3 ms·

"I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era." A recipe for this era would simply be to list banned posts on Twitter. Which w

"I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era." A recipe for this era would simply be to list banned posts on Twitter. Which we can't peruse because they are banned, proving the essay's point. You can't say what you can't say, but you can speculate on recipes for discovery. It would be a valuable public service for someone to collect banned utterances and publish them to provide assistance to those of us who can't read the room any better than Sanskrit, so that we can avoid non-obvious heresies. But then they'd have to publish things that can't be said.

klyrs 5y ago
That would be simple if twitter was the only forum. There's things that can't be said on Parler and Gab, too: stuff that was a minority (soft-censored) opinion 10-20 years ago, stuff that's still illegal to say in authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, but approaches plurality in certain Western contexts.
jkubicek 5y ago
Browsing banned posts on Twitter wouldn't be effective at all. Twitter openly and freely allows content that most of us would find abhorrent (racism, nazism, violent threats) and regularly ban content that is misleading and dumb and dangerous but not offensive at all (covid is fake, vaccines are more dangerous than the disease, etc)
escapedmoose 5y ago
Do non-obvious heresies really get people banned/canceled? I can’t remember any examples of when I’ve seen something banned and didn’t think “that was uncalled-for and they definitely had it coming.” But I’m happy to be disproven. Does anyone have counter-examples? Situations where people got banned for truly innocuous things?
- philovivero 5y ago
  Yes. Person-A was in an online forum I was part of. Person-A said to Person-B, who was getting emotional in a discussion, to not act emotional, as it was a factual discussion. Person-B accused Person-A of being insensitive to women, as it turns out Person-B was female. Person-A did not know Person-B was female, as Person-A didn't use forum avatars, and the name Person-B used wasn't an obvious female name in Person-A's culture. In other words, Person-A could prove not knowing the gender of Person-B. This was not sufficient, and Person-A was banned from the forum. Ironically, Person-B was one of those loud "women and men are as competent as each other" sorts, which leads one to wonder why she needed special handling. The icing on the cake: Person-C defended Person-A, knowing that the gender of Person-B was not known at the time of the comment. Person-C was banned from the forum. The forum, by the way, was a professional forum of one of the largest tech companies. Everyone here would know the name of the company, and being banned from this forum essentially was a light way of getting onto a blacklist of several other tech companies. This actually eventually led to Person-C quitting technology entirely a year or two later.
  - escapedmoose 5y ago
    Not exactly the kind of platform I had in mind, but thanks for your example
commandlinefan 5y ago
> You can't say what you can't say And you can’t find out what you can’t say until you’re already being punished for having said it.

klyrs 5y ago

That would be simple if twitter was the only forum. There's things that can't be said on Parler and Gab, too: stuff that was a minority (soft-censored) opinion 10-20 years ago, stuff that's still illegal to say in authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, but approaches plurality in certain Western contexts.

jkubicek 5y ago

Browsing banned posts on Twitter wouldn't be effective at all. Twitter openly and freely allows content that most of us would find abhorrent (racism, nazism, violent threats) and regularly ban content that is misleading and dumb and dangerous but not offensive at all (covid is fake, vaccines are more dangerous than the disease, etc)

escapedmoose 5y ago

Do non-obvious heresies really get people banned/canceled? I can’t remember any examples of when I’ve seen something banned and didn’t think “that was uncalled-for and they definitely had it coming.” But I’m happy to be disproven. Does anyone have counter-examples? Situations where people got banned for truly innocuous things?

philovivero 5y ago
Yes. Person-A was in an online forum I was part of. Person-A said to Person-B, who was getting emotional in a discussion, to not act emotional, as it was a factual discussion. Person-B accused Person-A of being insensitive to women, as it turns out Person-B was female. Person-A did not know Person-B was female, as Person-A didn't use forum avatars, and the name Person-B used wasn't an obvious female name in Person-A's culture. In other words, Person-A could prove not knowing the gender of Person-B. This was not sufficient, and Person-A was banned from the forum. Ironically, Person-B was one of those loud "women and men are as competent as each other" sorts, which leads one to wonder why she needed special handling. The icing on the cake: Person-C defended Person-A, knowing that the gender of Person-B was not known at the time of the comment. Person-C was banned from the forum. The forum, by the way, was a professional forum of one of the largest tech companies. Everyone here would know the name of the company, and being banned from this forum essentially was a light way of getting onto a blacklist of several other tech companies. This actually eventually led to Person-C quitting technology entirely a year or two later.
- escapedmoose 5y ago
  Not exactly the kind of platform I had in mind, but thanks for your example

commandlinefan 5y ago

> You can't say what you can't say And you can’t find out what you can’t say until you’re already being punished for having said it.