It’s an article that covers how misinformation on social media can explode and be harmful while using the recent Ellie Kemper news as an example. It’s less about cancel culture and more about how...
It’s an article that covers how misinformation on social media can explode and be harmful while using the recent Ellie Kemper news as an example. It’s less about cancel culture and more about how this stuff spreads like wildfire, including to “news outlets” like Slate and Buzzfeed, without any fact checking being done.
Though the article does comment on cancel culture in the beginning, and the author says something that I happen to agree with:
there is a third school of thought regarding cancel culture that merits consideration. Perhaps the problem isn’t so much “cancel culture” — neither the right-wing pundits cynically using it as a tool to incite rage, nor the people advocating for accountability themselves — as it is the platforms that set the stage for cancellation to take place, that amplify barely fact-checked, incendiary narratives without any consideration of context.
I've been banging the "it is the platforms that are bad" narrative for a while, but I don't think we can entirely erase the agency of individuals in stuff like this. Just look at this piece on The...
I've been banging the "it is the platforms that are bad" narrative for a while, but I don't think we can entirely erase the agency of individuals in stuff like this.
Just look at this piece on The Root about it. The author takes palpable glee at the opportunity to drag Kemper here, and it's really not an issue of fact checking. She isn't saying anything that isn't factual and she isn't missing any context. She just has the KKK framing and willfully, intentionally adopts it because that lets her use her comparatively larger platform to get her shots in. This is clearly journalistic malpractice here.
And it repeats with every person on Twitter. When it happened to Lindsay Ellis you could, again, read the fun and enjoyment from people participating in the pile on. These are shitty people who get off on cyberbullying targets of opportunity. It's a joke and a pastime for them and I think we really do need to spread some awareness about this behavior being out of line, refuse to engage with it ourselves, and calling it out when people in our circles engage in it. We've seen this dynamic play out in Gamergate too honestly. It is the exact same mechanism at play. The social justice angle just gives people a thin pretext to feel good about doing something they know is bad.
Agreed, 100%. I'd go a little bit further and say that attitude is even what led to GamerGate taking off as much as it did. I think the earliest instance of it I was aware of was ShitRedditSays...
It's a joke and a pastime for them and I think we really do need to spread some awareness about this behavior being out of line, refuse to engage with it ourselves, and calling it out when people in our circles engage in it. We've seen this dynamic play out in Gamergate too honestly. It is the exact same mechanism at play.
Agreed, 100%.
I'd go a little bit further and say that attitude is even what led to GamerGate taking off as much as it did. I think the earliest instance of it I was aware of was ShitRedditSays (remember before "SJW", there was "SRS" on reddit?). The puppeteers of GamerGate must have seen the rising frustration that people had with getting made fun of openly and took advantage of it. I say this because I was one of the people on the made fun of side and could have easily been radicalized into going with GamerGate if it wasn't for other factors that were more important to me, which landed me firmly on the anti-GamerGate side of things. I remember the frustration I felt that the immediate response to my ignorance wasn't education or patience, but instead just mockery. I'm not surprised that so many people responded to it with overt hostility and aggression.
There's a similar approach behind the Love Bomb tactic (which Lindsay Ellis also flagged in one of her JK Rowling videos), when right wingers sympathetically message left wing celebrities to say "see, isn't the left bad too?" and have the celebrity agree because they're sick and tired of the abuse they're getting for relatively little to no reason (e.g. Killer Mike after that gun ownership snafu).
The Root seems to be the worst outlet connected to the A.V. Club family. I don’t know why it is the way that it is, or where they get their writers from. But it’s definitely mostly elongated...
The Root seems to be the worst outlet connected to the A.V. Club family. I don’t know why it is the way that it is, or where they get their writers from. But it’s definitely mostly elongated twitter threads published on a website.
I agree with you that there are people that love to participate in pile-ups and cancel culture. I remember when the John Mulaney divorce news broke out, this was before the news came out that he was dating Olivia Munn, there were people saying that they couldn’t wait for Mulaney to become a racist comedian. For no other reason than they wanted to cancel him but they wanted to feel morally right about cancelling him, since there’s nothing morally wrong about getting a divorce.
I would say that most of them are teenagers who get their entire worldview from Twitter, but there’s also a lot of twenty and thirty year olds doing this type of stuff. Which is just sad.
Well yeah, The Root is well known to be openly racist.
Just look at this piece on The Root about it. The author takes palpable glee at the opportunity to drag Kemper here, and it's really not an issue of fact checking. She isn't saying anything that isn't factual and she isn't missing any context. She just has the KKK framing and willfully, intentionally adopts it because that lets her use her comparatively larger platform to get her shots in. This is clearly journalistic malpractice here.
Well yeah, The Root is well known to be openly racist.
My friend sent me a "breaking news" TikTok about this and it instantly made me suspicious enough to actually look in to it. There's this much more interesting story behind the "KKK" lede where it...
My friend sent me a "breaking news" TikTok about this and it instantly made me suspicious enough to actually look in to it.
There's this much more interesting story behind the "KKK" lede where it turns out Kemper is from the wealthiest family in Missouri, the daughter of the CEO of Commerce Bank (well, it's holding company), and that there's this whole weird archaic event that seems to be about showing off your daughter to the other wealthy people in Missouri.
The event's connection to the KKK seems very loose. The racist past of the event seems concrete, but also in a way that kind of goes hand to hand with and indicts everything historical from Missouri. There's an interesting story about historical wealth and power in the state, class differences, traditions, and how the upper class lives in Missouri -- but it gets obscured by the more flashy (and more wrong) KKK part.
I don't know that this article warrants its own submission, but it's a good read related to this. Insight from an activist who helped "infiltrate" the Veiled Prophet in the 70s. I say "infiltrate"...
I don't know that this article warrants its own submission, but it's a good read related to this. Insight from an activist who helped "infiltrate" the Veiled Prophet in the 70s. I say "infiltrate" because they really just crashed a party and briefly/literally unmasked the prophet himself, which doesn't seem to have had much of an impact.
Honest meta-question: why is this in ~tech? I mean, I guess it's kind of related because this wouldn't have happened without the ripple effects only possible with social media (Twitter), and...
Honest meta-question: why is this in ~tech? I mean, I guess it's kind of related because this wouldn't have happened without the ripple effects only possible with social media (Twitter), and social media is related to technology. But the article and the surrounding drama seems to deal more with sociology and less with the actual technology behind Twitter.
It’s an article that covers how misinformation on social media can explode and be harmful while using the recent Ellie Kemper news as an example. It’s less about cancel culture and more about how this stuff spreads like wildfire, including to “news outlets” like Slate and Buzzfeed, without any fact checking being done.
Though the article does comment on cancel culture in the beginning, and the author says something that I happen to agree with:
I've been banging the "it is the platforms that are bad" narrative for a while, but I don't think we can entirely erase the agency of individuals in stuff like this.
Just look at this piece on The Root about it. The author takes palpable glee at the opportunity to drag Kemper here, and it's really not an issue of fact checking. She isn't saying anything that isn't factual and she isn't missing any context. She just has the KKK framing and willfully, intentionally adopts it because that lets her use her comparatively larger platform to get her shots in. This is clearly journalistic malpractice here.
And it repeats with every person on Twitter. When it happened to Lindsay Ellis you could, again, read the fun and enjoyment from people participating in the pile on. These are shitty people who get off on cyberbullying targets of opportunity. It's a joke and a pastime for them and I think we really do need to spread some awareness about this behavior being out of line, refuse to engage with it ourselves, and calling it out when people in our circles engage in it. We've seen this dynamic play out in Gamergate too honestly. It is the exact same mechanism at play. The social justice angle just gives people a thin pretext to feel good about doing something they know is bad.
Agreed, 100%.
I'd go a little bit further and say that attitude is even what led to GamerGate taking off as much as it did. I think the earliest instance of it I was aware of was ShitRedditSays (remember before "SJW", there was "SRS" on reddit?). The puppeteers of GamerGate must have seen the rising frustration that people had with getting made fun of openly and took advantage of it. I say this because I was one of the people on the made fun of side and could have easily been radicalized into going with GamerGate if it wasn't for other factors that were more important to me, which landed me firmly on the anti-GamerGate side of things. I remember the frustration I felt that the immediate response to my ignorance wasn't education or patience, but instead just mockery. I'm not surprised that so many people responded to it with overt hostility and aggression.
There's a similar approach behind the Love Bomb tactic (which Lindsay Ellis also flagged in one of her JK Rowling videos), when right wingers sympathetically message left wing celebrities to say "see, isn't the left bad too?" and have the celebrity agree because they're sick and tired of the abuse they're getting for relatively little to no reason (e.g. Killer Mike after that gun ownership snafu).
The Root seems to be the worst outlet connected to the A.V. Club family. I don’t know why it is the way that it is, or where they get their writers from. But it’s definitely mostly elongated twitter threads published on a website.
I agree with you that there are people that love to participate in pile-ups and cancel culture. I remember when the John Mulaney divorce news broke out, this was before the news came out that he was dating Olivia Munn, there were people saying that they couldn’t wait for Mulaney to become a racist comedian. For no other reason than they wanted to cancel him but they wanted to feel morally right about cancelling him, since there’s nothing morally wrong about getting a divorce.
I would say that most of them are teenagers who get their entire worldview from Twitter, but there’s also a lot of twenty and thirty year olds doing this type of stuff. Which is just sad.
Well yeah, The Root is well known to be openly racist.
My friend sent me a "breaking news" TikTok about this and it instantly made me suspicious enough to actually look in to it.
There's this much more interesting story behind the "KKK" lede where it turns out Kemper is from the wealthiest family in Missouri, the daughter of the CEO of Commerce Bank (well, it's holding company), and that there's this whole weird archaic event that seems to be about showing off your daughter to the other wealthy people in Missouri.
The event's connection to the KKK seems very loose. The racist past of the event seems concrete, but also in a way that kind of goes hand to hand with and indicts everything historical from Missouri. There's an interesting story about historical wealth and power in the state, class differences, traditions, and how the upper class lives in Missouri -- but it gets obscured by the more flashy (and more wrong) KKK part.
I don't know that this article warrants its own submission, but it's a good read related to this. Insight from an activist who helped "infiltrate" the Veiled Prophet in the 70s. I say "infiltrate" because they really just crashed a party and briefly/literally unmasked the prophet himself, which doesn't seem to have had much of an impact.
Honest meta-question: why is this in ~tech? I mean, I guess it's kind of related because this wouldn't have happened without the ripple effects only possible with social media (Twitter), and social media is related to technology. But the article and the surrounding drama seems to deal more with sociology and less with the actual technology behind Twitter.
I put it in ~news, since it seemed the most appropriate, but then it was moved.