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Comment by vaer-k | Hacker News Reader

The problem is previously we didn't listen to victims, and allowed them to be silenced. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and we are listening unconditionally, but (occasionally) bad actors are taking advantage of our good intentions. How do we find balance?

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This is essentially why civilization has legal systems and courts. Unfortunately, legal systems and courts don't scale to internet (global) scale. You'll be "dead," metaphorically speaking, of an internet mob attack before your lawyer even calls you back.

We drastically need significant reform of our court system. We simply don't have the capacity to address the current demanda on the court system (which is why we need ao many plea deals.) We certainly don't have the slack we need in the system to be able to drastically expand the scope.

Nah, we just need some real mods on social media. We have them literally everywhere else.

The very same people that are complaining about cancel culture will without a shred of irony start to complain about moderator censorship.

I've touched on this in another comment, in another thread - if we are going to assume that people have the right to say whatever the hell they want, how do you reconcile that with the rights of a mob to pigpile someone for speaking their mind?

The short answer is: "You can't."

The long answer is: "You can't, because when two groups are in such a conflict, you either explicitly censor one, or implicitly censor the other."

Please don't make assumptions about what people believe like you are doing here. It limits your ability to engage in any sort of meaningful discussion and encourages more of the pointless partisan bickering that is causing such great harm to our country.

You can make the same sort of point without such language. Rather than asserting that "everyone who beleives X also believes Y and that is contradictory", you should assert "believing X and Y together is contradictory".

You're right, I should have used different language to make this point.

I'm not particularly convinced we've solved listening to genuine victims particularly well tbh.

Reasserting and making active commitments to 'justice for /all/'.

Check the facts and think for yourself.

In this case the accusation is that the accused used completely anonymous means to harass the accuser. How the accuser knows that the accused is responsible is not stated.

The problems here seem obvious.

I think there's another layer here with the virtue signalling side of it, and that depends on the exact communities/movements that a person is a part of. Like, where is the cancellation of Marjorie Taylor Greene over the absurd Holocaust comments? Matt Gaetz claims to be "cancelled" but could appear on multiple prime time cable news shows basically whenever he wants [1]. It was a huge battle getting Bill O'Reilly off the air, and he walked with a $32M severance, more money than most normal people see in a lifetime— see the movie Bombshell for a dramatization of that story. These people aren't cancellable because they're already powerful, protected, and the audience they have doesn't care about the complaints (or revels in them).

Maybe it's something of a reaction to these frustrations that some progressive circles have adopted this knee-jerk zero tolerance stance, where no crime or perceived crime is too small to attempt to silence someone for. YouTube film commentator Lindsay Ellis went through a bunch of this recently, and basically dealt with it by making a 1.5 hour video where she itemizes everything she's been accused of, and drinks her way through explaining and apologizing for all of it (including, wretchedly, sharing about her own history with a sexual assault). [2]

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7aWz8q_IM4

The issue isn't bad actors taking advantage and the issue isn't listening to victims. We should absolutely keep listening unconditionally and there will always be bad actors.

The problem is how we respond to what we hear. The core casue of the issue is treating online vigilante outrage mobs as an acceptable activity.

Problem is, for every victim, there are at least 10 people willing to fake victimhood for the attention alone.

This is absolutely not true. You are so far from correct that you do not seem to be operating in good faith. If you are operating in good faith, please go do some basic research.

I meant "on Twitter", but that's also an exaggeration.

Certainly not in the real world. I was very angry yesterday, I wish I could delete that comment

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