7 ms·

I identify pretty closely with one side. But certainly there are Outrage Machines on both sides, a network of media and personalities hyping up the latest calum

I identify pretty closely with one side. But certainly there are Outrage Machines on both sides, a network of media and personalities hyping up the latest calumny that the other side committed, for views and clicks. These machines can't slow down -- even if the other side has been quiet lately, all those people need something to do and talk about. They'll find something.

api 5y ago
One thing a lot of people miss is that there is a profit motive here. You can make money, sometimes a lot of money, by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. You can find examples of people doing this on all sides, especially at the extremes where outrage and other powerful negative emotions can most easily be stirred up. All the outrage over "cancel culture" is not about censorship. Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much. What the outrage is about is money. While you can still speak elsewhere or on your own web site, being kicked off the majors makes it hard to monetize that speech. Deplatforming really knocked the wind out of a burgeoning outrage-for-profit industry that had some influencers making millions by being controversy and outrage trolls on social media.
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
  Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech Since when? You're attempting to give default context to a word that has none. Somehow, api, I doubt that you'd be attempting that redefinition if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were silencing people and organizations of the Left.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    No need for the hypothetical — that happens regularly, and people on the left criticize them for it. They just don't often describe it as "censorship". Also, to add a bit of context: the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
    - myfavoritedog 5y ago
      that happens regularly It happens in a token way in infrequent and extreme circumstances. But there's nothing even remotely comparable to the fact that Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter, that numerous internet powers worked together to shut down Parler, that the NY Post was locked out of Twitter for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, etc. the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery Popularity despite censorship just goes to show how the operators of Facebook are in a different narrative bubble than a sizable portion of their users. The notion that Ben Shapiro is far-right is just demagoguery of your own. Shapiro is a pretty benign and centrist-sympathetic conservative.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- heresie-dabord 5y ago
  > make money [...] by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. I think you have summarised both the nature of the US "information economy" and the state of political discourse in the US.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    When you want to know why Fox News does anything it does, just take a look at it's marketshare [1]. That's why. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ...
    - heresie-dabord 5y ago
      I think this is the real export behind the phenomenon of social memia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488950
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      I couldn't fully see what was posted in the article since it was wanting me to sign in or something, but I will assume that it was showing Fox had a larger market share than the alternatives. The reason why is NBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc are far more in competition with each other than Fox is with them. There are no major right of center competitors to Fox. This results in most right of center tv news watchers going with Fox. If there was only one left of center news channel Fox would closer to even with it.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Noos 5y ago
  Not really. Like a recent cancel attempt was Scott Cawthon, creator of the game series Five Nights at Freddy's. His crime? Voting for trump. No really, that's it. His games weren't political, and while he was open about who he was, he pretty much seemed to be inoffensive in practice. But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so, and as far as i know he was definitely not trolling them or being any form of negative person apart from supporting people they disliked. https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/nybyo1/my_response_and_maybe_last_post/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/nybyo1... I can understand not wanting to support legit offensive personalities, but increasingly it will be used as a weapon to enforce proper thought. You can't really get used to siccing the tiger of cancel culture on people, because it gets really tempting to sic it on anyone. Homophobia for example is a useful concept to make people think about why they disagree with legalizing gay marriage, or their attitudes about alternative sexualities. But it also can and has been used as a club to silence enemies or any disagreement whatsoever. You have to keep things civil and restrained because once unrestrained, like the tiger, it can be used on and go after anyone.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    > But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so The LGBT community was [1] and still are violently attacked for the mere act of existing. The idea that people's political beliefs, what, don't affect other people who live in that country? Is insane. Voting is a political act which affects others. If someone votes for a politician who gives cover and support to a group which - as an example - believes atheists are unfit to have the right to vote - then they are voting to strip the right to vote from me and I do not and will not support them or their personal enterprises. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
    - slumdev 5y ago
      Running a gay bar in New York City wasn't illegal in 1969. The Stonewall Inn was effectively a brothel with mafia protection, not a gay version of Cheers.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  Yep. Look at it this way: the same Republicans who whine about cancel culture went ahead and stripped one of their own, Liz Cheney, of her committee positions merely for the crime of daring to oppose Trump. That should tell you all you need to know about their hypocrisy. edit: I guess I hit a nerve, lol
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    Liz Cheney was in party leadership. She was unable to lead since she couldn't stop attacking her own party members. That is no different than firing somebody for failing to do their job which nobody would consider the same thing as canceling. Trying to end a career of people because they donated to some politician or said some inappropriate years ago (that very often was accepted back then) is completely different.
- prepend 5y ago
  I think that two things can be true at the same time: there are people piling on rage about “cancel culture” to gain following/money; cancel culture is real and a bad thing. Similar to how I think that racism is bad and systemic and must be eliminated and there are people who make a good living on raging about stuff. People building on a cause doesnt mean that the cause is bad.
- axguscbklp 5y ago
  Deplatforming targeted one side of the political tribal war much more than the other, it was not just some politically neutral phenomenon that only targeted grifters.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  >Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much. >cen·sor (sĕn′sər) >1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and *to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.* Being authorized by twitter to do it on twitter is still censorship. A simple non-political example: censor bars on nudity in media, literally labelled 'censored': https://duckduckgo.com/?q=censored&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=censored&iax=images&ia=images The mental gymnastics to excuse censorship by private entities when it's done to the "correct" targets or for the "correct" reasons is infuriating. Censorship is censorship. It doesn't matter who is doing it.
  - api 5y ago
    That makes censorship a basically meaningless concept, since any exercise of one's property rights to deny a soap box to anyone now counts as censorship. It makes access to privately owned media an entitlement. Censorship historically means the initiation of force by the state (in the form of bans, fines, arrests, etc.) to suppress speech. There's very little of that in the USA outside certain well known areas like child porn or explicit personal threats of violence.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Censorship historically means the initiation of force by the state No, it doesn't, it historically means action by any locus of institutional power to control speech (and, before and directly inspiring that, specifically the review by particular officials of the Roman Catholic Church in the process of pre-publication review of material to assure it was free of doctrinal error.)
mrfusion 5y ago
Have you considered not “identifying”? Just choose your opinions on issues a la carte. Or even don’t have an opinion on a bunch of issues. I started doing that and now I’m kind of politically homeless but oh well. I do notice that I can talk to either side now which is cool and no one automatically puts up their defenses.
- standardUser 5y ago
  It's challenging to not identify with one "side" when the other side loudly and proudly support policies that directly harm (or would harm) many people you care about. It's natural to band together when under attack, and in fact it's really difficult not to.
  - smt88 5y ago
    It's fine to feel this way while acknowledging that the "other team" has gotten at least one or two issues right. For example, lots of left-leaning Asian Americans agree that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional, which puts them at odds with many of the people they'll likely vote for.
    - standardUser 5y ago
      Sure, but I don't see a ton of legislation being passed by Republicans about affirmative action or other areas where there may be some agreement across the political spectrum. I do see dozens of bills being voted on to limit trans rights, to reduce voting access to marginalized groups, to restrict access to reproductive medical care. Their priorities are being shown very clearly by the laws they prioritize. It doesn't help much if we agree on a few things but they have no interest in pursuing policies in those areas of agreement and instead keep focusing on divisive issues over and over and over.
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    I can totally see that. I think the portrayal of the other side by the media is more of a parody of them than what they actually are. As a data point. I moved to a red state and have befriended quite a few republicans. Any of them with a busy life really don’t care about the current hot button issues the media says they do. They mainly seem to want the government to leave them alone. It’s hard to fault them for that. The only ones that care about the hot button issues are the ones that watch the news several hours a day.

api 5y ago

One thing a lot of people miss is that there is a profit motive here. You can make money, sometimes a lot of money, by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. You can find examples of people doing this on all sides, especially at the extremes where outrage and other powerful negative emotions can most easily be stirred up. All the outrage over "cancel culture" is not about censorship. Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much. What the outrage is about is money. While you can still speak elsewhere or on your own web site, being kicked off the majors makes it hard to monetize that speech. Deplatforming really knocked the wind out of a burgeoning outrage-for-profit industry that had some influencers making millions by being controversy and outrage trolls on social media.

myfavoritedog 5y ago
Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech Since when? You're attempting to give default context to a word that has none. Somehow, api, I doubt that you'd be attempting that redefinition if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were silencing people and organizations of the Left.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  No need for the hypothetical — that happens regularly, and people on the left criticize them for it. They just don't often describe it as "censorship". Also, to add a bit of context: the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
  - myfavoritedog 5y ago
    that happens regularly It happens in a token way in infrequent and extreme circumstances. But there's nothing even remotely comparable to the fact that Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter, that numerous internet powers worked together to shut down Parler, that the NY Post was locked out of Twitter for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, etc. the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery Popularity despite censorship just goes to show how the operators of Facebook are in a different narrative bubble than a sizable portion of their users. The notion that Ben Shapiro is far-right is just demagoguery of your own. Shapiro is a pretty benign and centrist-sympathetic conservative.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
heresie-dabord 5y ago
> make money [...] by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. I think you have summarised both the nature of the US "information economy" and the state of political discourse in the US.
- XorNot 5y ago
  When you want to know why Fox News does anything it does, just take a look at it's marketshare [1]. That's why. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ...
  - heresie-dabord 5y ago
    I think this is the real export behind the phenomenon of social memia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488950
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    I couldn't fully see what was posted in the article since it was wanting me to sign in or something, but I will assume that it was showing Fox had a larger market share than the alternatives. The reason why is NBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc are far more in competition with each other than Fox is with them. There are no major right of center competitors to Fox. This results in most right of center tv news watchers going with Fox. If there was only one left of center news channel Fox would closer to even with it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Noos 5y ago
Not really. Like a recent cancel attempt was Scott Cawthon, creator of the game series Five Nights at Freddy's. His crime? Voting for trump. No really, that's it. His games weren't political, and while he was open about who he was, he pretty much seemed to be inoffensive in practice. But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so, and as far as i know he was definitely not trolling them or being any form of negative person apart from supporting people they disliked. https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/nybyo1/my_response_and_maybe_last_post/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/nybyo1... I can understand not wanting to support legit offensive personalities, but increasingly it will be used as a weapon to enforce proper thought. You can't really get used to siccing the tiger of cancel culture on people, because it gets really tempting to sic it on anyone. Homophobia for example is a useful concept to make people think about why they disagree with legalizing gay marriage, or their attitudes about alternative sexualities. But it also can and has been used as a club to silence enemies or any disagreement whatsoever. You have to keep things civil and restrained because once unrestrained, like the tiger, it can be used on and go after anyone.
- XorNot 5y ago
  > But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so The LGBT community was [1] and still are violently attacked for the mere act of existing. The idea that people's political beliefs, what, don't affect other people who live in that country? Is insane. Voting is a political act which affects others. If someone votes for a politician who gives cover and support to a group which - as an example - believes atheists are unfit to have the right to vote - then they are voting to strip the right to vote from me and I do not and will not support them or their personal enterprises. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
  - slumdev 5y ago
    Running a gay bar in New York City wasn't illegal in 1969. The Stonewall Inn was effectively a brothel with mafia protection, not a gay version of Cheers.
enraged_camel 5y ago
Yep. Look at it this way: the same Republicans who whine about cancel culture went ahead and stripped one of their own, Liz Cheney, of her committee positions merely for the crime of daring to oppose Trump. That should tell you all you need to know about their hypocrisy. edit: I guess I hit a nerve, lol
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  Liz Cheney was in party leadership. She was unable to lead since she couldn't stop attacking her own party members. That is no different than firing somebody for failing to do their job which nobody would consider the same thing as canceling. Trying to end a career of people because they donated to some politician or said some inappropriate years ago (that very often was accepted back then) is completely different.
prepend 5y ago
I think that two things can be true at the same time: there are people piling on rage about “cancel culture” to gain following/money; cancel culture is real and a bad thing. Similar to how I think that racism is bad and systemic and must be eliminated and there are people who make a good living on raging about stuff. People building on a cause doesnt mean that the cause is bad.
axguscbklp 5y ago
Deplatforming targeted one side of the political tribal war much more than the other, it was not just some politically neutral phenomenon that only targeted grifters.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
>Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much. >cen·sor (sĕn′sər) >1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and *to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.* Being authorized by twitter to do it on twitter is still censorship. A simple non-political example: censor bars on nudity in media, literally labelled 'censored': https://duckduckgo.com/?q=censored&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=censored&iax=images&ia=images The mental gymnastics to excuse censorship by private entities when it's done to the "correct" targets or for the "correct" reasons is infuriating. Censorship is censorship. It doesn't matter who is doing it.
- api 5y ago
  That makes censorship a basically meaningless concept, since any exercise of one's property rights to deny a soap box to anyone now counts as censorship. It makes access to privately owned media an entitlement. Censorship historically means the initiation of force by the state (in the form of bans, fines, arrests, etc.) to suppress speech. There's very little of that in the USA outside certain well known areas like child porn or explicit personal threats of violence.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Censorship historically means the initiation of force by the state No, it doesn't, it historically means action by any locus of institutional power to control speech (and, before and directly inspiring that, specifically the review by particular officials of the Roman Catholic Church in the process of pre-publication review of material to assure it was free of doctrinal error.)

mrfusion 5y ago

Have you considered not “identifying”? Just choose your opinions on issues a la carte. Or even don’t have an opinion on a bunch of issues. I started doing that and now I’m kind of politically homeless but oh well. I do notice that I can talk to either side now which is cool and no one automatically puts up their defenses.

standardUser 5y ago
It's challenging to not identify with one "side" when the other side loudly and proudly support policies that directly harm (or would harm) many people you care about. It's natural to band together when under attack, and in fact it's really difficult not to.
- smt88 5y ago
  It's fine to feel this way while acknowledging that the "other team" has gotten at least one or two issues right. For example, lots of left-leaning Asian Americans agree that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional, which puts them at odds with many of the people they'll likely vote for.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    Sure, but I don't see a ton of legislation being passed by Republicans about affirmative action or other areas where there may be some agreement across the political spectrum. I do see dozens of bills being voted on to limit trans rights, to reduce voting access to marginalized groups, to restrict access to reproductive medical care. Their priorities are being shown very clearly by the laws they prioritize. It doesn't help much if we agree on a few things but they have no interest in pursuing policies in those areas of agreement and instead keep focusing on divisive issues over and over and over.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  I can totally see that. I think the portrayal of the other side by the media is more of a parody of them than what they actually are. As a data point. I moved to a red state and have befriended quite a few republicans. Any of them with a busy life really don’t care about the current hot button issues the media says they do. They mainly seem to want the government to leave them alone. It’s hard to fault them for that. The only ones that care about the hot button issues are the ones that watch the news several hours a day.