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This is the reality of social media. If you offend the wrong person, you will most likely get fired from your job and or get unwanted attention in other parts

This is the reality of social media. If you offend the wrong person, you will most likely get fired from your job and or get unwanted attention in other parts of your life..all for just expressing an opinion. It's essentially online bullying by people that want to silence you for having an opinion that is different than their own. The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit. I see this especially in many of the open source and tech communities, which is why I no longer contribute. I also don't post anything political on my Facebook account. A future employer may look at this and judge me before I'm even hired..and decide not to hire me. Just looking at my list of friends, most people don't seem to realize that this may be a problem. The same power that gives special interest groups and individuals the ability to launch campaigns to get people fired gives companies the power to not hire you based on your lifestyle or personal beliefs.

gearoidoc 12y ago
Replace "offend the wrong person" with "do something really f*cking stupid" - which is what she did - and the outcome seems fair. No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions.
- andybak 12y ago
  Fair? Do you really think so? If so you terrify me. I've done plenty of really f*cking stupid things in my time. I'm very thankful most of them were offline or pre-internet.
  - gearoidoc 12y ago
    You're terrified by the idea that someone should be fired for gross unprofessionalism? To repeat: she did not deserve ANY bullying or harassment whatsoever. Did you experience consequences of the stupid actions you've taken?
    - andybak 12y ago
      > To repeat: she did not deserve ANY bullying or harassment whatsoever. That wasn't clear. You said the "outcome was fair" - the outcome was that her life was ruined.
      - gearoidoc 12y ago
        I also said: No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions. I meant the outcome from a professional standpoint was fair. I don't believe how her life has been "ruined" as I've explained elsewhere.
        tertius 12y ago
        Clearly the person who fired her only did so because of public outcry, i.e. the bullying. That was in their best interest. It wasn't fair. It wasn't a consequence equal to her action. It may have been equal to the reaction to her tweet, but that reaction was unjust. The consequences of the bullying, given her being fired, is much worse than if she was not fired. Her ability to compete in the workplace has been severely diminished because of this. Her PTSD that she will probably suffer for a long time has been greatly exacerbated by her firing. Given the worst intention of her tweet (ignorance), getting fired was still not the right reaction to her "crime." Do people need to be held accountable to their actions? I agree that they should. Outside of criminal law (since this wasn't criminal), the mob is not the right group to decide what the correct consequence of her actions should be. History shows that this leads to barbarism, which this was a case of. She didn't get what was coming to her, she got much worse.
        zem 12y ago
        if you think the outcome from a professional standpoint was fair, you have a very bleak and dystopian view of fairness. she was posting something to her own private twitter account in her own time; it had nothing to do with the job.
    - 650REDHAIR 12y ago
      Gross unprofessionalism? She wasn't on the job. It wasn't an official account.
- deleted 12y ago
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- latestrevision 12y ago
  It appears that a big part of this discussion is about how we as a group are not sure if it really is a situation in which she "[did] something really f cking stupid", though. Clearly, you do interpret her statement to be an offensive, racist remark, but by her own admission, she instead was commenting on how "[l]iving in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble." Whether or not her explanation for the off-color is truly genuine is up for debate, but scuttling somebody's life and career for something that only might have been a racist remark doesn't seem all that fair to me and (it would appear) a significant fraction of commenters here.
  - gearoidoc 12y ago
    Her explanation does sound like it was crafted by a political PR group - which makes sense considering her profession - but I'm still happy to take her word for it. However, it's pretty easy to see how it could be considered a racist and bigoted tweet and I'd expect her to have realised this before sending it. EDIT: I totally agree that scuttling someones life on career off the back of one tweet is unfair - I 100% agree with that. As I said in the original comment, the bullying she experienced was totally unfair. I don't believe, however, that her career is ruined by it - evidenced by the fact that she's now gainfully employed. I think it's definitely a red flag on her resume but by doing volunteer service after the fact I'd be surprised if any company wouldn't see this as "I did something dumb, I learnt and grew from it". Professionals in PR should naturally be extra-vigilant about issues like these.
    - 21echoes 12y ago
      if the joke had come out of Louis CK's mouth, its intention would have been obvious. given that, as she said in the article, "only an insane person would think that white people can't get AIDS", and the phrasing is obviously comic (dour opening, sudden & glib reversal, edgy punchline), I literally cannot read the tweet as bigoted or racist. Is the joke off-color? yes. Is it obviously self-deprecating, and aware of the fucked-up-ed-ness of white & first-world privilege? yes.
- fenomas 12y ago
  The gray text makes it look like a lot of people disagree. So suppose for the sake of argument that lots of people on the internet considered this post "really f*cking stupid" and tried to get you fired for it - would that not be a problem? I mean presumably you don't think it was a repugnant thing to have posted, but then neither did Justine Sacco.
  - gearoidoc 12y ago
    A fair point but comparing the ideal that people should be held responsible for their actions to a bad racist joke intended to highlight that "living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world" is apples and oranges at best. If you feel like Gawker would be interested in running a piece on my comment then feel free to go ahead and submit it.
    - fenomas 12y ago
      These things are subjective. Presumably Sacco felt that comparing genuinely racist content to someone's sarcastic joke about themselves was apples and oranges as well. I rather do myself. Put it this way - nobody is against the idea of "people being held responsible for their actions". But it's pretty hard to buy that that's what happened here. I remember when the Sacco thing was trending and I never saw anyone who seemed hurt or angry, or even offended. To the contrary, people were thrilled that some PR asshole was going to get fired but didn't know it yet.
- discardorama 12y ago
  > Replace "offend the wrong person" with "do something really f*cking stupid" - which is what she did - and the outcome seems fair. And yet if she was a writer for SouthPark or Family Guy, we'd all be laughing at the joke.
- jqm 12y ago
  "consequences need to exist to actions" Didn't G.W. Bush say something similar about people who criticized the Iraq war?
gear54rus 12y ago
This and many other problems are instantly rectified when one stops using shit like twitter or fb. Communicating with friends? fine, perfectly acceptable, PM or share with some reduced circle. Trying to be funny in the world where someone could get butthurt over a joke that was snooped from the conversation not intended for their ears? You're asking for it (for the lack of better wording). And yes I do realize the irony about this comment, feel free to downvote for 'victim blaming' if you don't understand the message.
- gearoidoc 12y ago
  A tweet is not part of a private conversation and the user in question should have known that - particularly considering their profession. Twitter & FB aren't the problem. A lack of awareness and judgement is.
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    You're right that lack of awareness and judgement is the problem. Lack of awareness of the fundamental error of attribution, and rushing to judgement based on far too little information. Anyone who thinks they can reasonably judge anyone based on any single post, much less 140 characters, is not doing a great job of being a citizen in the 21st century. Everything we say can be misunderstood, and if you can't imagine anyone tweeting something you don't like without them being racist/sexist/whateverist that is simply because your imagination sucks as a tool for knowing reality, just like mine, just like everyone else's. What we can or cannot imagine has absolutely nothing to do with what is real. This is the lesson of three hundred years of science. This is why ideas must be publicly tested by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference to be counted as knowledge. This is not to say we must never judge, but that judgement is far more difficult than most people realize, and they are far too quick to do it based on far too little information and far too much imagination. [edit: I should have said "we are far too quick..." The habit of judgement is hard to break!]
    - gearoidoc 12y ago
      I'm not judging the woman. I'm judging the action she chose to take, in the given context. I'm saying she did something really stupid. I don't know anything else about the woman bar the fact that she seems to have a very nice taste in New York social spots. Anyone who thinks they can reasonably judge anyone based on any single post, much less 140 characters, is not doing a great job of being a citizen in the 21st century. ^ If you're referring to me, as I said, I'm not judging her. But it's great that you see fit to lay down a marker for what constitutes being a good citizen. What we can or cannot imagine has absolutely nothing to do with what is real. This is the lesson of three hundred years of science. This is why ideas must be publicly tested by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference to be counted as knowledge. ^wat This is not to say we must never judge, but that judgement is far more difficult than most people realize, and they are far too quick to do it based on far too little information and far too much imagination. ^ Agreed, but unfortunately thats a symptom a lot of the internet suffers (arguably, feeds) from.
ossreality 12y ago
Oh for fuck's sake, not this again.
coldpie 12y ago
> The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit. Hahahahahahaha no. Eich paid money to political campaigns to ensure that some of his own employees and fellow citizens would not have basic human rights. Then, he refused to apologize for it and dodged the question when asked if he would do it again. That's not "expressing an opinion," that's nearly sociopathic. He was clearly working against his employees' best interest. Even ignoring his employees' feelings, he was bad for the company. Many productive employees threatened to quit because they didn't want to be represented by a person who explicitly expressed hatred towards them or their friends. That kind of person does not belong in a position of power, full stop. Expressing homophobia in 2015 is going to close doors, the same way expressing racism or sexism does and should. There was no "bullying campaign" except the one supported and perpetrated by Eich.
- ryguytilidie 12y ago
  Just curious why this is getting downvoted. Are people actually buying the whole "Eich is a victim because as a white multimillionaire he lost his job because he cared deeply about taking away the rights of others"...?
  - mbreese 12y ago
    It's because they are going overboard... I stopped reading when I saw the word "sociopathic".
    - coldpie 12y ago
      Do you think campaigning to ensure a group of people don't have certain fundamental rights that others do, for no reason other than your own personal animosity, doesn't qualify as sociopathic? I do.
      - deleted 12y ago
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timr 12y ago
Twitter, in particular, is awful. There's no context and very little thought possible in 140 characters. So you either get marketing from corporations, jokes/memes, or full-frontal assaults by the pitchfork-weilding mob, with no effective defense possible in the medium. At least on Facebook you can elucidate your thoughts, defend your opinions, and otherwise make an effort too look like a person who appreciates nuance, rather than someone whose entire intellectual capacity is captured in 140 characters.
- cstross 12y ago
  Twitter seems pretty much designed to function as an emotional amplifier. It's not dissimilar to traditional news media in that respect -- "if it bleeds, it leads" and all that. Humans like to pay attention to other humans, and are fascinated by bad behaviour and messy accidents. Newspapers and TV channels are always after something that provokes their readers and gets them emotionally engaged at a fight/flight level. And twitter and other social media that permit unrestricted engagement play to this -- that's precisely why they've grown so big. (Facebook is in no way an improvement unless you lock it down to friends-only. After all, the difference between 4000 characters and 140 isn't that great, when you're trying to discuss complex issues, especially if you're not very articulate or thoughtful in the first place.)
  - timr 12y ago
    Yeah, the most important benefit of Facebook is that you can say things "privately". But even then, it's a lot harder to portray someone as an evil villain cartoon when there's context. Even if most people don't read more than a sentence or two, it's possible to look like a real human being, whereas on Twitter you get your 140 characters, and that's that. By the nature of the network, nobody cares or sees the ten tweets that come before/after the offending one.
  - wutbrodo 12y ago
    > Facebook is in no way an improvement unless you lock it down to friends-only. This is definitely not true. As lunatic as they may seem, many of the people in these online mobs are at least somewhat reasonable, and if they were able to see context (for example, a comment or edit on the original post) it would pretty seriously attenuate the virality of stuff like this. Twitter is drive-by conversation: there's practically no possibility for context, for clarification, etc. Hell half the time I'm exposed to Twitter, I end up looking at fragments of conversation whose context is pretty damn painful to nail down. A shitty interface like that is a hell of a lot more efficient at instigating mobs over misunderstandings.
ryguytilidie 12y ago
I have some pretty serious objections to summing up people making a campaign to remove a bigot from his role leading an open source, community friendly company as "an online bullying campaign"...
ArkyBeagle 12y ago
Then the whole edifice is inherently unstable and will collapse at some point. I will still post economic or political-ish things, under my real name, but they're generally not very controversial, they're references to articles, book or blogs ( usually that I'd like to see read a bit more ).
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anon4 12y ago
Which is why you keep different online identities that don't point to each other. So you can say the stupid jokes on your "sgt.lonelyheart97" twitter while posting on your prim&proper official account once or twice a year. Someone who really wants to will probably be able to connect the dots after enough digging... somehow. But at that point it's someone with vendetta against you specifically. Or just go and post on 4chan anonymously.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  Two of the women mentioned in this article were doing just that. They posted pictures that the wrong people found offensive, got doxxed, bullied, and fired.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Which article did you read? Everyone in the article was demonstrating their innocence by doing things with their real names, with public profiles describing their place of employment.
gnopgnip 12y ago
Would society really be any better off if people aren't held accountable for what they say?
- DanBC 12y ago
  The coorect response to what most of these people said is for someone to pull them to one side and say "stop being a dick, especially if you're using the company social media account". Threats of violence, loss of job, weeks long campaigns -- none of that is an appropriate response.
  - BrainInAJar 12y ago
    in for example Eich's case how do you pull him aside and say "stop being a dick by donating to hate, and then trying to run a diverse company?"
    - stolio 12y ago
      Just because somebody's idea of diversity is different from yours doesn't make them hateful, it just makes them different. It's ironic that this is lost on people who argue the most loudly for inclusiveness.
      - CamperBob2 12y ago
        No, it doesn't make them "different," it makes them hateful. You're carrying water for some people that will go down in history next to the KKK. Stop it.
        stolio 12y ago
        What, stop defending people who are being forced out of society by an angry mob? No. I dislike angry mobs, it's kind of my thing.
        CamperBob2 12y ago
CamperBob2 12y ago
An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit. Maybe he shouldn't have participated in an offline bullying campaign against an entire segment of the population.
mcantelon 12y ago
While FOSS developers share political beliefs relating to the benefits of sharing software, FOSS traditionally had a culture of putting unrelated politics to the side. Strategically, FOSS couldn't afford to be seen as partisan given that it already encountered resistance from people who viewed it as a suspicious, vaguely communist, movement. Now that FOSS is established, and there are developers that have grown up with FOSS existing unchallenged in society, political agnosticism isn't seen as important. In contemporary Western culture, ideology seems to be taking the place of religion in terms of regulating morality. Social media has been instrumental in this transition. We're now seeing the emergence of global, ideological tribes that can communicate in realtime. Those who have power within these tribes are largely untouchable within the sphere of social media: they have the power to direct followers to lobby against others for perceived abuses, yet the power they wield intimidates many who would criticize them for abuse of power.
- mc32 12y ago
  While Foss should be to some degree apolitical, individual contributors should be allowed to express their political views. The politics and the software itself should be treated differently.
- lamontcg 12y ago
  I argued politics with a lot of FOSS developers on Usenet in the early 90s. They weren't apolitical. And the internal politics in FOSS were often very highly charged and often bitter. The splits that created OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, Stallman's politics with FSF and GNU bleeding over into endless licensing flamewars on the LKML mailing list, etc. You are either highly naive about FOSS or you've just defined all the vicious politics in FOSS as being just and righteous -- and that is exactly the justifications that the lynchmobs and their leaders in this article hold towards their victims as well.
MichaelGG 12y ago
There's a qualitative difference between making a joke, which probably had no bearing on her actual opinion or position on AIDS or Africa, and actively trying to deny rights to other people. It's not like she donated money to Stormfront. The equivalent comparison to Eich would be if he made a joke ending with "... Oh wait, I'm not gay" or something. (And wasn't a lot of the Mozilla thing really a disguised way at getting back at him for JavaScript?)
spb 12y ago
> The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit. It's kind of weird to think that Brendan Eich is still active in the web standards community, even though he's been forced to leave Mozilla. A man without a company.
- mcantelon 12y ago
  Given his past contributions to the web, it's unsurprising that he still participates and people listen to him.
  - stolio 12y ago
    The people who fought for Eich's departure like to downplay just how much knowledge he carries around in his head. I think deep down they're afraid to admit just how much damage they did to Mozilla, Firefox and the entire open source community. They still think they did a good thing.
    - josephgrossberg 12y ago
      What's something concrete that you think the entire open source community lost as a result of Eich no longer heading Mozilla?
      - stolio 12y ago
        Losing one of the most important people at one of the most important open source projects is a loss in and of itself. That was twenty years of experience and technical knowledge that walked out the door. Losing one of the only people in a position to fight against DRM who had the will to do so is another blow. The end result as I see it is the social justice community gets a "victory", religious people at Mozilla learn they're not to take part in our political process, and those who were left gave up the fight against DRM. Not that they had a choice, how do you ride into battle short a CEO and a CTO, and while licking your wounds from a vicious boycott/smear campaign? Firefox circa Eich on DRM: https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad-drm/ https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad-drm/ Firefox post boycott on DRM: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...
wozniacki 12y ago
It's essentially online bullying by people that want to silence you for having an opinion that is different than their own. Do you see any breakthroughs coming in platforms and/or technologies, that tackle this problem, on the horizon ?

gearoidoc 12y ago

Replace "offend the wrong person" with "do something really f*cking stupid" - which is what she did - and the outcome seems fair. No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions.

andybak 12y ago
Fair? Do you really think so? If so you terrify me. I've done plenty of really f*cking stupid things in my time. I'm very thankful most of them were offline or pre-internet.
- gearoidoc 12y ago
  You're terrified by the idea that someone should be fired for gross unprofessionalism? To repeat: she did not deserve ANY bullying or harassment whatsoever. Did you experience consequences of the stupid actions you've taken?
  - andybak 12y ago
    > To repeat: she did not deserve ANY bullying or harassment whatsoever. That wasn't clear. You said the "outcome was fair" - the outcome was that her life was ruined.
    - gearoidoc 12y ago
      I also said: No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions. I meant the outcome from a professional standpoint was fair. I don't believe how her life has been "ruined" as I've explained elsewhere.
      - tertius 12y ago
        Clearly the person who fired her only did so because of public outcry, i.e. the bullying. That was in their best interest. It wasn't fair. It wasn't a consequence equal to her action. It may have been equal to the reaction to her tweet, but that reaction was unjust. The consequences of the bullying, given her being fired, is much worse than if she was not fired. Her ability to compete in the workplace has been severely diminished because of this. Her PTSD that she will probably suffer for a long time has been greatly exacerbated by her firing. Given the worst intention of her tweet (ignorance), getting fired was still not the right reaction to her "crime." Do people need to be held accountable to their actions? I agree that they should. Outside of criminal law (since this wasn't criminal), the mob is not the right group to decide what the correct consequence of her actions should be. History shows that this leads to barbarism, which this was a case of. She didn't get what was coming to her, she got much worse.
      - zem 12y ago
        if you think the outcome from a professional standpoint was fair, you have a very bleak and dystopian view of fairness. she was posting something to her own private twitter account in her own time; it had nothing to do with the job.
  - 650REDHAIR 12y ago
    Gross unprofessionalism? She wasn't on the job. It wasn't an official account.
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latestrevision 12y ago
It appears that a big part of this discussion is about how we as a group are not sure if it really is a situation in which she "[did] something really f cking stupid", though. Clearly, you do interpret her statement to be an offensive, racist remark, but by her own admission, she instead was commenting on how "[l]iving in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble." Whether or not her explanation for the off-color is truly genuine is up for debate, but scuttling somebody's life and career for something that only might have been a racist remark doesn't seem all that fair to me and (it would appear) a significant fraction of commenters here.
- gearoidoc 12y ago
  Her explanation does sound like it was crafted by a political PR group - which makes sense considering her profession - but I'm still happy to take her word for it. However, it's pretty easy to see how it could be considered a racist and bigoted tweet and I'd expect her to have realised this before sending it. EDIT: I totally agree that scuttling someones life on career off the back of one tweet is unfair - I 100% agree with that. As I said in the original comment, the bullying she experienced was totally unfair. I don't believe, however, that her career is ruined by it - evidenced by the fact that she's now gainfully employed. I think it's definitely a red flag on her resume but by doing volunteer service after the fact I'd be surprised if any company wouldn't see this as "I did something dumb, I learnt and grew from it". Professionals in PR should naturally be extra-vigilant about issues like these.
  - 21echoes 12y ago
    if the joke had come out of Louis CK's mouth, its intention would have been obvious. given that, as she said in the article, "only an insane person would think that white people can't get AIDS", and the phrasing is obviously comic (dour opening, sudden & glib reversal, edgy punchline), I literally cannot read the tweet as bigoted or racist. Is the joke off-color? yes. Is it obviously self-deprecating, and aware of the fucked-up-ed-ness of white & first-world privilege? yes.
fenomas 12y ago
The gray text makes it look like a lot of people disagree. So suppose for the sake of argument that lots of people on the internet considered this post "really f*cking stupid" and tried to get you fired for it - would that not be a problem? I mean presumably you don't think it was a repugnant thing to have posted, but then neither did Justine Sacco.
- gearoidoc 12y ago
  A fair point but comparing the ideal that people should be held responsible for their actions to a bad racist joke intended to highlight that "living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world" is apples and oranges at best. If you feel like Gawker would be interested in running a piece on my comment then feel free to go ahead and submit it.
  - fenomas 12y ago
    These things are subjective. Presumably Sacco felt that comparing genuinely racist content to someone's sarcastic joke about themselves was apples and oranges as well. I rather do myself. Put it this way - nobody is against the idea of "people being held responsible for their actions". But it's pretty hard to buy that that's what happened here. I remember when the Sacco thing was trending and I never saw anyone who seemed hurt or angry, or even offended. To the contrary, people were thrilled that some PR asshole was going to get fired but didn't know it yet.
discardorama 12y ago
> Replace "offend the wrong person" with "do something really f*cking stupid" - which is what she did - and the outcome seems fair. And yet if she was a writer for SouthPark or Family Guy, we'd all be laughing at the joke.
jqm 12y ago
"consequences need to exist to actions" Didn't G.W. Bush say something similar about people who criticized the Iraq war?

gear54rus 12y ago

This and many other problems are instantly rectified when one stops using shit like twitter or fb. Communicating with friends? fine, perfectly acceptable, PM or share with some reduced circle. Trying to be funny in the world where someone could get butthurt over a joke that was snooped from the conversation not intended for their ears? You're asking for it (for the lack of better wording). And yes I do realize the irony about this comment, feel free to downvote for 'victim blaming' if you don't understand the message.

gearoidoc 12y ago
A tweet is not part of a private conversation and the user in question should have known that - particularly considering their profession. Twitter & FB aren't the problem. A lack of awareness and judgement is.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  You're right that lack of awareness and judgement is the problem. Lack of awareness of the fundamental error of attribution, and rushing to judgement based on far too little information. Anyone who thinks they can reasonably judge anyone based on any single post, much less 140 characters, is not doing a great job of being a citizen in the 21st century. Everything we say can be misunderstood, and if you can't imagine anyone tweeting something you don't like without them being racist/sexist/whateverist that is simply because your imagination sucks as a tool for knowing reality, just like mine, just like everyone else's. What we can or cannot imagine has absolutely nothing to do with what is real. This is the lesson of three hundred years of science. This is why ideas must be publicly tested by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference to be counted as knowledge. This is not to say we must never judge, but that judgement is far more difficult than most people realize, and they are far too quick to do it based on far too little information and far too much imagination. [edit: I should have said "we are far too quick..." The habit of judgement is hard to break!]
  - gearoidoc 12y ago
    I'm not judging the woman. I'm judging the action she chose to take, in the given context. I'm saying she did something really stupid. I don't know anything else about the woman bar the fact that she seems to have a very nice taste in New York social spots. Anyone who thinks they can reasonably judge anyone based on any single post, much less 140 characters, is not doing a great job of being a citizen in the 21st century. ^ If you're referring to me, as I said, I'm not judging her. But it's great that you see fit to lay down a marker for what constitutes being a good citizen. What we can or cannot imagine has absolutely nothing to do with what is real. This is the lesson of three hundred years of science. This is why ideas must be publicly tested by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference to be counted as knowledge. ^wat This is not to say we must never judge, but that judgement is far more difficult than most people realize, and they are far too quick to do it based on far too little information and far too much imagination. ^ Agreed, but unfortunately thats a symptom a lot of the internet suffers (arguably, feeds) from.

ossreality 12y ago

Oh for fuck's sake, not this again.

coldpie 12y ago

> The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit. Hahahahahahaha no. Eich paid money to political campaigns to ensure that some of his own employees and fellow citizens would not have basic human rights. Then, he refused to apologize for it and dodged the question when asked if he would do it again. That's not "expressing an opinion," that's nearly sociopathic. He was clearly working against his employees' best interest. Even ignoring his employees' feelings, he was bad for the company. Many productive employees threatened to quit because they didn't want to be represented by a person who explicitly expressed hatred towards them or their friends. That kind of person does not belong in a position of power, full stop. Expressing homophobia in 2015 is going to close doors, the same way expressing racism or sexism does and should. There was no "bullying campaign" except the one supported and perpetrated by Eich.

ryguytilidie 12y ago
Just curious why this is getting downvoted. Are people actually buying the whole "Eich is a victim because as a white multimillionaire he lost his job because he cared deeply about taking away the rights of others"...?
- mbreese 12y ago
  It's because they are going overboard... I stopped reading when I saw the word "sociopathic".
  - coldpie 12y ago
    Do you think campaigning to ensure a group of people don't have certain fundamental rights that others do, for no reason other than your own personal animosity, doesn't qualify as sociopathic? I do.
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timr 12y ago

Twitter, in particular, is awful. There's no context and very little thought possible in 140 characters. So you either get marketing from corporations, jokes/memes, or full-frontal assaults by the pitchfork-weilding mob, with no effective defense possible in the medium. At least on Facebook you can elucidate your thoughts, defend your opinions, and otherwise make an effort too look like a person who appreciates nuance, rather than someone whose entire intellectual capacity is captured in 140 characters.

cstross 12y ago
Twitter seems pretty much designed to function as an emotional amplifier. It's not dissimilar to traditional news media in that respect -- "if it bleeds, it leads" and all that. Humans like to pay attention to other humans, and are fascinated by bad behaviour and messy accidents. Newspapers and TV channels are always after something that provokes their readers and gets them emotionally engaged at a fight/flight level. And twitter and other social media that permit unrestricted engagement play to this -- that's precisely why they've grown so big. (Facebook is in no way an improvement unless you lock it down to friends-only. After all, the difference between 4000 characters and 140 isn't that great, when you're trying to discuss complex issues, especially if you're not very articulate or thoughtful in the first place.)
- timr 12y ago
  Yeah, the most important benefit of Facebook is that you can say things "privately". But even then, it's a lot harder to portray someone as an evil villain cartoon when there's context. Even if most people don't read more than a sentence or two, it's possible to look like a real human being, whereas on Twitter you get your 140 characters, and that's that. By the nature of the network, nobody cares or sees the ten tweets that come before/after the offending one.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  > Facebook is in no way an improvement unless you lock it down to friends-only. This is definitely not true. As lunatic as they may seem, many of the people in these online mobs are at least somewhat reasonable, and if they were able to see context (for example, a comment or edit on the original post) it would pretty seriously attenuate the virality of stuff like this. Twitter is drive-by conversation: there's practically no possibility for context, for clarification, etc. Hell half the time I'm exposed to Twitter, I end up looking at fragments of conversation whose context is pretty damn painful to nail down. A shitty interface like that is a hell of a lot more efficient at instigating mobs over misunderstandings.

ryguytilidie 12y ago

I have some pretty serious objections to summing up people making a campaign to remove a bigot from his role leading an open source, community friendly company as "an online bullying campaign"...

ArkyBeagle 12y ago

Then the whole edifice is inherently unstable and will collapse at some point. I will still post economic or political-ish things, under my real name, but they're generally not very controversial, they're references to articles, book or blogs ( usually that I'd like to see read a bit more ).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

anon4 12y ago

Which is why you keep different online identities that don't point to each other. So you can say the stupid jokes on your "sgt.lonelyheart97" twitter while posting on your prim&proper official account once or twice a year. Someone who really wants to will probably be able to connect the dots after enough digging... somehow. But at that point it's someone with vendetta against you specifically. Or just go and post on 4chan anonymously.

vonmoltke 12y ago
Two of the women mentioned in this article were doing just that. They posted pictures that the wrong people found offensive, got doxxed, bullied, and fired.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Which article did you read? Everyone in the article was demonstrating their innocence by doing things with their real names, with public profiles describing their place of employment.

gnopgnip 12y ago

Would society really be any better off if people aren't held accountable for what they say?

DanBC 12y ago
The coorect response to what most of these people said is for someone to pull them to one side and say "stop being a dick, especially if you're using the company social media account". Threats of violence, loss of job, weeks long campaigns -- none of that is an appropriate response.
- BrainInAJar 12y ago
  in for example Eich's case how do you pull him aside and say "stop being a dick by donating to hate, and then trying to run a diverse company?"
  - stolio 12y ago
    Just because somebody's idea of diversity is different from yours doesn't make them hateful, it just makes them different. It's ironic that this is lost on people who argue the most loudly for inclusiveness.
    - CamperBob2 12y ago
      No, it doesn't make them "different," it makes them hateful. You're carrying water for some people that will go down in history next to the KKK. Stop it.
      - stolio 12y ago
        What, stop defending people who are being forced out of society by an angry mob? No. I dislike angry mobs, it's kind of my thing.
        CamperBob2 12y ago

CamperBob2 12y ago

An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit. Maybe he shouldn't have participated in an offline bullying campaign against an entire segment of the population.

mcantelon 12y ago

While FOSS developers share political beliefs relating to the benefits of sharing software, FOSS traditionally had a culture of putting unrelated politics to the side. Strategically, FOSS couldn't afford to be seen as partisan given that it already encountered resistance from people who viewed it as a suspicious, vaguely communist, movement. Now that FOSS is established, and there are developers that have grown up with FOSS existing unchallenged in society, political agnosticism isn't seen as important. In contemporary Western culture, ideology seems to be taking the place of religion in terms of regulating morality. Social media has been instrumental in this transition. We're now seeing the emergence of global, ideological tribes that can communicate in realtime. Those who have power within these tribes are largely untouchable within the sphere of social media: they have the power to direct followers to lobby against others for perceived abuses, yet the power they wield intimidates many who would criticize them for abuse of power.

mc32 12y ago
While Foss should be to some degree apolitical, individual contributors should be allowed to express their political views. The politics and the software itself should be treated differently.
lamontcg 12y ago
I argued politics with a lot of FOSS developers on Usenet in the early 90s. They weren't apolitical. And the internal politics in FOSS were often very highly charged and often bitter. The splits that created OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, Stallman's politics with FSF and GNU bleeding over into endless licensing flamewars on the LKML mailing list, etc. You are either highly naive about FOSS or you've just defined all the vicious politics in FOSS as being just and righteous -- and that is exactly the justifications that the lynchmobs and their leaders in this article hold towards their victims as well.

MichaelGG 12y ago

There's a qualitative difference between making a joke, which probably had no bearing on her actual opinion or position on AIDS or Africa, and actively trying to deny rights to other people. It's not like she donated money to Stormfront. The equivalent comparison to Eich would be if he made a joke ending with "... Oh wait, I'm not gay" or something. (And wasn't a lot of the Mozilla thing really a disguised way at getting back at him for JavaScript?)

spb 12y ago

> The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit. It's kind of weird to think that Brendan Eich is still active in the web standards community, even though he's been forced to leave Mozilla. A man without a company.

mcantelon 12y ago
Given his past contributions to the web, it's unsurprising that he still participates and people listen to him.
- stolio 12y ago
  The people who fought for Eich's departure like to downplay just how much knowledge he carries around in his head. I think deep down they're afraid to admit just how much damage they did to Mozilla, Firefox and the entire open source community. They still think they did a good thing.
  - josephgrossberg 12y ago
    What's something concrete that you think the entire open source community lost as a result of Eich no longer heading Mozilla?
    - stolio 12y ago
      Losing one of the most important people at one of the most important open source projects is a loss in and of itself. That was twenty years of experience and technical knowledge that walked out the door. Losing one of the only people in a position to fight against DRM who had the will to do so is another blow. The end result as I see it is the social justice community gets a "victory", religious people at Mozilla learn they're not to take part in our political process, and those who were left gave up the fight against DRM. Not that they had a choice, how do you ride into battle short a CEO and a CTO, and while licking your wounds from a vicious boycott/smear campaign? Firefox circa Eich on DRM: https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad-drm/ https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad-drm/ Firefox post boycott on DRM: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...

wozniacki 12y ago

It's essentially online bullying by people that want to silence you for having an opinion that is different than their own. Do you see any breakthroughs coming in platforms and/or technologies, that tackle this problem, on the horizon ?