No tags yet.
Hello, I’m Ollie. After I saw this site was opened, I thought it would be a good idea to put some of my ideas down on paper. So, that's what this is. Hopefully it makes you think and I hope you enjoy reading it.
Social media has allowed the masses to engage in political discourse. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are now places where people of differing political opinions collide every day. However, these Silicon Valley giants have been unequal in their use of their own hateful conduct policies. Often you will find that conservative political activists (and some lefties, but this isn’t reported on so well) are being silenced unfairly using these policies. For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on Twitter as this is where the inequality in policing is most prevalent.
Not so recently the New York Times hired Sarah Jeong to its editorial board. Ms Jeong, a South Korean native, is a journalist that specializes in technology reporting. She is very active on Twitter. After she was hired at the New York Times, Ms Jeong and The Times came under fire for tweets she had posted in the past.
Tweets such as: “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically only being fit to live underground like grovelling goblins” And “Oh man it’s kinda sick how much joy I get from being cruel to old white men” Ms. Jeong also started the hashtag #CancelWhitePeople.
Twitter’s hateful conduct policy states:
You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.
Ms. Jeong’s Tweets, however, do not breach twitters hateful conduct policy as they do not directly attack or threaten people based on their race. Now you’re probably wondering, why is this important? Well, Sarah Jeong hasn’t been taken off Twitter, and rightfully so. But, imagine if a conservative posted this: “Oh man it’s kinda sick how much joy I get from being cruel to old black women” The individual would be suspended from Twitter and probably fired. So, what came of the outcry when Ms Jeong was hired?
She apologized.
Trying to explain it as one big bad joke, and that's about it. She got the equivalent of a slap on the wrist and being told, “don’t do that again”. Of course, no one actually knows if Ms Jeong was making an attempt at comedy or not, so you’ll just have to form your own opinion on that. At this point, you might be thinking, “Ollie this is one big rant and that’s against Don’t Be Afraid rules!” Well yes, at this point it has been a rant to be perfectly honest. Now, I’ll start to offer some suggestions about what could be done to fix this issue. Personally, I believe that you should be able to say what you want when you want, the matter of policing your speech should be your business (in fewer words - free speech). I also believe it's important to expose yourself to all opinions because that's how you learn. Allow people to voice their opinions. This is very different from targeted harassment, however. If someone tweets or messages you abusing you based on race or sexuality or whatever, that is unacceptable, full stop. Systems to manage this are already in place and shouldn’t be removed. However, if someone just tweets, voicing their opinion on something without abusing and targeting specific people as Ms Jeong did, they should be allowed to. There are obvious exceptions to this like posts/pages/users that question someone else's human rights/existence. Another layer of consideration is hate speech.
The dictionary defines hate speech as: “Speech that attacks, threatens, or insults a person or group on the basis of national origin, ethnicity, colour, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability.” In my opinion hate speech is stuff like, “You are a stupid *insert slur here*” or “@*Insert name here* I hate you because you're a dumb *insert slur here*”. However, tweets like Ms Jeong’s do not specifically target a person or group (I do not believe in identity politics and do not see race/ religion etc. as a specific group of people).
When talking about this I always like to mention a quote from Carl Benjamin, “No one's mind has ever been changed because they have been banned from Twitter”. Start a dialogue. When Ms. Jeong posted the previously mentioned tweets, I believe she was perfectly within her rights, whilst I might not agree with the sentiment, she should still be allowed to say what she wants. Instead of calling for her to be banned you should show her why she is wrong, because believe it or not most white people really ain't that bad. Just the same as if someone believed that Logan Paul won the fight with KSI, you wouldn’t ask for them to be banned, you would try and prove them wrong. Now, how do you keep debate civil and stop it devolving into a flame war? Well, this is the difficult part. People are generally irrational. So, when people go online, have an opinion and meet someone who disagrees with their opinion, it doesn’t go well. Random Twitter wars are not the answer, the 140-character restriction limits your ability to fully express yourself. Instead, write articles on websites like this where you can fully articulate a point. But, equally important is reading articles you disagree with to understand the other point of view.
Here is the disclaimer: all of these solutions are based on my opinions. If you do believe in identity, politics things become a whole lot more confusing and troublesome. There is also the question of what counts as a 'slur' when defining targeted harassment and hate speech. This is another topic you could spend hours deliberating and discussing but I don’t have the time for that right now, maybe I’ll write something about it later.
Have a nice day Ollie