When the mob can literally set you on fire, then you should be worried about the mob, but, crucially, the mob on social media can't actually hurt you; they can only convince other people to hurt you. It's those other people, the people who hold positions of responsibility and authority -- your boss, your dean, anybody with the power to hire or fire you -- who are really responsible here. The shame of cancel culture is entirely theirs.
People have lost their jobs, gotten death threats, had personal information shared, been swatted, and so on when the mob didn't like what you said on Twitter (or Facebook or ...).
The mob may start on Twitter, but it goes offline. They can call your work, boss, friends, and other to harass them. No one “powerful” can stand up to a mob for long.
When faced with an unstoppable force, no one will be your immovable object. Everyone you think cares about you will eventually cave in and throw you under the bus.
Likening modern 'woke' mob outrage on Twitter to Maoist China is the correct analogy. The purpose of being 'cancelled' is not any kind of real social justice. It's the enforcement of an ideological orthodoxy.
Never apologise to the mob. Even a superficial understanding of game theory shows you that you have nothing to gain from the self-flagellation involved in a public apology. Remember, You'll never be forgiven. I've never seen an example where the mob has pursued entirely altruistic goals. It's the witch-trials of the 21st century. Nothing more.
Twitter mobs have gotten people fired, ostracized from society and the cops called on them. Twitter mobs are extremely powerful, but many don't see that because they agree with the mob.
Humans love mobs. It makes them feel empowered, and gives them greater "authority" than they would otherwise have. We have seen mobs throughout human history cause all sorts of horrible incidents. But the difference between a physical mob and an internet mob, is that in a physical mob you can be identified, you are still risking some of your own safety, and you can usually immediately see the consequences of your own actions.
In an internet mob you can remain anonymous, you don't need to actually carry out any of the threats you make (others may do it for you, eg calling for somebody to be fired), and you aren't risk any of your own reputation.
I absolutely loath seeing mainstream media write about what happens on twitter/social media. It magnifies the mob far beyond reason. "Twttier in an outrage", "Internet blows up" it's just insane. Not only does it give the impression that vast majority of users on a platform are on the same side (they're not), it gives them pseudo-credibility. And unfortunately, the next step is for corporations to take them seriously.
The more I see these stories and see how social media has shaped and is shaping the 21st century, the more I wish it was never created. It was fun at first. But the dark side of humanity has been given a power it should never have had.
It does confuse me that these mobs have such power on decision makers at companies and media outlets like this. The interesting thing about Twitter "mobs" is that if you look away from the computer screen or hit the button on the side of your phone, they are suddenly silent and may as well not exist. You can, in fact, log out of Twitter and never log back in again. Most of the time doing so will have zero long term negative impact, since the mob is fickle, trapped in their filter bubbles, and will move onto the next outrage in days if not hours.
The mobs that cause doxing or have credible threats of harm upon on individuals (like job loss or even violence) do in fact wield incredible, terrifying power though.
In the most polite way possible: these comments are not well-considered.
There are such things as mobs that arise during or after sporting events, you know. (What's the majority/minority
balance there?) So Twitter mobs, too, are very much a thing—no need for a stretch of
the imagination. The threats both of these pose are squarely in the category
of things to be concerned about wrt the dangers of mobs. And to argue about
things like the "classical liberal [...] belief that speech can't harm people" (i.e. that the belief is wrong)
while asserting that there is no threat of harm posed by clear-cut examples of mobs on Twitter is to talk out of both sides of the mouth.
> You can argue that cancellations are mobs, but the existence of mobs doesn't
"mob rule" make.
With the ability to rationalize thoughts like this, is there even any point of
trying to approach this with reason?
> Or even the example of the truck driver, where the "mob" actually
backpedaled and apologized, but the authority figure didn't. You can fault
the "mob" for acting quickly, yes, but you can't fault it for aiming to
sentence people unjustly.
Sorry, the obvious attempt to sidestep here is too obvious. Reddit may have
the best of intentions in trying to find the Boston bombers, but that doesn't
make it any less exemplary of a mob in action.
The whole attempt to narrowly recognize mobs only when a minority is
threatened is stultifying, and your entire line of reasoning is just begging
the question. Tyranny of the majority is a thing, but they're definitions
that overlap in their examples; they're not synonymous, even if the overlap is
significant.
In a prison, the inmates outnumber the guards, but that doesn't preclude a mob
mentality taking hold if the guards' behavior turned mob-like (or, say, police
behavior e.g. during in a protest where outnumbered by prostestors). At the
same time, mob rule remains a possibility in the scenario involving the
reverse. The numbers stay the same, but in each there's a plausible picture
of mobs and mob rule. Majority/minority is not only not the defining factor,
it's a footnote.
The actual key to understanding mobs, mob rule, and the dangers they pose
comes from recognizing the parallels between the bystander effect (where the
undesirable outcome is most commonly inaction) to mob mentality (where the
undesirable outcome is most commonly action)—it's diffusion of
responsibility/accountability, mixed with other things, case-specific.
> But I can say that certain cases were bad while also believing that the net
impact of the culture that did bad things is good, or is moving us forward.
This is just another attempt to make an illegal move, like the sidestepping
above. This time, it's implicit false dichotomy. Keep the good while
eliminating the bad—that's what's in the argument to handle this without the
chilling effect that cancel culture has.
> either you start from the liberal position that cancellation is just speech,
and deserves exactly as much protection as any other speech
All right, so you don't accurately characterize the totality of diversity on
your opponents' side and now it's come to strawmanning, then (or at least a
failure to steelman—opting to attack the weakest of ones' opponents positions
instead). There's a (possibily majority [hah!]) position among those speaking
against cancellation culture that doesn't involve removing these protections
of the speech. Yascha Mounk can float the idea of various things that involve
the law being used to enforce drastic changes to the permissibility of
cancellation efforts, but it doesn't mean everyone with a like mind about the
dangers of cancellation culture agrees with it. Present an argument against
those who acknowledge that the speech/actions are protected but should
voluntarily be avoided rather than wielded.
Popehat may be widely cited, but the arguments on this topic never fail to not be facile.
I think when individuals or even companies roll over, it's because the mob's attack can be quite scary. It's easy to point at the people who stay their ground and say, "see, they didn't cave and did just fine."
But that's an obervation we make in hindsight, and without knowing it was like for the targets. At the time, their phone is probably ringing off the hook, media are calling, etc., and they have no idea when the attack will end or if people are getting fired, advertisers withdrawing or any of that.
I'll applaud anyone, left, right or other-vectored, who stands up to mobs, though. I'm not a fan of the phrase "cancel culture," but it gets one thing right: it is a cultural development, both the culture of outrage and the culture of appeasing the mob. The injustice of a, outraged mob declaring itself judge, jury and executioner only works if targets try to appease them. So while the culture of outrage is a hard problem because it's diffuse, anyone who refuses to accept that injustice is has an outsized effect in pushing back against the appeasement side of it.
People do something shitty all the time, like literally all the time. But public condemnation is the new normal. But nothing you do will prevent that from happening. Mob is just being mob. The mob mentality is spreading like a disease.
It really depends on what your goals are the right way to engage if you get mobbed.
I operate on two rules of thumb in this space:
1) you have absolutely zero control over the mob. The mob is a force of nature. They will decide you are the most important thing for several hours, and then they will change their minds. Or they won't. Point is, you can't control it.
2) The most important thing is to not be surprised by a mob about yourself. If you're going to get mobbed, may it at least happen because of something you intended to communicate, not because of a flippant thought shouted into the global-cast megaphone that is Twitter.
Internet mobs only take down powerful people and companies when those companies are built to facilitate those mobs.
Internet mobs have completely failed to take down any number of other bad CEOs, or influence the policy of any nation state in a significantly positive way.
The disconnect is leverage. You can rant all you like online, but corporations only care about sales and the bottom line. Unless Team Rant has a measurable effect there you have no real influence at all.
Internet mobs have been good at shaming middle- and low-status individuals who attract envy and/or who say the wrong thing in public. Careers and reputations have certainly been damaged or destroyed.
But don't confuse that kind of schoolyard game for political or economic influence - they're completely different things.
Mobs have always been with us, to where stoning appears at least as far back as ancient times, so the phenomenon of twitter mobs isn't new. The people behind them are the same archetypes they have always been. Consider who is absent from mob formation: honest, grounded, level headed, principled, honourable, responsible, good intentioned, admirable, courageous, adjusted, and other traditionally virtuous people, then look at who is left over. The formation of a mob is always the same, one person channeling the latent hurtness and sensitized aggression of others against their target for the perverse and morbid satisfaction of having done so, and to have been at the center of it.
The question we haven't asked (and I haven't either) is what socities or cultures of good people have done to mitigate pools of hysteria forming like these in the past.
We know that people actuated by attention are untrustworthy, and treating them as anything other than edgy entertainment is probably harmful socially. You can't fix the mobs, but you can create cultures that isolate them and don't tolerate or believe them in principle, no matter what their cause is. If you can't do that, you can at least respect people who do. I feel like this isn't a new problem.
The real issue is not the mob, it's the companies kneeling over to bad PR.
We've already got mobs in our streets fighting for X and Y (I won't go politically into whether the reasons are right or wrong), except governments (mostly) don't care about bad PR from a mob. The real issue is that for any single thing, Twitter mobs can rally and ask for the firing of anybody.
Look at our most recents "mobs": DongleGate, libUvGate,... The common denominator is that all people participating in these lack any empathy to see human beings as anything else than a commodity and don't care about any kind of consequences while companies just fire people because "we have to issue some kind of punishments".
Sure, there have to be consequences for "bad behavior" or anything that hurts the company's public image, but is firing at the first offense really the only way to punish a bad employee?
Well, good job tech scene! We've disrupted the scene and built Witch-Hunt-As-A-Service. Free of charge!
I think making laws to stop a mob from forming would be very hard, complex, and have lots of hairy side effects. My idea instead is to look at it from an employer's side: one should not be able to fire somebody on the spot for fuzzy PR reasons. So the mob can still form, but the ultimate consequence, a termination, in most cases would be impossible.
As to stopping mobs from forming or doing their damage, I strongly believe social networks can do quite a lot too.
For every time people pat themselves on the back about getting some nazi fired, consider there's others where the mob gets it wrong (see: Reddit and the Boston bombers).
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