Lots of people are offended every day and they don't coalesce into slanderous mobs who demand the offender's termination. Further, these largely ignored offenses are generally much more overt than "accidentally making an 'ok' sign", "interviewing a black man who wishes there was more focus on violence in his community", "citing a prominent black researcher", "opening an Asian restaurant", "wearing a Chinese-inspired prom dress", "whatever the Covington Catholic students did to piss of the national media and their legions", etc. Moreover, I strongly suspect that the offended are largely progressives and not the minority groups on whose behalf they claim to take offense. This seems like a pretty novel phenomenon, isolated to one more-or-less distinct group (notable exceptions include Kaepernick or Dixie Chicks circa 2005, but these are anomalies and also "punching up" and not downward or laterally).
Kaepernick and Dixie Chicks are obvious examples of "cancel culture" coming from the right, and many people on the left are more than happy to practice this in the other direction, in spite of recognizing how wrong it was in those cases.
Now, of course "the mob" can get things wrong. We see it all the time — and it's not a progressive or "cancel culture" thing specifically. It's just a side effect of these very rapid and short-burst communication platforms that many people use these days. And I'd frankly argue that the fact that bad information is so easy spread has been used to very harmful effect not by progressives but by people like Donald Trump who require these sorts of misinformation campaigns to stay afloat politically.
Maybe you disagree with that last point.
Regardless, if you dislike hate-filled mobs reacting to bad information, then you have to admit that some sort of content control has to be applied by social media platforms themselves. Or else it will continue to happen.
That said, the other part of this is that it's very easy for a large group of people to be informed of and react against something which they perceive to be harmful. Progressives — even cis white male progressives — have every right to be offended and to express their opinions against something they perceive as harmful. I imagine if you're on the receiving end of this then, yeah, it can feel like a coordinated mob and I have no doubt that it can be downright traumatizing. But that doesn't mean it's wrong or that you've been "cancelled." It is, again, a side effect of how our social media is currently designed and I'll be honest that I don't know what the solution is. But high profile writers with huge megaphones need to be aware that people have the ability to read, share, and react to what they write. And even low-level racism, sexism, etc which they maybe could get away with in the past will now be scrutinized. But that's a good thing, because we as a culture need to be scrutinizing how certain beliefs cause people real harm.
People aren't just expressing their opinion. Instead a whole bunch of people are engaging in actual illegal harassment, when these mobs start up.
No, I am not talking about criticism. I am talking about the actual harassment that often comes out of these mobs. Harassment such as death threats to you, your friends and your family, and the like, all because someone said something dumb on twitter or whatever.
When we debate cancellation, we're mostly debating other kinds of harassment: doxxing, pressuring one's employer to terminate an employee, and defamation. Specifically, we're talking about harassment campaigns--in other words, large movements that engage in any of these behaviors for the purpose of punishing wrongthink. While these mobs have a few people who make death threats, there aren't usually large enough numbers of these threats to constitute a campaign, and even if there were, I like to think that even cancellation advocates would consider this out-of-bounds of acceptable behavior. The debate mostly revolves around the question of whether these harassment campaigns constitute criticism ("the opponents of cancellation just don't want to be criticized" and all that). Of course, harassment is never criticism, and it's always morally repugnant; however, sometimes harassment is legal either in theory (e.g., afaik there is no legal prohibition against doxing) and other times it's legal in practice (e.g., 'defamation' is illegal in theory but the burden of proof is absurdly high).
From the perspective of free speech ideals, "speech" is the expression of an idea; it may be "persuasion" but not "coercion" or "intimidation". Cancellation is both coercive and intimidating by design and by definition, so it falls outside of the boundaries of 'speech'; however, not everything that violates free speech ideals is illegal to the great glee of free speech opponents.
> When we debate cancellation, we're mostly debating other kinds of harassment:
Sure, but I think it is unfortunately that this is the only thing that people talk about.
The reality is that there is a whole bunch of stuff that is really really bad, such as death threats and the like, that will happen whenever there is a hate mob/harassment campaign that was started against someone.
When people try to defend these kinds of online mobs, they tend to focus more on the grey stuff, and they try to ignore the really bad stuff that happens. It is much easier to defend someone just "criticizing" another, instead of the much worse stuff that I've seen happen.
I don't think that someone should be able to distance themselves from the truly horrific stuff that can come out of these kinds of movements. It is much worse than people just be criticize, or whatever. And people need to recognize that those kinds of things happen.
IE, the stuff that happens can often be even worse than the, admittedly still very bad things that you brought up that I agree shouldn't happen either.
And by bringing up the even worse stuff, it gives less room for contrarians to make arguments and claims like "Well, actually, criticism isn't harassment", or "well actually, maybe the person deserved to be the target".
I agree with this to a certain extent, but any side of a large debate is going to have a handful of people who make death threats. I wouldn’t want anyone to think, for example, that criticism of antifa is invalidated or lessened because one or two critics issued threats. If there is evidence that the volume of threats is higher among cancellers than other movements, then that would be good cause for additional criticism IMO.
But everyone should condemn violence and harassment from their own ideological cohort.
> Now, of course "the mob" can get things wrong. We see it all the time — and it's not a progressive or "cancel culture" thing specifically. It's just a side effect of these very rapid and short-burst communication platforms that many people use these days.
"Getting things wrong" is a symptom of social media and misinformation; cancellation and mobbing, however, are almost unique to progressive mobs. There are conservative mobs. E.g., the campaigns against Sarah Jeong, Kaepernick, and the Dixie Chicks [circa 2005]), but these are far fewer and they punch up (and in the case of Jeong, she really should have been terminated based on NYT's own policies and track record irrespective of a mob).
Misinformation is a problem, and Donald Trump wields it to great effect, and I'll happily talk about that in a pertinent thread.
> Regardless, if you dislike hate-filled mobs reacting to bad information, then you have to admit that some sort of content control has to be applied by social media platforms themselves. Or else it will continue to happen.
I certainly think that social media companies should be held to account for the consequences of their curation policies or else they should not curate at all. I don't think they should be allowed to claim to be "dumb pipes" when it suits them even though they're transparently not "dumb pipes".
> Progressives — even cis white male progressives — have every right to be offended and to express their opinions against something they perceive as harmful. I imagine if you're on the receiving end of this then, yeah, it can feel like a coordinated mob and I have no doubt that it can be downright traumatizing. But that doesn't mean it's wrong or that you've been "cancelled."
You're quite right--anyone who argues that cancellation and criticism are equivalent would indeed be mistaken. Cancellation refers to concerted campaigns to harm someone, usually by having them terminated or defaming them. This is harassment, not criticism, even if it's not prosecuted.
> It is, again, a side effect of how our social media is currently designed and I'll be honest that I don't know what the solution is.
Social media certainly plays a role, but if it were the primary driver, we would expect these mobs to be evenly distributed across the ideological matrix.
> And even low-level racism, sexism, etc which they maybe could get away with in the past will now be scrutinized. But that's a good thing, because we as a culture need to be scrutinizing how certain beliefs cause people real harm.
"Scrutinized" is one thing. The problem is that overwhelmingly there is no evidence to support claims of 'racism' whatsoever, and yet the penalties are harsh. There's simply no evidence at all that could acquit you in the court of Twitter. Kafka couldn't write fiction like this.
