I hesitate to support new laws, given their propensity to be abused, but I do want to point out that, quite apart from that, I think this wouldn't work. Cancellation mobs are based solely in the desire to feel righteous about being sadistic. I wasn't sure about that until recently -- I would have said "sometimes" or "usually" and not "solely" until the last few days. But if you look at the reaction from people on the right to the apology from the Olympic boxer, you can see that I'm correct on this. The same people who got nearly orgasmic over what happened to the Home Depot Lady, writing intense, moralistic justifications for using cancellation as a weapon for the "moral" side, are really mad at her.
That's entirely backwards if they truly see cancellation as an effective, strategic weapon and not just a vehicle for sadistic punishment of The Other. It amounts to spending weeks singing the praises of a gun as the best possible gun for killing one's enemies and then getting *really, really upset* at someone shot by that gun -- for bleeding!
So while I understand your strategy, I think it wouldn't work because the behavior isn't based in rationally weighing consequences. It's based on pure sadism. And sadism is not something that the government can control via law just because the consequences of expressing it are bad for society. It would fail, having terrible unintended consequences, for the same reason that a law making divorce nearly impossible to get would fail, having unintended consequences. The government cannot make people moral enough to not be sadistic, just as it cannot make people moral enough to keep commitments to love, honor, and cherish until death.
That is very psychologically insightful about cancellation and sadism. I appreciate that.
That said, I don't see why the motivation impinges on whether or not a law should exist. People are going to be homicidal whether or not there is a law that gives severe punishments to murderers. Despite not changing homicidality, it's still a good idea to have such a law, because it deters murder. It does not have to prevent all murders for it to be a good law. It doesn't have to change murderers into non-homicidal people. To be a good law, it just has to deter murders.
I don't see why a law forbidding harassing and cancelling one's Internet enemies wouldn't work for the same reason. I'm not proposing the law as a means to change bad people into good people. I'm only proposing it as a means of reducing the number of cancellation attempts made by bad people. Psychopaths and sadists are gonna psychopath and sadist, but at least they can do it a little less in the domain of free and open discussion.
I think what you propose is a bad law because it's impossible to clearly define, unlike murder. In murder, the victim is dead. Motivation really matters when a law proposes to outlaw behavior that can't be defined extremely clearly. I'll give you an example. Suppose that one of the Groypers wants to harass a Jewish person who has said something they didn't like online. In deference to this law, instead of the usual type of cancellation mob, they post on their burner account pretending to like what the person said: "This incredibly astute point was made by an employee of (company). I think we should all contact (company) and say how proud we are to support (company) who hires American Jews of such sterling insight and wisdom." This likely has the same effect as a cancellation mob whipped up in the usual, but in order to prove the intent, law enforcement would need to prove that it was a burner account of an anti-Semite. Now we're trusting the government to interpret thought crimes, which may be clear in this case (assuming we want the government to have the power to demand everyone's real identities online) but would often be *very* murky. Plenty of real anti-Semites exist, as we've seen since October 7, but there are a lot of people who can't be easily defined as such. I am a strong supporter of Israel and think that a great deal of anti-Zionism *is* anti-Semitism, but not all of it. Now the government would be interpreting motives in order to determine whether actions were motivated from animus or not. I'm not eager to entrust the government with a brand new category thought crimes they can prosecute us for.
That was just one example, off the top of my head. I could think of dozens more ways to cause harassment without an explicit whipping-up of a cancellation mob and thus require the government to prosecute a case based on what a person was really thinking or feeling, which is not a Pandora's box I want to see opened.
If you want a legislative solution, I would suggest looking into civil damages. If Twitter got sued every time they allowed a cancellation mob to ruin someone's life, they might change how they run their platform. That would entrust less power to the government. (Not saying I'd personally support this; I'd have to think about it. But it has fewer pitfalls than what you propose.)
“We need to suppress opinions that don’t align with the narrative of who I agree with to save democracy”. You’re very very very dumb. Whoever is telling you you’re smart is also dumb.
"Dare I say that harsher laws should be passed to punish those who participate in noxious, hysterical cancel mobs. This would be tantamount to saying that free speech should be supported, but speech aimed at cancelling or otherwise discouraging others to practice their speech must be punished by the law."
This is tantamount to saying that in order to have free speech we must police speech. You are advocating for exactly the same thing your opponents are.
People should be allowed to advocate (with their speech) for someone's cancellation just as much as you should be allowed to speak against such a culture. It the actual cancelling, deplatforming, and suppression of speech that should have legal ramifications, not the speech itself.
You cannot incite a mob to violence. You shouldn’t be able to incite a mob to deprive someone of their speech.
You also cannot harass people in real life. There are laws against that too. Why shouldn’t there be laws against forms of harassment that threaten to deprive people of their careers and livelihood?
Furthermore, although your situation would be ideal, it is in practice impossible to protect people downstream of cancel mobs given current institutional arrangements. It might be possible to strengthen those institutional arrangements, and I would be in favor of that. But such reforms would also require disruptive new laws.
I’m open to alternative suggestions. High-flying principles are clearly not adequate either way. They have failed, and the current situation is an indication of that. If the current situation is an acceptable tradeoff to you, OK. It’s not an acceptable tradeoff to me. Something needs to be done.
I share your contempt for cancel culture, and I agree that the incitement of violence and harassment should have legal consequences. It seems that what you are proposing (correct me if I'm wrong) is a prohibition on speech that advocates for someone to be fired, be dropped from the line-up of an event, have access to a digital platform revoked, and the like. If such speech crossed the line into harassment then yes, consequences should follow. If such speech deliberately incites mass harassment or violence then consequences should follow. However, the notion that someone who simply voices an opinion in favour of another's cancellation should be punishable by law seems problematic and antithetical to the "high-flying" principles of free speech. I believe that we abandon such principles at our peril, and I fear that the laws you propose will not be used in the way that you would like them to be used.
In the end, cancel culture is a cultural problem and I'm not so sure we can legislate our way out of it. I believe that a concerted effort from individuals such as yourself to shift the cultural landscape will be more effective and have less unwanted consequences than any kind of political force. That's just my two cents. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
More laws, less justice. You are proposing cancel culture, but in the "opposite" direction of today. Shutting down opposing views is just that. Free speech means hearing what we don't want to hear. Any limit or laws enacted is a slippery slope away from free speech. What we need is to bring back healthy moderated debates. The only debates we've seen on MSM are the presidential debates. The rules imposed but the committees to protect the candidate were draconian and I'm not convinced the rules delivered the desired outcome. Legislation is not the answer, open honest debates, like the kind I learned in high school debate class, in front of the population are what's needed.
Yep and those action instill fear and makes others less likely to speak out. It's effective, but in the wrong way, you'll get no disagreement from me on that.
Cancel culture, like many ideals, began with good intentions. Cancel Culture attempts to hold people accountable for their words (which may be the wrong approach) and accountable for their actions. Typically cancel culture results in some type of public shunning or "blocking" people and/or not purchasing product. The idea on its surface seems good. But once the mob gets involved, it can, and often does, turn into a modern day lynching, subverting the good intentions. Along with the advent of social media we seem more willing to allow the mob to rule. I see it constantly on X. The speed of social media exacerbates the problem. What used to be voting with our feet became the instantaneous voice of the mob, and typically the mob doesn't have or doesn't care about all of the facts. You can't change human nature and there is nothing as uruly as a mob bent on getting it's due. But I don't believe more legislation is the answer. Instead, common sense, discussion, cooler heads, debate, remembering (or learning) morals and values of decency and respect, do unto others, and the majority holding each other accountable. I believe we've failed by not teaching our children proper civic values and morals. The results are what we see. One example of lack of morals just look at the debacle that is the Olympics, from the opening ceremony to allowing XY beat the heck out of XX.
But hope springs eternal, and i believe that we will get better and stop some of this madness. I see good debate happening here on Substack and it is encouraging. Carry on Mr Bass!
First amendment only covers government institutions and does not protect from cancelation when those canceling hide that the cancelation is taking place because of public views
I hesitate to support new laws, given their propensity to be abused, but I do want to point out that, quite apart from that, I think this wouldn't work. Cancellation mobs are based solely in the desire to feel righteous about being sadistic. I wasn't sure about that until recently -- I would have said "sometimes" or "usually" and not "solely" until the last few days. But if you look at the reaction from people on the right to the apology from the Olympic boxer, you can see that I'm correct on this. The same people who got nearly orgasmic over what happened to the Home Depot Lady, writing intense, moralistic justifications for using cancellation as a weapon for the "moral" side, are really mad at her.
That's entirely backwards if they truly see cancellation as an effective, strategic weapon and not just a vehicle for sadistic punishment of The Other. It amounts to spending weeks singing the praises of a gun as the best possible gun for killing one's enemies and then getting *really, really upset* at someone shot by that gun -- for bleeding!
So while I understand your strategy, I think it wouldn't work because the behavior isn't based in rationally weighing consequences. It's based on pure sadism. And sadism is not something that the government can control via law just because the consequences of expressing it are bad for society. It would fail, having terrible unintended consequences, for the same reason that a law making divorce nearly impossible to get would fail, having unintended consequences. The government cannot make people moral enough to not be sadistic, just as it cannot make people moral enough to keep commitments to love, honor, and cherish until death.
That is very psychologically insightful about cancellation and sadism. I appreciate that.
That said, I don't see why the motivation impinges on whether or not a law should exist. People are going to be homicidal whether or not there is a law that gives severe punishments to murderers. Despite not changing homicidality, it's still a good idea to have such a law, because it deters murder. It does not have to prevent all murders for it to be a good law. It doesn't have to change murderers into non-homicidal people. To be a good law, it just has to deter murders.
I don't see why a law forbidding harassing and cancelling one's Internet enemies wouldn't work for the same reason. I'm not proposing the law as a means to change bad people into good people. I'm only proposing it as a means of reducing the number of cancellation attempts made by bad people. Psychopaths and sadists are gonna psychopath and sadist, but at least they can do it a little less in the domain of free and open discussion.
I think what you propose is a bad law because it's impossible to clearly define, unlike murder. In murder, the victim is dead. Motivation really matters when a law proposes to outlaw behavior that can't be defined extremely clearly. I'll give you an example. Suppose that one of the Groypers wants to harass a Jewish person who has said something they didn't like online. In deference to this law, instead of the usual type of cancellation mob, they post on their burner account pretending to like what the person said: "This incredibly astute point was made by an employee of (company). I think we should all contact (company) and say how proud we are to support (company) who hires American Jews of such sterling insight and wisdom." This likely has the same effect as a cancellation mob whipped up in the usual, but in order to prove the intent, law enforcement would need to prove that it was a burner account of an anti-Semite. Now we're trusting the government to interpret thought crimes, which may be clear in this case (assuming we want the government to have the power to demand everyone's real identities online) but would often be *very* murky. Plenty of real anti-Semites exist, as we've seen since October 7, but there are a lot of people who can't be easily defined as such. I am a strong supporter of Israel and think that a great deal of anti-Zionism *is* anti-Semitism, but not all of it. Now the government would be interpreting motives in order to determine whether actions were motivated from animus or not. I'm not eager to entrust the government with a brand new category thought crimes they can prosecute us for.
That was just one example, off the top of my head. I could think of dozens more ways to cause harassment without an explicit whipping-up of a cancellation mob and thus require the government to prosecute a case based on what a person was really thinking or feeling, which is not a Pandora's box I want to see opened.
If you want a legislative solution, I would suggest looking into civil damages. If Twitter got sued every time they allowed a cancellation mob to ruin someone's life, they might change how they run their platform. That would entrust less power to the government. (Not saying I'd personally support this; I'd have to think about it. But it has fewer pitfalls than what you propose.)
Nah. That's quite akin to "We need to cancel democracy in order to save democracy". We need less laws. Not more.
The right to free speech is part of the constitution. Would you like to get rid of that law as well?
“We need to suppress opinions that don’t align with the narrative of who I agree with to save democracy”. You’re very very very dumb. Whoever is telling you you’re smart is also dumb.
It’s not opinions. It’s incitement to ruin a person’s career.
"Dare I say that harsher laws should be passed to punish those who participate in noxious, hysterical cancel mobs. This would be tantamount to saying that free speech should be supported, but speech aimed at cancelling or otherwise discouraging others to practice their speech must be punished by the law."
This is tantamount to saying that in order to have free speech we must police speech. You are advocating for exactly the same thing your opponents are.
People should be allowed to advocate (with their speech) for someone's cancellation just as much as you should be allowed to speak against such a culture. It the actual cancelling, deplatforming, and suppression of speech that should have legal ramifications, not the speech itself.
You cannot incite a mob to violence. You shouldn’t be able to incite a mob to deprive someone of their speech.
You also cannot harass people in real life. There are laws against that too. Why shouldn’t there be laws against forms of harassment that threaten to deprive people of their careers and livelihood?
Furthermore, although your situation would be ideal, it is in practice impossible to protect people downstream of cancel mobs given current institutional arrangements. It might be possible to strengthen those institutional arrangements, and I would be in favor of that. But such reforms would also require disruptive new laws.
I’m open to alternative suggestions. High-flying principles are clearly not adequate either way. They have failed, and the current situation is an indication of that. If the current situation is an acceptable tradeoff to you, OK. It’s not an acceptable tradeoff to me. Something needs to be done.
I share your contempt for cancel culture, and I agree that the incitement of violence and harassment should have legal consequences. It seems that what you are proposing (correct me if I'm wrong) is a prohibition on speech that advocates for someone to be fired, be dropped from the line-up of an event, have access to a digital platform revoked, and the like. If such speech crossed the line into harassment then yes, consequences should follow. If such speech deliberately incites mass harassment or violence then consequences should follow. However, the notion that someone who simply voices an opinion in favour of another's cancellation should be punishable by law seems problematic and antithetical to the "high-flying" principles of free speech. I believe that we abandon such principles at our peril, and I fear that the laws you propose will not be used in the way that you would like them to be used.
In the end, cancel culture is a cultural problem and I'm not so sure we can legislate our way out of it. I believe that a concerted effort from individuals such as yourself to shift the cultural landscape will be more effective and have less unwanted consequences than any kind of political force. That's just my two cents. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
The above writing is very dangerous for humanity.
More laws, less justice. You are proposing cancel culture, but in the "opposite" direction of today. Shutting down opposing views is just that. Free speech means hearing what we don't want to hear. Any limit or laws enacted is a slippery slope away from free speech. What we need is to bring back healthy moderated debates. The only debates we've seen on MSM are the presidential debates. The rules imposed but the committees to protect the candidate were draconian and I'm not convinced the rules delivered the desired outcome. Legislation is not the answer, open honest debates, like the kind I learned in high school debate class, in front of the population are what's needed.
You can get canceled for saying the wrong thing in an open debate.
Yep and those action instill fear and makes others less likely to speak out. It's effective, but in the wrong way, you'll get no disagreement from me on that.
Cancel culture, like many ideals, began with good intentions. Cancel Culture attempts to hold people accountable for their words (which may be the wrong approach) and accountable for their actions. Typically cancel culture results in some type of public shunning or "blocking" people and/or not purchasing product. The idea on its surface seems good. But once the mob gets involved, it can, and often does, turn into a modern day lynching, subverting the good intentions. Along with the advent of social media we seem more willing to allow the mob to rule. I see it constantly on X. The speed of social media exacerbates the problem. What used to be voting with our feet became the instantaneous voice of the mob, and typically the mob doesn't have or doesn't care about all of the facts. You can't change human nature and there is nothing as uruly as a mob bent on getting it's due. But I don't believe more legislation is the answer. Instead, common sense, discussion, cooler heads, debate, remembering (or learning) morals and values of decency and respect, do unto others, and the majority holding each other accountable. I believe we've failed by not teaching our children proper civic values and morals. The results are what we see. One example of lack of morals just look at the debacle that is the Olympics, from the opening ceremony to allowing XY beat the heck out of XX.
But hope springs eternal, and i believe that we will get better and stop some of this madness. I see good debate happening here on Substack and it is encouraging. Carry on Mr Bass!
I think we already have a “law” that does what you suggest, ie the First Amendment. The issue is enforcement.
First amendment only covers government institutions and does not protect from cancelation when those canceling hide that the cancelation is taking place because of public views
Did I say we need to abolish all laws? Obviously "less laws" does not include the constitution.