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It turns out "the words the person are saying aren't the person" turned out to be a polite fiction as people who had been saying awful things for years online t
by shadowgovt 1y ago
It turns out "the words the person are saying aren't the person" turned out to be a polite fiction as people who had been saying awful things for years online turned out to go on to act on those ideas.
We tried "Don't feed the trolls." It's how we got where we are now.
- 9rx 1y agoPeople have always acted upon their (awful) ideas. In fact, the internet (DARPANET) itself was created as a tool to help combat exactly that. However, that is completely independent from what is emitted from a computer screen. To try to somehow bind them together is logically incoherent. Which technically-minded folks understand, but now that the technology has become so accessible that anyone can use it...
- shadowgovt 1y ago> However, that is completely independent from what is emitted from a computer screen We may just be working under different definitions. Are you claiming that when I type things into, say, Hacker News and hit reply, the words you read aren't the words I wrote? Or are you asserting the "person" of the words in the computer is not the same person I am behind the keyboard? I'd argue that the latter is the disproven hypothesis. It turns out people who said awful things online were actually awful people; they may not show it as often in public, but they weren't different human beings. Broadly speaking, they believed the things they said and tended to act on them in real life. Laughing off things on the computer as not real was how at least one shooting went unchecked.