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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

> Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental.

I found this[1] article very interesting. Basically, only 2% of American adults generate over 80% of all tweets. "Cancel Culture" really is run by a few extremists who have a louder voice than everyone else.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

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100% this, there is an extremely small, extremely vocal minority which gets amplified by social media and the media tends to report on this small group as its views are outrageous and generate outrage which in turn generate clicks and ad revenue for those outlets. Boring dependable/sensible government is not something that generates huge ad revenue.

That may be so, but you don’t want to end up being an unwitting victim.

One of the first instances early on on Twitter was that young marketing woman going to South Africa making a sarcastic anti-racism tweet before boarding only to learn after landing a brouhaha was brewing leading to her firing because the mob wanted to see it as racist.

I guess you’re talking about the IAC PR director publishing the following:

  Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!

if you’re directing PR for internet companies and post something like this from a public profile associated with your workplace - yeah, I wouldn’t call them an “unwitting victim”, and I think they would have lost that job if they made the same joke on a talk show in the 90s.

That being said, I find it crazy how easily people get fired with no recourse in general in the USA. Seems like even personal dislike from management is legal grounds for termination?

It’s in poor taste. Should not have been tweeted. It was an anti-racist commentary, but you know the mob, throw them some fresh meat.

In firing her the company is complicit in casting her as racist when her sarcasm was pointed at low brow racism. But that escaped the shamers and cancellors. They were too busy frothing at the mouth.

> In firing her the company is complicit in casting her as racist

No, in firing her the company is complicit in furthering the idea that the duty of a PR representative to their employer is to have and exercise good judgement when it regards public relations for the firm.

That’s an ex-post excuse. They got blowback from her attempt at exposing people’s preconceptions. They didn’t like it. They caved in to the mob. PR isn’t perfect. They make mistakes judging public reaction to comms for their clients. Unless it’s super bad, they don’t lose their jobs in public. There was no opportunity fir her to explain her side. Nope. Hot potato.

Companies burry all kinds of misdeeds for their staff. So it’s not at all congruent.

> They got blowback from her attempt at exposing people’s preconceptions. They didn’t like it.

Yes, “actions that produced blowback that the company doesn't like” are the definition of a PR failure. When PR is your whole job, that's a big deal.

> Companies burry all kinds of misdeeds for their staff

You can't bury it when it is public and tied to both the employee and the company from the outset.

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

I'm having a hard time seeing this as 'anti-racism', even if the 'punchline' hinges on the uncomfortable truth that black africans are disproportionately the victims of HIV, it is very much punching down.

Is it in very bad taste? absolutely yes. Is it something that needed to be #1 trending on twitter? no. Is it something that should noticeably alter the path of someone's life? Not in any world I would choose to live in.

I do agree with your premise, a single joke in very bad taste by a non-public entity is a non-event. I think that we all have something somewhere in our closet that could be twisted against us by cancel culture.

The scariest part is that there is no redemption. A picture or recording of you doing something reprehensible when you were 17 will be used against you years later. Cancel culture needs to recognize that people grow and change. We need to recognize that young people say and do stupid shit without understanding the full context of what they are doing, or the potential consequences.

We are in agreement. As I mention elsewhere. It’s in poor taste. It relied on if not racist at least negative stereotypes to expose the bad stereotype and the assumed privilege that a type of person gets AIDS. Her company panicked.

If she been accused of murder they would have offered more sympathy. They’d have probably helped with a lawyer, etc. but here? Oh no, the mob singled you out. You’re on your own, bye now!

> The scariest part is that there is no redemption. A picture or recording of you doing something reprehensible when you were 17 will be used against you years later

“Redemption” is not the same thing as “freedom from accountability due to having escaped accountability for a sufficiently long time”.

There is certainly an argument that for at least some forms of accounts one ought to have the latter as well as the former (hence statutes of limitations), but they are distinct and radically different concepts.

When your job is PR, when you have a PR disaster you might have trouble finding another job until you figure out how to demonstrate to future employers that you have learned something from the experience.

This 2% are the are same folks who will berate you on Reddit for saying you prefer partners with jobs.

At the end of the day you can decide to argue with angry people or not. Another perk of being social media free

The French revolution was effected by a relatively small mob of Parisians, not at all representative of the rural France that was the majority. Still, minority or not, the heads rolled.

To be a bit more precise, that small mob invented head rolling, since the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror is when the guillotine first became widely adopted.

It's not even clear that those extremists have a louder voice in and of themselves. Nobody really listens to them except their opponents, who amplify them because they think it makes the entire progressive culture look bad.

New slogan: "We are the 98%"

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