Twitter had become a powerful mechanism to lodge complaints, vid and invalid.
Companies often will immediately take notice of someone they’d dismissed via traditional channels.
Harassment, racism, juvenile immaturity, etc., are also called out via Twitter. Sometimes they are legitimate grievances, other times not.
But there is almost never any due process and as infrequently are there repercussions for liars, people looking for someone to silence, or simple malicious intent.
This is as bad as “disinformation”. It’s ruining many innocent peoples lives, but Twitter couldn’t care any less.
Psychologically this is group bullying without consequences.
> Psychologically this is group bullying without consequences.
Very much so. It's mob mentality. The group diffuses the responsibility, shielding everyone, enabling the bullying to be done without consequences.
IMO it should be illegal to fire someone based on mob actions. There should be legal repercussions to this. Either against the people who did the firing, or against twitter, for enabling mobs and bullying. There's a legit case to be made that twitter has caused significant damage to people's images and careers, that they've known about this problem for a long time and did nothing about it. Victims could get together and do a class action lawsuit.
It's scary because realistically, it might take a long time for things to change. Right now, the mob can crush anyone they feel like crushing with no consequences. Does anyone really want to live in that world? This could get worse if we let it. It might even be possible to weaponize this, pay for a botnet to get someone you don't like fired.
> Right now, the mob can crush anyone they feel like crushing with no consequences.
Not quite. Right now the mob can crush anyone if that "anyone" is at the mercy of an institution that will allow them to be crushed.
Imagine this exact same situation, except that MIT tells the Twitter mob to get lost. What would happen? The Twitter mob would howl for a couple of weeks, and then their attention would turn elsewhere. If nobody at MIT blinks, then the mob can't crush anybody.
That's true. They might even have a hard time even keeping it up for a couple of weeks if said institution doesn't even bother to respond to the twitter mob, just completely ignores them. Social media has a very short attention span, and if nothing new happens, they'll move on to something else to get outraged about.
It's still problematic that many people will lose their livelihood and have their careers damaged by this. Even if your current employer sides with you, having negative twitter mobs write about you might reduce your chances of landing the next job.
In order to make things better, I think we need to be more vocal and forceful in standing up to cancel culture. To actively reject it as a society. Just hoping that your current and future employers will maybe side with you, maybe that's a start, but it isn't enough.
I'm not sure which part of my comment makes you think of cancel culture.
My general gist was that we should make it illegal to fire someone, penalize someone or withdraw opportunities because an online or real-life mob told you to. Mob "justice" has been a problem humanity has had to deal with for centuries/millenia, but the internet somehow made people think mobs are OK, because participating is risk-free now.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, regardless of how bad/wrong another comment is or you feel it is. We're trying to avoid that here (edit: and you've unfortunately been posting like this a lot). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Companies often will immediately take notice of someone they’d dismissed via traditional channels.
Harassment, racism, juvenile immaturity, etc., are also called out via Twitter. Sometimes they are legitimate grievances, other times not.
But there is almost never any due process and as infrequently are there repercussions for liars, people looking for someone to silence, or simple malicious intent.
This is as bad as “disinformation”. It’s ruining many innocent peoples lives, but Twitter couldn’t care any less.
Psychologically this is group bullying without consequences.