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It's really easy to not be "canceled", just be a good person. What genuinely OK opinion are people being canceled for?

• theshrike79 5y ago
  People change. Your "edgy" tweets and shitty jokes from when you were young and stupid can still haunt you in your adult life. Case in point: James Gunn ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gunn#Firing_from_Disney_and_reinstatement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gunn#Firing_from_Disney_... ) This is why I rarely interact on Twitter and I have a script that deletes all my tweets that are over X days old. If I say something truely insightful, I'll just make a blog post out of it.
  • tstrimple 5y ago
    > "Firing from Disney *and reinstatement*" Yep, he's super cancelled. Great example.
• thinkingemote 5y ago
  Define "good" and "ok" first. A good person who doesn't use Twitter (someone who might fix cars, or works on a fishing vessel for example) who is having this little discussion about what is "good" and "ok" might very easily use the wrong words and offend someone.
  • tayo42 5y ago
    Really? This is easy, don't hurt other people.
    • panzagl 5y ago
      You're literally talking down to someone right now- that's not hurting other people?
    • voakbasda 5y ago
      That’s not possible. People take offense at everything. Or they will tomorrow. That’s the real problem: the standards of “good” and “decent” shift from time to time. What is fine today may get you canceled tomorrow. Thus, it is not safe to put your opinions out there in any form that could come back to bite you. If you want to take that risk, fine. But do not pretend that it is safe.
      • tayo42 5y ago
        It really isn't changing that much though. Maybe if you think someone might be offended by what you say in 10 years, maybe don't say it now. It's probably offensive now
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
          Are there any of your own beliefs which you don't express because they might be considered offensive in the future?
          • tayo42 5y ago
            I don't think i hold offensive beliefs (controversial maybe, as we see here, but no ones getting their feelings hurt), if I did and learned about I'd change them. It seems easy to not be offensive though, what kind of beliefs are people having trouble with?
            • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
              There are some issues where it seems impossible to hold a non-offensive belief. You can't support abortion or oppose abortion or claim abortion is unimportant without genuinely hurting a lot of people's feelings. (I wouldn't deny that you can avoid being offensive by simply avoiding all controversial issues, and in some contexts that's a perfectly reasonable approach.)
    • recursive 5y ago
      You can't physically hurt people on twitter, as it's all information. So whether or not you hurt someone is (at least partly) dependent on how people react. That can be hard to predict.
    • thinkingemote 5y ago
      Now define "hurt". It's not easy as "hurt" is not objective, is relative to others and no longer connected to intention.
      • tayo42 5y ago
        This isn't some clover got you, if someone tell you your offended them then that's it, you offended them. You don't get to redefine it
        • tdrgabi 5y ago
          You offended me.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • mtizim 5y ago
          Your comment offends my intelligence, therefore you've hurt a person, therefore you're not a "good person" anymore. But you might not care about that. You might say that I'm arguing in bad faith, or that your words couldn't possibly have offended me. But you don't get to redefine it. Obviously, you might just not care that you've just offended me. That's what bad people do. You aren't a bad person, right? Could you please apologize?
        • cgriswald 5y ago
          That's an unreasonable standard. If I chose to see your use of the phrase 'clover got you' as some slur against Irish people and was offended, would you have offended me? This is an unfair question, not because it's not a reasonable one given your argument, but because if you say 'yes' I can't take you seriously. Of course, that's not really the issue. The issue is what the response is when people are offended. I can certainly modify my language and behavior to reduce the chances of offending someone. I can even apologize when I've accidentally put my foot in my mouth. Twitter lacks the tolerance and nuance for either of those scenarios, though. If something 'not ok' is said, what was intended or meant doesn't matter (and any nuanced is typically ignored). An apology isn't seen as an apology for a mistake, but as an admission of guilt of being a terrible person who doesn't deserve oxygen.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      It's definitely not sufficient, we've seen people being cancelled who did not do anything bad.
• nickstinemates 5y ago
  Who's the arbiter of an OK opinion?
• blockmarker 5y ago
  It's really easy to not be burned at the stake, just don't be a witch.
  • aksss 5y ago
    ha, beat me to it! :D
  • tayo42 5y ago
    Being canceled isn't even a real thing. It's just a phrase people use because they have to have consequences when they show their true selves. Some group of people don't agree with you? Show me an example of being canceled then
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • recursive 5y ago
      If you really think it's not a thing, here's an early cancellation. Pretty much everyone involved lost their jobs, and it was all over social media for a cycle. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-got-two-people-fired-and-led-to-ddos-attacks/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
      • shankr 5y ago
        My earliest memory of getting "cancelled" predates twitter where Dixie Chicks were "cancelled" by their own fans because they criticized the Iraq war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
        • cgriswald 5y ago
          The show Soap was (literally) canceled for positive representations of homosexuals by people complaining to employers, issuing death threats, and etc. https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/soap/ https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/soap/ > Though the show’s ratings were still good in season four, ABC cancelled the series because of continued pressure from the so-called “moral majority.” By the end of the series, Vlasic pickles was the only advertiser interested in advertising on the series. In They’ll Never Put That on the Air, executive producer Paul Junger Witt said, “We weren’t killed by a fearful network. The network had been incredibly supportive. We had been doing this long enough to understand that they were in a business, and they sat down and showed us — dollar for dollar — why they couldn’t afford to do it anymore.” The people who are part of cancel culture now are literally using the same scare tactics that were used to suppress and oppress homosexuals and other minority groups.
• aksss 5y ago
  just believe in our gods and you won't get burned at the stake, how hard is that, people? I mean really? /s
• causi 5y ago
  The problem is that you can have a not-ok opinion and still be a good person who has a positive effect on the world, but we have no tolerance for that. We demand public perfection.
• recursive 5y ago
  What's "good"? I think it's at least OK to suggest that covid vaccines are generally good, and most people who are eligible should get them. But it's a social media shit-storm. I'm not interested.
• colordrops 5y ago
  Got attacked by dozens of people and eventually a twitter account ban for suggesting that free-speech is important and Chappelle's latest special shouldn't be removed from Netflix.
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    If you got banned by Twitter, it was probably more than merely "suggesting" that free speech was important.
    • colordrops 5y ago
      No, this is exactly what happened. My tweet suggested nearly verbatim what I said above, and in response I got verbally abused and insulted by literally dozens of people from the trans community. They scrubbed through my tweet history, replying to old tweets and reporting anything they could. They reported a very old tweet where I promoted pacifism (I'm a pacifist), but it was sarcastic, stating that if we are gonna punch Nazis, we might as well punch mujahideen, ISIS, pro-lifers, Zionists, etc. They took advantage of the fact that sarcasm can be read both ways, and I was banned for promoting violence. Nevertheless I was cancelled due to my comments on free speech. Choose to believe it or not, that's your business, but this is exactly what happened.
      • AussieWog93 5y ago
        >Choose to believe it or not, that's your business, but this is exactly what happened. (I do believe you. By comment was in response to your original one, which lacked a lot of the context you just provided.)
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  I used to think this way. Saw too many legitimately-good people get brigaded to believe it anymore. There's enough pile-on mobs on Twitter now with enough disagreement on what's acceptable that you can trip over any of them.
  • tayo42 5y ago
    I wouldn't consider canceling and pile on mobs to be the same thing. I'm getting piled on here, I wouldn't say I'm getting canceled lol
• themaninthedark 5y ago
  Here is a good example: "You just used 'OK' in your comment, only white supremacists use 'OK'."
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    I mean, it's an example...
    • themaninthedark 5y ago
      I would ask you to think back to 2019 when a large majority on Twitter and from the mainstream media took a picture of some high school boys in Washington DC and brandied them about as the face of racism in America. "He has a racist smirk"
      • AussieWog93 5y ago
        Do you have a link to this? I Googled the quote at the end and just found this weirdo tweeting under the hashtag #RealNiggas4Romney.
        • themaninthedark 5y ago
          Here is a medium article that preserved a bunch of the tweets and a wiki article. I remember(maybe mis-) some reddit comments at the time about the kid's smirk. There was also a buch of comments about "punchable face" https://medium.com/@RevolutionaryId/twitter-democratizing-mobbing-high-profile-individuals-calling-for-violence-against-the-covington-ad18fae84840 https://medium.com/@RevolutionaryId/twitter-democratizing-mo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_confrontation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_... >In the wake of the publication of the longer video, CNN Business reporter Donie O'Sullivan described the twitter video uploaded by "2020fight" as the one that "helped frame the news cycle" of the previous days, and characterized the video as a "deliberate attempt" to mislead and "manipulate the public conversation on Twitter"—a violation of Twitter rules.[76] According to Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher, the tweet had been boosted by a network of anonymous Twitter accounts to amplify the story. To add to my point of 'OK': On January 22, shortly after tweeting it, comedian Kathy Griffin deleted a Twitter message in which she accused Covington basketball players making an OK gesture of "throwing up the new nazi sign".
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• namelessoracle 5y ago
  A good person does not use Twitter. If you use Twitter therefore you are a bad person and deserve to be cancelled.
• bena 5y ago
  While I don't think most of the people engaging with you are doing so completely in good faith, I don't think you understand the "fickleness" of the tweeting masses either. Just like you're getting downvotes and a lot of blowback for your opinion on this matter here, it's way worse on twitter. I've heard someone say that twitter is a game where the goal is not to be the main character of the day. And that kind of holds. Twitter is a bit geared for outrage. Small snippets with no context. Say you don't like The Batman and you could find yourself under a barrage of hate and vitriol. It's not a left thing or a right thing, they both have their mobs on twitter, in addition to all the other random mobs floating about. Hell, say something shitty about the wrong product will have that mob after you.
  • tayo42 5y ago
    are people using cancel to refer to the pile on mobs or what they consider unfair escalation in consequences? i mentioned in another post, im on the receiving end on a pile on I think, but i wouldn't say i'm being canceled. if you say internet communities have an issue with pile on mobs and harassment, id agree but i think that's different then canceling, which i don't think happens to the average person or they even need to worry about
    • bena 5y ago
      "Cancel" is a nebulous term, it means almost whatever the person using it wants to mean. Is banning cancelling? What about HN's rate limiting? Being harrassed off of a platform? All these things have been called "cancelling" by someone. And fair play by others. I think, in this context, we do have to consider the mobs as a part of "cancelling" because this is a thread about an article about people who don't engage in social media. Partly due to the fear of the amount of negative engagement.
• candlemas 5y ago
  Good people are boring.
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  >It's really easy to not be "canceled", just be a good person. I think you've really highlighted here why there's so much backlash against the latest wave of political correctness. To many people, myself included, a "good person" is someone who can be counted on to help a friend in need, goes out of their way to make the day of the people they interact with that little bit more special (this is something I need to work on), and works hard to provide for their family in whatever way they can. In my experience at least, a lot of the people who say the right words and hold the right opinions will flake on a friend in their hour of need, or avoid speaking with certain kinds of people lest they say the wrong thing. On the contrary, I can name several people who have dark senses of humour or right-wing beliefs, but will always go above and beyond to help out their community and the people they care about (yes, LGBT people and ethnic minorities too!). I'm not saying that PC people are worse than non-PC people (if anything, it's probably uncorrelated), but the fact that you've binned people into "good" and "bad" based on how PC their opinions are is just, at least in my opinion, completely out of step with the view of general society.