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Comment by robjan | Hacker News Reader

The entity who performs the act of cancelling isn't the employer who fires the "offender", but the angry mob who lobbies the employer to fire said person.

The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information and fact checking.

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> The entity who performs the act of cancelling isn't the employer who fires the "offender", but the angry mob who lobbies the employer to fire said person.

Boycotting, publicly denouncing or even attempting to convince an employer to fire someone falls within the bounds of legitimate free speech. The effects of cancel culture lie within the power of employers, platform owners, etc. The angry mob isn't putting a gun to anyone's head, they're just complaining loudly.

>The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information and fact checking.

Which would, itself, be cibsuderedd Orwellian and denounced as an attempt to create a Ministry of Truth to punish wrongthink, all while questioning who gets to define what "falsehood" or "exaggeration" is, and who watches the watchers?

That's a solution, but it's one that the opponents of cancel culture would probably vehemently oppose as being no different than cancel culture itself.

If work in the US weren't "at will", wouldn't an employer be legally unable to fire someone just because of an angry mob?

(:philosoraptor:)

Probably, but it is, so they do.

And not to get too "political" with it, but the camp opposed to cancel culture tends to be right-wing, and tends to frame their opposition as being left-wing (using US standards.) Right-wing people also tend to support at-will employment as an expression of right-libertarian/anti-regulation principles.

This may be why the discourse around cancel culture tends to be framed in such a way that the threat is the speech of leftists/liberals/progressives, etc. rather than the power of corporate entities to enforce arbitrary consequences.

> The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information

We do that already, specifically if it has the effect of harming someone. See, defamation law.

But most of what is objected to about “cancel culture” is dissemination of true facts about people as well as statements of personal preferences about how others should react to those facts, not dissemination of false or exaggerated information.

> The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information and fact checking.

Everyone seems to agree on the need for this except the people who are spread the most misinformation and the people who want to make them happy.

Again, it seems like we're all hostages of the whim of a few social media CEOs.

A USPS letter carrier once asked me to say "bulk mail" instead of "junk mail." Similarly, I believe social media CEOs don't say "the angry mob" but instead refer to "highly engaged active users" (who, for a modest sum, may receive your targeted message).

It would be ironic if it turned out some huge percentage of observed echo chambers were bots and alts. Unfortunately, I may be too optimistic on that point.

pre-internet sock puppetry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn

non-internet spontaneous angry mobs include rock fans on 12 July 1979, serbs on 24 April 1987, etc.

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