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From a deontological perspective, a culture where punishment for wrongthink is dished out by social media is better than one where wrongthink is outright illegal. That's why I like living in America, where there are no hate speech laws.
But a thought occurred to me: from a consequentialist perspective, it'd be better to let "cancelling" be done by the state, because then people can defend themselves and a court can decide if they're truly guilty of the offense.
I'm ignorant of international affairs, so I have a question for those of you who are better-educated and/or not American: in a culture where there are hate speech laws, like Britain, are Twitter which hunts less common?
While on the one hand, there is a due process involved for criminal wrongspeech (which is distinct from wrongthink), it should also be noted that the power of the criminal law system are much beyond the powers of a twitter mob.
A twitter mob can cancel you, make you lose your employment, your reputation and so on. It is unlikely that they convince everyone to stop selling you food.
A court can sentence you to prison, confiscate your property and ultimately kill you (though that is very rare for speech acts in countries with any due process).
The relative threat of these depends on the position. I think people in the gig economy are probably less affected by twitter mobs (even if they bother to make Uber fire you, it is not like that career as a driver is an irreplaceable loss), while people who are independently wealthy are also not very affected.
The most affected are likely people who have some level of prominence and a customer base taking part in the boycott. An indie game developer is likely more affected by a cancellation from the left than a gun store owner.
Of course, prison will also not affect everyone equally. I imagine that for someone who has recently been doing time, getting another month for holocaust denial (or whatever) will have a much lower impact than for someone whose job, family and friends are all dependent on him being considered a law-abiding citizen.
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Yes and no, it's a big challenge to take on govt-backed institutional cancellers in court. In Australia we had a case where some uni students complained about not being allowed into the Indigenous-only computer lab. This angered an Indigenous administrative worker, Prior, who took them to the human rights commission, which is like an arbitrator before you get to court. The commission didn't bother to tell 2 out of 3 they were even being investigated for several years, before Prior asked them to pay $5K lest she sue. She actually managed to get 5K out of one fellow, Findlater, since he wasn't sure he could afford a legal battle.
Happily all ended well since Wood and co managed to get costs IIRC. Still a huge waste of time. I'm not quite sure of all the details here since it's a long and complex story but my general point is: how many people can afford lengthy court cases? And what kind of people will end up staffing the human rights commissions you end up with? If our conservative media didn't blow up the case into a national event, Prior probably would've been able to get away with it.
Yeah that case was disgusting. Exhibit A for why the HRC should be abolished.
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The are a lot of problems with popular cancel culture.
First of all, since there are no stated norms, there’s no way to know for sure that anything you say isn’t going to meet the cultural ban-hammer. In 2010 the issue of gay marriage was controversial, as in people were voting on it, and there were campaigns for AND against, all of which were perfectly legitimate — and would be met with horror by the high powered today. Today it’s almost I legitimate to bring up the issue of not only gay but trans identity as unworthy topics for a kindergarten classroom.
The above becomes even more of an issue when the constantly moving goalposts of acceptable speech meet the permanence of forever archives online. Things that I said twenty years ago are now basically alt-right positions. They might well have been liberal positions in 2000. Except that they still exist ready to be discovered and used.
These two situations end up creating a massive chilling effect in which people refuse to talk about issues that touch culture wars. Not because they’re polite, but because they fear the consequences of being on the record on those topics. Do you want your opinion on trans people in sports on the record? What about children getting surgeries?
Beyond that, there’s nothing really preventing the use of cancel culture as a weapon. I don’t like you, or you’re a direct competitor with me, I can take you down with an out of context post or tweet or conversation. And there’s no preventing people from applying the rules unevenly— canceling a republican for saying what democrats say with impunity.
A second issue is that really, the private sector has a lot of leverage over you that the government doesn’t. Banks and payment systems are private. They can simply refuse to do business with you. Your boss can fire you. The landlord can refuse to rent to you. If you need a private certification to do your job, the private certification company can simply not issue or renew that credential.
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The state has been far less repressive even in Europe. I am active in the nationalist scene and we use government services as much as possible. Trying to book a hotel is impossible if you are hosting an even to the right of mainstream politics. Booking a government facility is often possible. People get deplatformed from all sorts of private companies, nobody has been banned from the medical system, the water company or the post office. The government has been one of the best employers for dissident right wingers as it is really hard to fire a state employee for political engagements in their spare time.
The corporate system isn't one with set processes or rules. There is no set law for what can be on social media, there is no appeal process and there is no trial. Even with banks accounts just disappear. The state at least operates on laws and procedures. Dealing with private companies is anarchy since they just do whatever they feel like today.
For any system to function it has to be predictable. I would rather have a system that is more repressive but predictable than to have a system in which one has no ability to predict outcomes. A bad contract is often better than a user agreement that can be changed at a whim.
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We get a certain amount of performative outrage in Australia, but usually it doesn't go after people's jobs. E.g. the Melbourne comedy festival renamed the "Barry award" because Barry Humphries called transgender sex surgery "self mutilation", and there's been various unsuccessful attempts to get the name of Margaret Court Arena changed because of Court's anti-gay marriage position.
The last person that I remember getting sacked for saying the wrong thing (apart from politicians who don't count) was Israel Folau, and he ended up getting what most assume was a pretty big settlement.
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How can you separate the witch hunts from the general gravity well of American culture?
The founding userbase is going to set norms. Most of these apps are launched in America and adopted by bored Americans. I suspect this creates a bias towards stirring up bullshit along our CW fronts.
To get a control group, you’d need a platform which is decoupled from the American sphere. Russian telegram or anything dominated by China could work. Does weibo favor witch hunts? Would we even know if it did?
Weibo and yikyak are both in societies far more oppressive than Western Europe/Australia, which is another confounder.
Are their social media sites popular in the francosphere but not the USA? Or Germany? I don’t think so- WhatsApp seems closest- but that’s the only really good comparison.
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This was the basic idea behind one of Scott's old essays: Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness. Though applied to more issues than just speech.
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The difference is that in Europe both hate speech laws and labor laws are stronger and the latter often protect some form of political expression. Originally this was largely implemented so leftists couldn't be fired by their employers, but some people with wrongthink views have used them effectively. Eg. there are a few TERFs who've successfully avoided being fired in the UK via labor tribunals and legal action, and in France and Germany you get the occasional hard-right figure who successfully appeals a firing.
In the US only a handful of the most progressive states have these laws. Eg. Damore was able to get a good settlement for being fired by Google because California is iirc one of very few states where you can't be fired for political views. A lot of the BLM-related cancel mob firings in the US would be illegal in much of Western Europe.
The Maya Forstater case in the UK wasn't an employment law case ruling that she was unfairly dismissed (she was on a fixed term contract which wasn't renewed, so she had no rights under UK employment law). The court ruled that her gender-critical feminism was a secular philosophy analogous to a religion, and therefore protected under antidiscrimination laws. This makes political views a stochastically protected class (because you don't know whether a tribunal will find a given set of political views to constitute a philosophy).
Firing a permanent employee with the usual employment law protections (which, in the UK, requires 2 years' tenure) for out-of-work political speech is sufficiently straightforwardly illegal that cancelmobs don't bother asking employers to do it.
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It depends on the laws, eh? If memes are illegal, and you posted memes in a private WhatsApp group, then you're going to prison.
From a consequentialist perspective... I would rather have the First Amendment than the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to send anything "grossly offensive" over electronic communications, even if no one actually sees it or is offended by it.
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I would say that Twitter witch hunts are less common in Finland than what seems to be the case in the US, which of course might simply reflect that in a smaller nation it's harder to create the sort of a critical mass that you really need for a proper pile-on with an effect.
People also frequently get away with saying stuff in Finnish that they wouldn't in English, even before the Musk takeover; for instance, just yesterday a somewhat notorious far-right author went on one of his semi-frequent drunken twitter rampages where he typically, among other things, posts crude sex stuff to left-wing Twitter women (one example from the current one was "I would like to make you straight by wearing sandpaper around my dick while fucking you in the ass" - no, it doesn't make much sense in Finnish either) and repeatedly posting the Finnish n-word to notable black politicians, seomthing he has done, as said, several times without reprecussions. Safe to say that if an American author of any sort did that in English their posting career would be cut short. (He also called me a "repulsive walking colon" during this bout, quite a mild example.)
The most recent free speech case here was, of course, the case of conservative politician MP Päivi Räsänen, once again acquitted after an onerous legal process.
Or - as is my theory - witch hunts are deprived of much of their power if what they ask for is explicitly illegal due to well established workers' rights legistlation. When most people outright can't be "canceled" the "cancellation meme" loses much of its power.
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What were the comments? This reporting is ludicrous. You might say the media gladly provides the censorship the state ultimately refrained from.
You mean Räsänen, right? The comments have been pored over multiple times by Finnish media in Finnish, such as in this article by Yle (ie. Finnish state media). The comments are also often quite extensive, need context, and one of the main issues was that the prosecutor had its own interpretations of them that were quite in variance with the literal statements.
There's an English-language liveblog of the latest trial here, they go over the statements to some degree here.
This is exactly what viewpoint censorship looks like. Nothing but a hodgepodge of accusations that amount to not loving the gays enough in one’s heart. This is really great if you're trying to foster a fearful atmosphere, where no one really knows where the line is, and any denunciation against a neighbour can bear fruit.
Let's say someone wanted to cancel/censor you or me. In the absence of a smoking gun, the prosecution would provide vast disparate swaths of comments and we'd be endlessly arguing about the context.
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This is a perfect example of why having free speech as a core tenet is superior to all other approaches. Having some apparatchik come up with dishonest interpretations of statements to prosecute someone for wrongthink is just such an obvious failure mode of hate speech laws that I have trouble believing that this result is anything other than the intended outcome.
If 2020 has taught me anything at all, it’s that bureaucrats and politicians do not consider even the most obvious failure modes of their hare-brained schemes.
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...the intended outcome is to prosecute and then acquit?
Yes: the fact that you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, empowers the bureaucracy to overstep its authority in a way that even upper-middle-class citizens can't fight on their own. Since the people in the bureaucracy aren't ever held responsible for these decisions (there's no effective individual legal mechanism for this) they can do this with impunity (case in point: the Kyle Rittenhouse case).
Civil rights organizations are designed to deal with this specific problem- so if a bureaucracy decides to do this, the citizen in trouble at least has their typically-ruinous legal fees taken care of (and people willing to hire them afterwards). They're still not compensated for the time they spent in prison or on trial, though.
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The intended outcome is to harass people over their views. I can't imagine looking at such a blatantly awful prosecution and thinking, "well, justice done in the end". I am, once again, glad to live in a country that's at least closer to free.
I'm not saying I'm agreeing with the prosecution or how this case has been handled, or that the agitation laws currently work fine considering they've allowed this procedure to go this far (though this might also serve as a precedent for further cases to not be processed this way, even in our common-law system), I was just saying that presumably the intended outcome for the prosecution wouldn't be just to harass but to actually convict. Räsänen case wasn't even my main point anyway, and I'm not necessary saying there's any particular connection between formal hate crime laws and social media culture.
Right, but I think his point was that even if they'd prefer to convict (maximum punishment), they'll cheerfully settle for causing years of pain (guaranteed minimum punishment). Even if you (the defendant) win, you lose, and people will think twice about that kind of wrongthink in the future. The intended outcome is to suppress this kind of speech.
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As far as I can tell in the UK you have both cancel mobs, and the police knocking on your door for mean Tweets.
Indeed. Caroline Farrow is a great example. She is (was) being harassed by a trans woman, but for the crime of tweeting unfavorably about a trans person, police showed up at her house and arrested her in front of her children, rather than the person who was harassing her. This is on top of her being socially canceled.
In general, nothing about government prosecution of cancel culture precludes private, social prosecution of cancel culture. Unlike the laws on monopoly of physical, men-with-guns violence, there's no law saying that only the government can deal consequences to one accused of wrongthink. It would be great if there was, but for now, we're in the uncanny valley of half-measures where we have the downsides of both implementations and neither of the upsides.
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This depends on having a state apparatus that is even slightly trustworthy to determine what is wrongthink and who is guilty. One can arrange their life to be de facto uncancellable, but you can't really make yourself immune to state persecution. I'll take my chances with the Twitter mob.
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