Comment by keiw2jzn
8 years ago
IMO you’re gonna need to do more than blame Twitter.
Humans were racist, misogynistic, selfish, hateful, road raging shitheads before social media.
Columbine was before all of these things
Kent state
Beltway sniper
Jonestown
Hate crimes everywhere
What’s different is how visible Twitter makes it
My money is on this being more of a nationalism thing. Buried or purposefully hidden xenophobia and anxiety over being in each other’s faces suddenly
Especially with the older crowd that grew up and lived mostly isolated
These attitudes were more visible during GW’s time in office too
It’s disconcerting seeing a community of “smart” people ignoring a lot of variables and insisting on demonizing Johnny Come-lately
It was less work to find a hateful clique before Twitter. Just walk around town and find the right group of people
No see, this is the enormous blind spot that people have about "hate" on social media. It was the progressive _left_ who pioneered the mobbing, the sealioning, the doxing, the threats, the career sabotage. That is, the people who fashion themselves opposed to hate crimes.
Remember the ESA Rosetta shirt guy who broke down into tears? Yeah there was the Verge with "I don't care if you landed a probe on a comet, your shirt is holding back progress."
How about Justine Sacco and her tweet about AIDS and being white? That was Sam Biddle and Buzzfeed, and it was anti-racism outrage that missed the sarcasm and self-mockery in her original message.
Who can forget the anti-harassment antics of Adria "DongleGate" Richards? She posted that guy's photo on Twitter, engaging in "harassing photography", and the media called her a hero for it.
And of course, the biggest "harassment" scandal of all, GamerGate, actually egged on by progressive journalists like Sam Biddle and Leigh Alexander, proudly proclaiming that nerds needed to be bullied into submission, that gamers were a bunch of angry white manbabies, and so on. Taunting from their position of privilege while denigrating a lower status demographic.
That's hate. That's selfish. That's bigoted. But it doesn't count because it was "punching up". Because the progressive left has somehow convinced itself that when it exercises power, it stands completely isolated from the "oppressive systems" it deems are driving all of our "patriarchal", "capitalist" society. Now a few years later, the right has caught up, and now it's all blamed on them with the same buzzwords as before. Nope. This is on the left. The left has the media power and networks to amplify this outrage into the stratosphere, the left runs the companies that maintain it. And they continue to deny responsibility and pretend like people defending against their attacks are somehow the real offenders.
Those backwards country bumpkins weren't on social media when all of this started happening.
Remember the ESA Rosetta shirt guy who broke down into tears?
I remember that the shirt was designed by a female friend of his and he wore it on TV to help her get some exposure!