, I will perform the execution. And if all those things end up taking place, that's what civilized society calls justice. However, if the relatives and the loved ones of the person you murdered were outside that door right now, and after busting down that door, they drug you out into the snow and hung you up by the neck, that would be frontier justice. Now, the good part about frontier justice is it's very thirst-quenching. The bad part is it's apt to be wrong as right. Well, not in your case. In your case, you'd have it coming. But other people, maybe not so much. OSWALDO: But ultimately, what's the real difference between the two? HANGMAN: The real difference is me. The hangman. To me, it doesn't matter what you did. When I hang you, I'll get no satisfaction from your death. It's my job. I hang you in Red Rock. I move on to the next town. I hang someone else there. The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man. And that dispassion is the very essence of justice. For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice.

unholythree 5y ago
I’ve noticed a unfortunate conflation of word lynching with racism motivated homocide lately. Even from authorities (newspapers, lawyers, some state ACLU) that have to know they aren’t always the same. I think the nuance of these specific injustices is important because the solutions are different. A killing could even be lawful but racist and therefor unjust, but that’s a distinct (albeit important) problem from mob violence or murder.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  Lone Star beer used to have images under their bottle caps as puns[1]. One of them used an image of a noose as part of the puzzle, which was completely unrelated to race, or death - it was simply using the word as a similar word to "news". Someone went apeshit on Twitter[2], and now all the puns are gone while Lone Star reviews them for sensitivity. I'm politically liberal, and I'm fucking ashamed of the fact that this kind of stupid behavior is associated with liberal politics. 1. https://lonestarbottlecaps.com https://lonestarbottlecaps.com 2. https://www.mysanantonio.com/food/bars-drinks/article/what-happened-lone-star-bottle-caps-puzzle-missing-16210414.php https://www.mysanantonio.com/food/bars-drinks/article/what-h...

agumonkey 5y ago

There's a weird biological thing at play here. As if we have a reflex to clean what too many people agree on. But so many time it ends up being entirely wrong I really wonder why it's still at play. We kinda had to invent justice structures to avoid blunt reactions. Also who thinks internet focuses too much on endless debates and abnormal relations. Did we spend so much time arguing before ? I'm so jaded I just want sharing chitchat jokes and food and nothing more. And I kinda believe that it's a more balanced approach to society. But i'm kinda digressing (an proving the opposite of my point partly)

acituan 5y ago

> The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. There can be no mob without twitter's involvement. There are always two parts to social media; social media the people at scale and social media the recommendation engine with impulse driven features that actively rank orders and promotes what content meets what eyes. By definition internet brings the scale, i.e. the size. But size in itself does not create a mob. You could walk around in a crowded square and mumble all the controversial things to yourself; people will at most give a bad stare, but mostly ignore you, a mob will not form after you. It would take a shit-stirrer to actively salience the thing you said to the people in that crowd who would be most motivated to come after you. Twitter et al are the shit-stirrers that makes money every time they can make a person engage with a content, regardless of the thoughtfulness or the sentiment of the engagement.

jrm4 5y ago

But of course -- compared to what? Twitter sounds awful in a vacuum if described like this, and indeed it does have lots of problems. But, if we are going to have very huge and influential corporate sources of information, Twitter is MUCH more defensible than e.g. MSNBC/CNN/Fox, in that its significantly more "little d" democratic. The thousands of voices available there are far better than the tiny few coming from many other sources, and because the platform is generally "open" in that we can see what others post. I think Twitter is actually doing an excellent job, given the incredible difficulties involved with what it does, especially as compared to a Facebook, etc.

nszceta 5y ago

> Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. Ah, yes. Necklacing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing

brailsafe 5y ago
This is some liveleak shit I'm maybe glad I didn't see.
- nszceta 5y ago
  Too graphic for LiveLeak. It would be on documentingreality instead. Also, from the wiki, in 1986, Winnie Mandela, then-wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, stated, "With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country", which was widely seen as an explicit endorsement of necklacing. Lovely.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    It definitely wouldn't have been too graphic for liveleak a few years ago. There was plenty of cartel videos for example.