1808

I understand the difficulty in speaking out against harassment presented, I guess I’m asking what’s the solution being argued? Or to step back, what’s being argued? I think we all agree harassment is bad and this is a sad story.

It was raised before that people in the thread were focusing too much on social media, despite everything about this story being rooted in social media. So if the issue or solution isn’t related directly to how to handle social media harassment, what exactly?

1809

Yes, absolutely that too.

1810

I mean it’s a complicated question, because i think young people actually don’t see something like “social media” but have weird and arbitrary lines they think are real, like “stan Twitter” or “fan Twitter” or “pol Twitter” or whatever, that don’t exist at all but consist only of people following hashtags. The point is it’s generally drama within a micro-community but it’s when it spreads beyond it that the pile-ons start.

Just as an example, if 95% of the people on Qt3 dog piled me for months because of X, i’d leave, and it wouldn’t matter to me if some defended me.

The difference is that i don’t see Qt3 as ‘the internet’ or ‘social media’; but when a micro-community dogpiles someone in social media, the transparent truth of their not being walls between hashtags becomes all too clear. So instead of just “opting out” of a forum, they quit the internet.

Since everything being interconnected is the point, the very feature of social media platforms is kind of the heart of the issue.

1811

It seems to have come down to really bad luck when Ellis used the phrase “if you squint your eyes.” Given the heated context, and if enough people were predisposed to never believe her claim that it wasn’t intentional, that was the whole ballgame. So we can discuss the behavior of the mob, but we should also acknowledge that this slip of the tongue/keyboard was really unfortunate.

1812

I quoted this but kept reading, and it was resolved. But I think it bears repeating for those not interested or well versed in her work. This is the exact opposite of what she did. Every video, even the ones criticizing popular works still seek to find the intentions and good in every work. The Bright video that was posted was very good, as it basically was, this had some decent ideas, but it completely mishandled them in a very cliche way.

Her criticisms were very much even handed, thoughtful and thorough.

I do think though, that she and some of the other youtube criticism community have a problem with their fanbases and the connection to them. I also think that Lindsay has thinner skin that a lot of other people, and that criticism of her tweet was taken too far, but she also legitimized that criticism by responding. Natalie Wynn went through a lot of this in 2020 with criticism around the inclusion of a particular trans performer in one of her videos, and was “cancelled”.

She kind of goes over all of these details better than I could explain in her feature-length video.

This is not to criticize Lindsay Ellis for having “thin skin” when it comes to online discussion, as it ok to be that person too, nobody deserves to go through harassment and hate, and she didn’t deserve it. I just think that is probably why she is stopping making videos while other people like her that have had similar issues continue on.

As for that tweet:

Anyone with 2 brain cells can understand from her tweet that she was not trying to be racist, just comparing two very popular YA fiction properties, and saying they follow similar tropes, as well as a lot of other recent YA controversy. Literally comparing ATLA with other properties as well in the tweet itself, not just singling out Raya.

But, people like to talk shit on twitter, she is fighting from a position of relative power and privelege, and many people on twitter like to target people like that with criticism. While there may have been a kernel of good discussion to be had on tropes in YA fiction, and comparing 2 asian influenced properties with another, that was all drowned out by people acting in bad faith, or people like @scottagibson chiming in without full knowledge. (I am not calling out here, as you are not that type of person, and have educated yourself in this thread, and I know you to be a good person, but you could see how your comment could have snowballed and influenced others on twitter and become a telephone game, which is what happens in pile on culture)

Again, the answer is, never tweet, and never respond to tweets, never read comments, and do your videos.

1813

This is my actual comment:

I don’t really understand what is bad about that comment.

1814

Well, I guess you are making an assumption on something you say you know nothing about, then why say anything at all?

1815

Because we are having a conversation here, and I was recapitulating what someone else said, not making an assumption, and I was more than prepared to have someone say no, that’s not really accurate, and then I would know more?

1816

And that is what I said, but you called me out anyway?

What I was trying to point out is that on twitter, comments like the one you made get parroted as fact, retweeted to oblivion and pushed around, like the telephone game.

Not like on the forum in which we are having a good faith back and forth discussion.

1817

Yes, that’s fair enough, I get the distinction. Sorry.

1818

Oh definitely, no problem. I understand you are a smart guy, and I was probably not as articulate as I could be in my original tweet.

But, on twitter, people just explode over comments, and make ones like yours without the “if this is accurate” disclaimer, or if they do put that in there, people just ignore it.

I like twitter as a fun place to comment on stuff in a non serious way, and joke with friends. I don’t think that other people treat it that way, it is almost purpose built for speed harassment and lighting speed disinformation spread.

1819

I think that’s a fair summary of the place!

1820

+1

The character limit, the way retweets work, the way engaged posts are promoted, blue checkmarks, bios, none of it leads to nuanced speech, but everyone always expects that, despite themselves not doing it all the time, because you can’t. Which leads to all sorts of different standards by everyone, because it’s to big a place.
As for Ellis, one thing that wasn’t said, in case anyone cares, is that she likes things even if she criticizes them. It’s ok to like things even when you realize they don’t exist in a vacuum and are dumb/propaganda/product placement/have some bad takes/whatever.

1821

I understood where Natalie was coming from. She’s worked damn hard to look as good as she does, and in passing in general (which is harder) - it is not easy work, it takes a lot of money, pain, and effort. Being trans and being clocked as trans is dangerous. She wanted to protect herself, and folks doing what she was criticized, puts her at risk.

I understood where her detractors were coming from as well, and why they were so angry. They wanted the same thing, and they didn’t have the means or the time to do the same work, and honestly, being accepted shouldn’t take effort, much less the herculean efforts Natalie made.

It was existential all around on that one, and that will lead to a lot of nastiness. Natalie didn’t even say anything that I consider to be that bad, but I am not non-binary, I know some non-binary folk, but I don’t know how exactly it is for all of them.

Natalie’s a really talented woman who made some good videos.

1822

I just caught up on the entire Lindsay Ellis portion of this thread, and I feel like we just sort of described a lower case “cancel culture” without ever invoking the name. I’m quoting Telefrog’s response and a bit of Matt_W’s, which were the best two posts to encapsulate it, but it wasn’t limited to just these posts.

I’m not trying to be glib, but I know at various points some version of “cancel culture isn’t a real thing” has been thrown around in this thread. There are very understandable reason be skeptical—capitalized Cancel Culture is absolutely a rallying cry used in bad faith far more often than not to invoke victimhood when someone is faced with criticism, and it is very disproportionately used by the right-wing in US politics.

But yeah, social media and human nature can combine in devastating ways, and as more people “live and work online”, the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been, and whatever you want to call that (maybe cancel culture is irredeemably poisoned by the bad faith claims), I think it’s worth continuing to talk about in at least the reasonable ways we do here. Discuss examples, talk through them, sort through the nonsense claims and the genuine examples as we try to understand what’s happening.

Sorry if that doesn’t make any sense, I probably shouldn’t have “binged” through a couple hundred posts here at once and then thrown in my two cents, someone may have already said something like this much better (or poked holes in my thinking) and I just overlooked it.

1823

Let’s not make it sound like any slip of the tongue can get you in hot water / cancelled. You need to be unlucky (several examples, like the lady who made a joke about AIDS in Africa), or already have people chomping at the bit to cancel you (the example we’ve been talking about).

It’s not like this happened because of one twitter post, but because there was a bunch of people of the Gamergate variety looking for stuff to weaponize, but also some people who for one reason or other had been hurt by Lindsey somehow, maybe she didn’t care enough about some minority, or maybe her Star Wars opinion was wrong, who knows.

Unfortunately, we’re not built for the Internet age.

1824

I’m not sure I can make the distinction between a “slip of the tongue” and saying anything when “you already have people chomping at the bit to cancel you.” It seems in this day, all you need to be is a fairly high-profile woman writing or saying stuff about POC/LGBTQ/liberal stuff to have folks gunning for you.

1825

I guess it’s all a matter of mass, once you have enough people looking to cancel you. A slip of the tongue, enough to be non-obvious that people are doing an intentional misrepresentation, you get people who are not all that informed on the subject weighing in, eventually enough mass is achieved and a person gets crushed under the weight of “we never evolved to deal with the whole world having an opinion about you”.

Dunno how to fix it, not caring about the online world could be a possibility, but harder to do when your job is to a large extent the online world.

1826

There’s a small cottage industry of women who talk shit about LGBT/liberal/etc. stuff on social media. Somehow they haven’t been cancelled by the twitter mob. Generalizing that all you need to be is a woman who takes any perceived anti-left stance to be canceled by the twitter mob is massive hyperbole.

1827

I already mentioned Etika upthread earlier as a victim of the online culture for harassing “problematic” people, but he had said several hurtful homophobic or racist slurs by the time he threw himself off a bridge, so I guess for some his suicide was less “unearned”.

Or how about porn actress August Ames? It sure didn’t take much for the mob to harass and bully her until she decided to take her own life, all starting because of a tweet about her declining to film a job with another porn actor because they also shot gay porn at the time. Nobody gave a shit about her reasoning (which I believe was something about gay porn is shot with less health regulations than is standard for the industry), people were quick to accuse her of being a hateful and bigoted homophobe.

Those are two examples that led to death, but I know there are more where if not nearly as final, were still harrowing and grotesque to see unfold, led not by alt-right types, but instead groups and people who portrayed themselves as progressives fighting for social justice and betterment. I was particularly appalled when the Etika incident went down (which is why it sticks so sharply in my mind to this day) because he was so clearly very vulnerable mentally, and it’s what really made me step back and realize how toxic and hateful many are within my chosen sphere of political leanings, and how left leaning people don’t do nearly enough as a group to push back on their actions.

I think Wholly Schmidt is dead-on: everyone is so careful here and elsewhere to tap dance around calling this behavior cancel culture because of its association with the alt-right, that they’ve missed the forest for the trees and don’t even bother to try and fix the problem because that would mean admitting existence of it as a problem.