Because no one everyone received 100s of death threats or was doxed on Twitter? Harassment is ver real and hard to miss in the platform.
It takes time and self-discipline to follow that rule, but discussion is much better when we do and degenerates badly when we don't. HN's goal is to be interesting. Degeneration is always the same, so isn't.
But the argument I responded to was literally:
>I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games.
Which boils down to the poster accusing people who claim they are being abused of doing it for social status, which is in essence a criticism of the weakest form of their argument. So you seem to be applying this guideline pretty inconsistently. Are you implicitly supporting the previous claim by calling out my rebuttal and not the post I was replying to? It certainly looks that way Dang.
I think I correctly inferred that the original post was dismissing very real harassment. I posted a somewhat loose counterpoint noting that many people claiming abuse are in fact the subject of death threats, which are not a "confus(ing) being corrected with persecution".
Lower in the discussion I took the time to point out California penal code, where twitter is physically located, defines death threats, regardless of intent as a crime. THis builds my point further, and I believe that the original post was not in good faith, or was not well thought out.
California law even goes on to say that even absent intent, it is a crime. Which makes sense, because otherwise anyone making such a threat could argue that they were "joking", which happens to be a favorite defense of internet troll.s
[1]https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ [2]https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html
Right now the policy is heading toward cheating by equating anything that looks like a threat with a threat. This is not writing laws with human beings in mind. Removing the requirement for intent is literally banning certain types of speech for the sole purpose of allowing for algorithmic/lazy enforcement. And because almost all of the time it's going to be a false positive it's going to selectively enforced against certain subsets of the population or used to hang someone for a different crime that didn't stick.
I don't buy the troll argument. If the message is coming from a troll it is almost by definition not a real threat and just a person trying to elicit a reaction or blowing off steam.
I'm all for going after people that make legitimate death threats over the Internet but not this way.
You don't have to for 2 reasons. 1. The law states that intent is irrelevant and 2. people already report these threats.
>Removing the requirement for intent is literally banning certain types of speech for the sole purpose of allowing for algorithmic/lazy enforcement
Not it isn't. The threat absent intent is still illegal. It is illegal precisely because it hard for humans to judge intent. And, often you can't establish intent until after someone has acted upon a threat, which does you no good. Death Threats have been illegal in the US and preceding common law systems for basically forever. It has never been protected speech in the US.
To reiterated, death threats are not protected speech and this isn't a free speech issue.
I think your definition is far too narrow, and makes distinctions without a difference. I don't believe it matters at all if the person legitimately intends to commit violence against me. It's going to have the same impact.
> I think your definition is far too narrow, and makes distinctions without a difference. I don't believe it matters at all if the person legitimately intends to commit violence against me. It's going to have the same impact.
I think both are OK. Context matters. It seems you guys would send someone to prison for life for something like https://i.imgur.com/w8H43aQ.png
No, we do not live in a world of absolutes. Remember, if it is a criminal matter, the "victim" cannot choose to not press charges. I do not trust our legal system and neither should you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Vance_Jr.
...for their parents.
I know abuse happens. In fact, it happens on all sides, but gets downplayed if it happens to politically unpopular targets. Even some of the people who've profiled themselves as anti abuse specialists are more than happy to direct their own followers to targets, share their phone numbers, address, and so on. Even without that hypocrisy, the line between legitimate use and harassment is fuzzy.
Just recently for instance, there was that BuzzFeed article about Milo Yiannopoulos, and you could see the morality police mobbing and hounding anyone who was remotely in contact with the guy as being evil nazis. The same people who cry for Twitter to stop abuse. It's only bad when the out group does it, when the in group does it you're just sharing important information and leveraging the network effects of digital media. Guilty until proven super guilty.
There was also the famous case of Steph Guthrie and Gregory Allen Elliot in Canada where simply denouncing a feminist witch hunt was enough to get the guy a long and arduous harassment case he eventually won, where his accuser claimed with a serious face he didn't have the right to defend himself against her. And he wasn't even the guy she was originally after.
Closer to home there was recently drama in the node community where, after failing to vote out a community leader for having shared the wrong opinion on codes of conduct, the persecutors themselves were found to be harassing people and advocating violence shamelessly... Which suddenly was not grounds for a reprimand.
To my knowledge, nobody is receiving hundreds of credible death threats. Rather, offhand comments like "I hope you die" or offensive memes are deliberately being spun into a moral panic because it's useful as tribal ammo. When the network effects and witch hunts go the other way, it's waved away.
The truth is somewhere in the middle, and not everything is what it seems. But I know I'm not going to get an objective assessment from the people who think it's ok to fire others for disagreement, especially not when they don't just summon social media followers, but instead recruit a cabal of journalists with much larger platforms to conduct their smears.
PS: Milo is an edgelord try hard, I don't like him. But all he is is the Shanley Kane of the right, with more talent.
While I think there is some overlap, I don't see that as being the whole story here. I've actually seen some of the threatening and terrifying things some friends and acquaintances have received. This has at times included specific threats and photos of where the target lives.
I don't see people who complain about abuse posting photo's of Milo supporters homes and encouraging people to go there and hurt them.
Great reframing here - now, it's not a discussion of how abuse on twitter is an issue, but a discussion of how abuse happens both from the right and the left. Good job of deflecting the actual point, very alt right of you.
> To my knowledge, nobody is receiving hundreds of credible death threats.
"Credible" - so, as long as the death threat is not "credible", it's ok. Uh huh. "I hope you die" does not contribute in any meaningful way to discussion. And hundreds of "I hope you die"s do not provide an abusive and suppressing environment? Suuuuure, bro.
> The truth is somewhere in the middle, and not everything is what it seems.
Everything is not what it could be, if it was different than what someone said something could not have been, when all the parties involved might or might not contribute to the problem, even if it's not an issue for all sides to understand equally when some parties are unconcerned with the facts as they lie in the instance of how it should not be in the world today.
In other words, I think your vague bullshit generator is working great.