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And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's

And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. Cancel culture exists. It hurts people, and it generates fear. Heresy exists and it is punished. Most people are self-censuring heavily now. I have experienced it myself in personal and professional contexts, and I am a moderate liberal. The OP mentions the fact that both sides always have truthful anecdotes to support their positions, and use it to attack the other. And that is what you've done here. Regardless of the details of cancel culture, how could you think a system like that could ever possibly work? When there is status to be gained from making an allegation then they'll be made, true or not. When allegation is enough to generate a mob, which affects your employer, your friends and family, you're entire life, this is a disproportionate punishment even if the allegation were true. But the accused rarely, if ever, even gets to speak in their own defense. It's called "social justice" but it's not a court, there are no rules, and the judge jury and executioner feels just fine if they never take a dispassionate look at facts. This system, applied to anything, is the opposite of justice. To believe otherwise is to reveal a deeply flawed understanding of how human beings respond to incentives. (Of course, one way to get around this problem is to redefine "guilt" to require only that the victim feel bad. But again, this incentivizes victims to feel bad, and somehow everyone forgets that people feel bad for all sorts of reasons, sometimes having nothing to do with the accused.)

slg 5y ago
Maybe this reply to my comment wasn't directed specifically at me, but I want to make it clear you are arguing against points I didn't make. I wasn't saying cancel culture doesn't exist. I wasn't saying people don't self-censor. I was instead saying that people who complain about self-censorship often don't understand the reason behind why some things are now objectionable. This results in them painting with too broad of a brush when they talk about that self-censorship and cancel culture. You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right.
- vimy 5y ago
  > You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right. Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right. Your whole position is based on the left being correct about everything. Take non-binary for example. I’ve looked into it, read the studies and my conclusion is that it’s pseudoscience that deserves to be mocked. But you probably think it’s real so if I joke about it you think I’m a bigot. From my perspective, joking about it is like when we used to mock people who believed in creationism. So what is doing it right if we both have two fundamentally different positions about a subject? ——- I’m not gonna get into a debate over non-binary. That’s not the point here, it’s an example.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    So were you against mocking people who believed in creationism? It sounds like you’re fine with shaming people when you’re in the ingroup, while at the same time you don’t want to be shamed for being part of an outgroup.
    - vimy 5y ago
      I mocked creationism too. You can mock my dying mother for all I care. I wouldn’t like it but believe in your right to say whatever you want.
      - jakelazaroff 5y ago
        You are free to mock non-binary people, though. And others are free to call you a bigot. Both of those comport with a right to say whatever you want.
  - KyleJune 5y ago
    It's not a democrat thing. Large parts of the population disagree on things. When people do things objectionable to republicans, they all try to cancel them too. Many republicans want to cancel gay people, trans people, immigrants, minorities, socialists, etc.
etchalon 5y ago
It's like all of society collectively forgot about "political correctness", and how the exact same complaints about "cancel culture" used to be called "political correctness" and behold society continued to function so well we completely forgot about the horrors of "political correctness" only to now worry about the horrors of "cancel culture!"
- lliamander 5y ago
  We didn't forget. It's the same problem, but morphed and magnified by social media.
  - etchalon 5y ago
    I'd challenge the idea it's been morphed or magnified. It's the exact same nonsense.
    - bandyaboot 5y ago
      And just like political correctness, the label of cancel culture is very selectively applied and is often agenda driven.
philliphaydon 5y ago
> And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. We used to debate things and have different views and opinions. Milo Ydbjsixjebdoaod, Ben Shapiro. But now instead of debating and proving people right or wrong. It’s just complain and protest the venue and people and get them knocked off Twitter YouTube Facebook etc. Climate change is another one. Anyone who wants to debate the topic is instantly cancelled as a denialist. Social media has ruined information to some extent.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  > Climate change is another one. Anyone who wants to debate the topic is instantly cancelled as a denialist. This is nothing to do with cancel culture or social media. It’s because big energy companies paid people to deny climate change. Unsurprisingly this makes people tetchy around those with let’s say heterodox views. The well has been poisoned for fair criticism and it was not poisoned by environmentalists.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    While I believe climate change is a real thing. When someone questions why data is excluded from models it’s automatically flagged as denial. You can argue that there’s people paid to deny but it doesn’t change the fact anyone who even questions it is cancelled. Look at the “97% of scientists” report that came out and half the scientists were either not even in that subject or said their opinions were taken out of context. Yet everyone cites that as absolute fact and questioning it gets you blasted. That’s cancel culture no matter how you try to spin it.
    - hnhg 5y ago
      You clearly don't remember the 'smoking causes cancer' debate - yes, there was a debate and it was hotly contested, and it was very emotionally charged. It played out similarly to the topic of climate change has so far. There has never been an era of reasonable public discussion and consensus building. If that's cancel culture, then it's nothing new.
hnhg 5y ago
Yes, it exists. Remember when Trump called for the cancellation of Kaepernick? The treatment that whistleblowers get? Freedom fries? Cancel culture is a deeply embedded component of US society.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
> You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. In psychology, a term for that is "minimisation" [1]. I commented on the power-play aspect of it here [2]. It seems so common in all forms of social media (and seems significantly less common in real-life to openly minimise another's experience [3]) that one suspects it's an immanent feature of electronic communication. That seems to mesh not just with diffusion of responsibility, but that every other person in the digital world appears as a single, isolated data point who could be gaslighted into thinking they were totally alone in holding their opinions. As an amplified tyranny of the majority it seems the go-to attack in tech circles, where minority users are openly threatened with the "inevitable" march of "ubiquitous" technologies and will be "left behind" for failing to fall into line. Until these mechanisms have widespread recognition and are named I don't think it's possible to build social media technologies absent of serious harms. [1] https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology) https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006944 [3] Perhaps it's my privileged position to experience/witness it less.
atoav 5y ago
The issue here is that saying a thing on twitter with the potential audience of the whole world is an inherently different thing than e.g. saying that thing to your blokes in the pub. Imagine it is 1980 and you went into a disco with a certain percentage of people of $ethnicity: What is your expectation for what would happen if you started yelling that people of $ethnicity have $negative_attributes and no right to exist? That they come to you and tell you that you have a point there? Of course the group will not ignore you, you are directly criticising their existence from an outside position. And this is the issue here: expectations. When speaking on a global online platform with near instant feedback your expectation shouldn't be that you can just voice a controversial opinion and have nobody disagree like it would happen when you talk to your likeminded friends in a small circle. Your expectation should be that you are in close vicinity of all the people you are talking about, because you are. And this can also be a good thing, because assuming a ton of things about others that you could just directly talk to is a sounds like a receipe for disaster. Imagine that instead of yelling stuff in the disco you were to talk to people and getting to know their point of view. The issue is that you can't do that on social media because you are always in the spotlight. And in the spotlight it is hard not to wave the flag of your team and have a human conversation instead. Social media is a constant spotlight, global, instant and huge public space and the behaviour you discribe is a direct result of the fact that people treat it as their living room conversation instead. Shitstorms are real and often they can get quite bad, but paradoxically you won't get rid of them with less moderation ("more free speech") but by interfering with the spread of the word.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "Imagine that instead of yelling stuff in the disco you were to talk to people and getting to know their point of view. The issue is that you can't do that on social media because you are always in the spotlight" You can, with a direct private message/email. (not sure if that is possible with twitter, though) That works very well to solve many issues, but of course it does not get you the same attention like publicly responding to someone stupid/insensitive and most people are on social media for attention.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
mitchdoogle 5y ago
Arguing with someone that their opinion is wrong is not gaslighting. Gaslighting is denying fundamental reality. Like a man screaming obscenities at his girlfriend and then later telling her he never used any curse words towards her. You can debate whether a joke is racist or a joke about race, or whether there's a difference between the two. It's not gaslighting
- Georgelemental 5y ago
  "Denying fundamental reality" is exactly what "cancel culture isn't real" is. Cracking one's knuckles can't reasonably be construed as objectionable in any way, and yet once the mob finds out you can lose your job https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/ https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
  - docmars 5y ago
    Especially when there are plentiful examples of cancel culture in the news on a nearly weekly basis. Arguing against the existence of empirical evidence showing real consequences is absolutely gaslighting, and I see it all the time from primarily left-leaning folks who, without always saying it, believe the people who were cancelled fully deserved their punishment, without bothering to assess the context or conditions of the situation in relation to our fundamental rights in society, where fair trial and freedom of speech/thought are ignored in favor of an unregulated digital militia composed of Twitter bots and large corporations like VISA/Mastercard coercing businesses to terminate payments for controversial people -- while narrative-approved late night entertainers humiliate you and people like you for daring to exist, opine, and jest differently than them as they broadcast their dogmatic standards as gospel to their fervent viewers who fail to see through them. I recall when Patreon spent way too much manpower to silence Sargon of Akkad because their payment providers were enforcing their own private societal norms on Patreon's users, by proxy. Imagine, if you will, that you're an Uber driver and while driving someone to their destination, you nearly get hit by another vehicle and in your fear, you scream an expletive that upsets just this one customer. You later lose your ability to drive for any taxi service because their payment services refuse to facilitate paying you for that one cross remark. Many people argue that private companies have every right to deny service or operate their services in any way they like, but if most of them are operating in unison to control speech and aid in humiliating average people for breaching their "community standards", then having a society with rights to free speech, expression, and thought without undue punishment outside of the court of law is pointless. These rights may as well not exist if they only serve a vocal, angry minority. The irony being that those same rights are protected for them because large corporations use them as fodder for shallow marketing campaigns that take advantage of human compassion towards manufactured victimhood that inaccurately represent the realities of this world, signaling their defense of complete lunacy for profit. Cancel culture is an absolutely pathetic way to treat citizens in our society, I don't care how "private" your company is in their ability to make decisions like these — you cannot deny the backbone of society to individuals for spilling their milk.
mechanical_bear 5y ago
I have never wished for awards on HN, but this comment surely deserves one.

slg 5y ago

Maybe this reply to my comment wasn't directed specifically at me, but I want to make it clear you are arguing against points I didn't make. I wasn't saying cancel culture doesn't exist. I wasn't saying people don't self-censor. I was instead saying that people who complain about self-censorship often don't understand the reason behind why some things are now objectionable. This results in them painting with too broad of a brush when they talk about that self-censorship and cancel culture. You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right.

vimy 5y ago
> You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right. Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right. Your whole position is based on the left being correct about everything. Take non-binary for example. I’ve looked into it, read the studies and my conclusion is that it’s pseudoscience that deserves to be mocked. But you probably think it’s real so if I joke about it you think I’m a bigot. From my perspective, joking about it is like when we used to mock people who believed in creationism. So what is doing it right if we both have two fundamentally different positions about a subject? ——- I’m not gonna get into a debate over non-binary. That’s not the point here, it’s an example.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  So were you against mocking people who believed in creationism? It sounds like you’re fine with shaming people when you’re in the ingroup, while at the same time you don’t want to be shamed for being part of an outgroup.
  - vimy 5y ago
    I mocked creationism too. You can mock my dying mother for all I care. I wouldn’t like it but believe in your right to say whatever you want.
    - jakelazaroff 5y ago
      You are free to mock non-binary people, though. And others are free to call you a bigot. Both of those comport with a right to say whatever you want.
- KyleJune 5y ago
  It's not a democrat thing. Large parts of the population disagree on things. When people do things objectionable to republicans, they all try to cancel them too. Many republicans want to cancel gay people, trans people, immigrants, minorities, socialists, etc.

etchalon 5y ago

It's like all of society collectively forgot about "political correctness", and how the exact same complaints about "cancel culture" used to be called "political correctness" and behold society continued to function so well we completely forgot about the horrors of "political correctness" only to now worry about the horrors of "cancel culture!"

lliamander 5y ago
We didn't forget. It's the same problem, but morphed and magnified by social media.
- etchalon 5y ago
  I'd challenge the idea it's been morphed or magnified. It's the exact same nonsense.
  - bandyaboot 5y ago
    And just like political correctness, the label of cancel culture is very selectively applied and is often agenda driven.

philliphaydon 5y ago

> And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. We used to debate things and have different views and opinions. Milo Ydbjsixjebdoaod, Ben Shapiro. But now instead of debating and proving people right or wrong. It’s just complain and protest the venue and people and get them knocked off Twitter YouTube Facebook etc. Climate change is another one. Anyone who wants to debate the topic is instantly cancelled as a denialist. Social media has ruined information to some extent.

zarzavat 5y ago
> Climate change is another one. Anyone who wants to debate the topic is instantly cancelled as a denialist. This is nothing to do with cancel culture or social media. It’s because big energy companies paid people to deny climate change. Unsurprisingly this makes people tetchy around those with let’s say heterodox views. The well has been poisoned for fair criticism and it was not poisoned by environmentalists.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  While I believe climate change is a real thing. When someone questions why data is excluded from models it’s automatically flagged as denial. You can argue that there’s people paid to deny but it doesn’t change the fact anyone who even questions it is cancelled. Look at the “97% of scientists” report that came out and half the scientists were either not even in that subject or said their opinions were taken out of context. Yet everyone cites that as absolute fact and questioning it gets you blasted. That’s cancel culture no matter how you try to spin it.
  - hnhg 5y ago
    You clearly don't remember the 'smoking causes cancer' debate - yes, there was a debate and it was hotly contested, and it was very emotionally charged. It played out similarly to the topic of climate change has so far. There has never been an era of reasonable public discussion and consensus building. If that's cancel culture, then it's nothing new.

hnhg 5y ago

Yes, it exists. Remember when Trump called for the cancellation of Kaepernick? The treatment that whistleblowers get? Freedom fries? Cancel culture is a deeply embedded component of US society.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

> You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. In psychology, a term for that is "minimisation" [1]. I commented on the power-play aspect of it here [2]. It seems so common in all forms of social media (and seems significantly less common in real-life to openly minimise another's experience [3]) that one suspects it's an immanent feature of electronic communication. That seems to mesh not just with diffusion of responsibility, but that every other person in the digital world appears as a single, isolated data point who could be gaslighted into thinking they were totally alone in holding their opinions. As an amplified tyranny of the majority it seems the go-to attack in tech circles, where minority users are openly threatened with the "inevitable" march of "ubiquitous" technologies and will be "left behind" for failing to fall into line. Until these mechanisms have widespread recognition and are named I don't think it's possible to build social media technologies absent of serious harms. [1] https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology) https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006944 [3] Perhaps it's my privileged position to experience/witness it less.

atoav 5y ago

The issue here is that saying a thing on twitter with the potential audience of the whole world is an inherently different thing than e.g. saying that thing to your blokes in the pub. Imagine it is 1980 and you went into a disco with a certain percentage of people of $ethnicity: What is your expectation for what would happen if you started yelling that people of $ethnicity have $negative_attributes and no right to exist? That they come to you and tell you that you have a point there? Of course the group will not ignore you, you are directly criticising their existence from an outside position. And this is the issue here: expectations. When speaking on a global online platform with near instant feedback your expectation shouldn't be that you can just voice a controversial opinion and have nobody disagree like it would happen when you talk to your likeminded friends in a small circle. Your expectation should be that you are in close vicinity of all the people you are talking about, because you are. And this can also be a good thing, because assuming a ton of things about others that you could just directly talk to is a sounds like a receipe for disaster. Imagine that instead of yelling stuff in the disco you were to talk to people and getting to know their point of view. The issue is that you can't do that on social media because you are always in the spotlight. And in the spotlight it is hard not to wave the flag of your team and have a human conversation instead. Social media is a constant spotlight, global, instant and huge public space and the behaviour you discribe is a direct result of the fact that people treat it as their living room conversation instead. Shitstorms are real and often they can get quite bad, but paradoxically you won't get rid of them with less moderation ("more free speech") but by interfering with the spread of the word.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"Imagine that instead of yelling stuff in the disco you were to talk to people and getting to know their point of view. The issue is that you can't do that on social media because you are always in the spotlight" You can, with a direct private message/email. (not sure if that is possible with twitter, though) That works very well to solve many issues, but of course it does not get you the same attention like publicly responding to someone stupid/insensitive and most people are on social media for attention.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago

mitchdoogle 5y ago

Arguing with someone that their opinion is wrong is not gaslighting. Gaslighting is denying fundamental reality. Like a man screaming obscenities at his girlfriend and then later telling her he never used any curse words towards her. You can debate whether a joke is racist or a joke about race, or whether there's a difference between the two. It's not gaslighting

Georgelemental 5y ago
"Denying fundamental reality" is exactly what "cancel culture isn't real" is. Cracking one's knuckles can't reasonably be construed as objectionable in any way, and yet once the mob finds out you can lose your job https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/ https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
- docmars 5y ago
  Especially when there are plentiful examples of cancel culture in the news on a nearly weekly basis. Arguing against the existence of empirical evidence showing real consequences is absolutely gaslighting, and I see it all the time from primarily left-leaning folks who, without always saying it, believe the people who were cancelled fully deserved their punishment, without bothering to assess the context or conditions of the situation in relation to our fundamental rights in society, where fair trial and freedom of speech/thought are ignored in favor of an unregulated digital militia composed of Twitter bots and large corporations like VISA/Mastercard coercing businesses to terminate payments for controversial people -- while narrative-approved late night entertainers humiliate you and people like you for daring to exist, opine, and jest differently than them as they broadcast their dogmatic standards as gospel to their fervent viewers who fail to see through them. I recall when Patreon spent way too much manpower to silence Sargon of Akkad because their payment providers were enforcing their own private societal norms on Patreon's users, by proxy. Imagine, if you will, that you're an Uber driver and while driving someone to their destination, you nearly get hit by another vehicle and in your fear, you scream an expletive that upsets just this one customer. You later lose your ability to drive for any taxi service because their payment services refuse to facilitate paying you for that one cross remark. Many people argue that private companies have every right to deny service or operate their services in any way they like, but if most of them are operating in unison to control speech and aid in humiliating average people for breaching their "community standards", then having a society with rights to free speech, expression, and thought without undue punishment outside of the court of law is pointless. These rights may as well not exist if they only serve a vocal, angry minority. The irony being that those same rights are protected for them because large corporations use them as fodder for shallow marketing campaigns that take advantage of human compassion towards manufactured victimhood that inaccurately represent the realities of this world, signaling their defense of complete lunacy for profit. Cancel culture is an absolutely pathetic way to treat citizens in our society, I don't care how "private" your company is in their ability to make decisions like these — you cannot deny the backbone of society to individuals for spilling their milk.

mechanical_bear 5y ago

I have never wished for awards on HN, but this comment surely deserves one.