Freddie deBoer Vanishes

I was greatly disturbed to see that Freddie deBoer has purged all his old tweets from Twitter (without, so far, eliminating the account) and has removed the entire contents of his blog. I am very much saddened by this. We disagreed deeply about many things politically: he is an unalloyed socialist at heart, his views on the intersection of copyright and the Internet are deeply naive, as is his odd belief that Kickstarters are inevitably scams. Despite these differences, he was also honest about the increasingly neglected work of convincing others politically, and knew how to craft a well-assembled argument, even if you disagreed with key parts of it. His refusal to engage in snarky personal attacks, the house style at Gawker and so many other Internet-era publications, set him above all of them and made his writing worth reading. I'll miss him, and I hope he finds another online home soon.

Lindy West Resigns From Twitter

In my pantheon of online annoybots, Lindy West is fairly far down the list. Unlike, say, Anita Sarkeesian, she hadn't proposed a centralized censorship regime for the Internet. However, she has endorsed the unprovable standard of "affirmative consent" in rape cases, has a history as a victimhood miner, and I suspect a bunch of other fairly middle-of-the-road (for modern feminists) policy nostrums. For a number of reasons, West has largely flown beneath my radar. So when I found a Vox piece on her voluntary exit from Twitter, I was not terribly surprised, given what I had read of hers. What interested me about that Vox piece was this passage (emboldening mine):

Rather, her breaking point — what made her feel she could no longer participate in the platform’s “profoundly broken culture” — was that Twitter has failed to acknowledge and deal with the alt-right’s use of the social network to spread its racist ideology, leading to severe, real-world repercussions:

The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now — how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? — and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and “authoritarianism is bad,” and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency. Twitter executives did nothing.

Which is to say, she very expressly wished Twitter would have shut up those mean people over there with the temerity to disagree with her, in public, even.  This is not a surprise, and in fact there was at least one significant "tell" previous that she very much wanted her own echo chamber: her response to the Washington Post investigations showing the Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at U. Virginia was a hoax:

Turns out that the real #UVA rape "truthers" are @AmandaMarcotte, @JessicaValenti, @thelindywest and their hivemind pic.twitter.com/fPykKBZbVJ

— Yeyo (@YeyoZa) December 6, 2014

Or, you could just take her word for it:

Whenever I advocate for the safety of marginalized groups on the Internet, some genius always pipes up to say, “Oh, so you just want to live in your echo chamber?” And YES. OF COURSE I JUST WANT MY ECHO CHAMBER, DINGUS. If by “echo chamber” you mean “a space online where I can communicate in good faith with informed people who don’t derail every conversation with false equivalencies and rape threats,” then yes, I’m dying for a fucking echo chamber.

In fact, maybe that’s what we’ll call it: Echo Chamber, the first feminist social network.

Given that presumptive bestie (or at least sister-in-arms) Marcotte is on Twitter's Orwellian "Trust & Safety Council", her kvetching here takes an interesting color. The subtext is a bitter complaint that, if they can make Milo Yiannopoulos go away, why can't they get rid of all these other people she doesn't like, too? In that, it amounts to a positive sign for the beleaguered Twitter, which continues to struggle to find profitability. Chasing those eyeballs out en masse makes no sense. Bon voyage, Lindy, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

The Dickish Milo Yiannopoulos Finally Gets Kicked Off Twitter

So, Internet exploder extraordinaire Milo Yiannopoulos finally got kicked off Twitter permanently as a result of a squabble with Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones. Despite the New York Times' claim that Yiannopoulos was "one of the most egregious and consistent offenders of its terms of service", the truth is that Twitter has yet to point to specific violations of those terms by the man known as @Nero. Unfortunately, the case against him is much more tangled than the Times story lets on, something Cathy Young details in a long Allthink piece.

There are two different questions here. One, does Milo deserve sympathy and support? And two, is Twitter's enforcement of anti-harassment rules politically biased, rife with favoritism, and generally inconsistent?

(The TL;DR answers are: not so much in this case, and yes.) Young observes that "his online conflicts tended to escalate into nasty personal attacks", viz. this one about former Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro on the occasion of his son's birth:

Young continues:

 Milo is a very smart, talented, charismatic man. I still believe he was on the right side when he joined the fight against the crypto-totalitarian "social justice" cult. But I've always thought that, unfortunately, any backlash against "progressive" cultural politics was likely to be a magnet for actual racism, misogyny, and other bigotries. Today, Milo is actively boosting these malignant forces. As his "Daddy" Donald Trump would say: Sad!

Even though Twitter hasn't commented on the matter more extensively, it seems almost certain that the problem stemmed, in part, from faked tweets he posted, purported to be from Jones, which in turn "was both impersonation, a severe violation of Twitter rules, and a pretty clear move to pour more fuel on the fire."

If Yiannopoulos took up arms against political correctness, he didn't much care about the identity and behavior of his allies, something Brendan O'Neill recently wrote about (via Reason's Robby Soave):

These attacks on Ms Jones speak to something more than the raucousness of Twitter, which can often be a good thing, certainly to the extent that it allows unheard, eccentric and potty voices to be heard. It speaks, more importantly, to the derailment of the important task of challenging PC. Tragically, for those of us who want to prick PC from a genuinely liberal and pro-autonomy perspective, the anti-PC mantle has in recent months been co-opted by the new right, or the alt-right, as some call them. These lovers of Trump (they call him ‘daddy’) and conspiracy theorists about feminism (whose wicked influence they spy everywhere) have turned being anti-PC from a decent, progressive position into an infantile, pathological, Tourette’s-style desire to scream offensive words out loud, like the seven-year-old who’s just discovered the thrill that comes with saying ‘f**k’.

Yet simultaneously, as Freddy DeBoer points out, it's pretty obvious that Yiannopoulos got the boot at least in part because he's not in the club (emboldening mine):

When Emmet Rensin was suspended from Vox for following liberal logic on Trump to its obvious conclusions, it was trivially easy to find Vox employees who had said far worse things on Twitter, while Vox employees, with absolutely no consequences. The #WeAreTheLeft debacle was made extra funny/sad by the fact that so many of the signatories of that letter were objectively guilty of the kinds of behaviors the letter indicted. People who gleefully trashed Justine Sacco complain about pile-ons; people who say doxing is wrong get others fired from their real-life jobs. There are no principles; there’s only who you’re cool with and who you aren’t. I’ve been for saying this for years, 8 in fact, and the response has always been a kind of muttered shiftiness, a desire to change the subject. Because most people know I’m right. They always have. But for some reason, there’s this dedication to maintaining the pretense, this addiction to plausible deniability. Nobody really thinks this stuff is about principle, but to be a member in good standing, you have to go through the motions. That hasn’t changed.

Which is what makes this so frustrating, and why all defenses of free speech ultimately grow tiresome, because they tend to involve the defense of sometimes terrible behavior. As Ken White recently wrote at Popehat, "nobody needs free speech rights to protect admirable speech by people we like." Anita Sarkeesian, Yiannopoulos' longtime #Gamergate foe, appears to have finally won the game started when she landed on Twitter's "Trust & Safety" board. But let us assume that she and her like-minded cohorts indeed turn Twitter into a mammoth echo chamber, a place where orthodoxy and adorable cat pictures are the only permissible tweets. Where will she go to gin up the death threats so central to her shtick?

Bomb Threats And Harassing Phone Calls Attend Gamer Meetup In D.C.

Arthur Chu, Twitter's male answer to the question, "what would a Kardashian be without looks?", lost his shit about Cathy Young, Christine Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos and other pro-#GamerGate individuals having a meetup at the Washington, D.C. bar Local 16:

Hey @localsixteen just so you know there's an Internet hate speech movement meeting up at your place tonight http://t.co/MRcw2mqqqy

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) May 1, 2015

This sparked a flood of angry calls to the bar, and eventually a bomb threat:

What makes this serious threat of violence even more disturbing is that the GGinDC event was packed. Yiannopoulos told us on Sunday that there were at "least 250" people in attendance at the time of the incident. He added that he "shook at least 150 hands" during the course of the evening: "I run a lot of events and normally you can expect 40-60 per cent of RSVPs to show up. But there were even more people there on Friday night than the 220 who had RSVPed," he told us.

My suspicion is that it was one raging idiot intending to scare rather than an actual bomb, but whatevs. I'm not especially interested in label-based argumentation, which is 95% bullshit, nor in establishing victimhood cred; that's a game for losers. Chu has since blocked me on Twitter, which probably says more about his limited cognitive abilities and intolerance than what I tweeted at him (the only thing to my recollection I ever said was hardly abusive). No one is allowed to have wrongthink, and especially, to do so over frosty adult beverages, apparently.

On Civility And "Safety"

My friend Linda Kaim recently posted a link to a Caitlin Dewey essay at the Washington Post about harassment on Twitter, and in particular, harassment of women in that venue. "Per an October study by the Pew Research Center, 4 in 10 Internet users have experienced online harassment" (link my own, not provided in the article). I wanted to reprint my comments, and possibly expand on them somewhat.

---

Having been in the online wars, am familiar with many of the arguments here. Some while back, my sister posted an article criticizing Richard Dawkins for some sexist things he had said in the past, and Sam Harris as well. I don't agree with all of what Dawkins has to say there, but what I see in that is a conflation of two entirely unrelated things:

There’s no denying that Dawkins played a formative role in the atheist movement, but it’s grown beyond just him. Remarks like these make him a liability at best, a punchline at worst. He may have convinced himself that he’s the Most Rational Man Alive, but if his goal is to persuade everyone else that atheism is a welcoming and attractive option, Richard Dawkins is doing a terrible job. Blogger and author Greta Christina told me, “I can’t tell you how many women, people of color, other marginalized people I’ve talked with who’ve told me, ‘I’m an atheist, but I don’t want anything to do with organized atheism if these guys are the leaders.’”

I found this passage in one of the linked stories discussing this matter:

...worst of all, just a few days ago, was this remark he retweeted. It implies – no, not implies, asserts – that feminists assume all men are misogynists (a detestable lie), and that women who receive sexist abuse bring it on themselves by doing so. There’s no reasonable way to read Dawkins’ retweet as anything but an endorsement of this sentiment. (I’m aware the original author was a woman, which just goes to show, as I’ve said in the past, that the rift in the atheist community isn’t between men and women; it’s between people who want every atheist to feel welcome and safe among us, and people who don’t care about doing that.)

The problem here is the author conflates civility and safety. Civility — the ability to discuss ideas and make arguments without making personal attacks — should always be the standard. "Safety", however, is really a demand for the right to never be offended. It is a wish that the world were other than it is. In the headline article, that wish is accompanied by the soft-pedal euphemisms that frequently walk down the aisle with calls for censorship. For instance, let us take this passage:

I am not naive on these issues: I understand that Twitter’s toeing a very difficult line, trying to provide a constructive, useful service to its users while also upholding the all-important virtues of free speech. Since both those things are critical to Twitter’s success, and since they often appear to act in opposition to each other, Twitter’s basically damned either way: Whatever it does, whoever it privileges, somebody will be unhappy.

Did you notice that? "Privileges". In this reading, Twitter "privileges" people to speech, even when that is offensive. This reflects a deep misunderstanding of what free speech is about.
I get that Twitter can be a madhouse, and it does seem that women magnetize abuse therein — or at least, some of them. Anita Sarkeesian particularly seems to draw that out, although one might argue she has a symbiotic and even commercial relationship with such abuse. But the prominent the women I follow on Twitter — Christina Hoff Sommers, Elizabeth N. Brown, Wendy McElroy, Megan McArdle — seem generally less perturbed by this (and I have to imagine most of them get considerable abuse on a regular basis, writing as they do on political subjects for commercial outlets).