This is a really hard question for me. My values dictate that opposition should be by dint of argument. The solution to bad speech is more, better speech. If we're not willing to speak out against people who are making poor arguments, especially *influential* people making poor arguments, we're missing the boat.
However, I am sympathetic to avoiding doing battle with the truly non-influential. Someone who publishes a story in The Atlantic? Worthy of disagreement for certain. Some random dude in a comments section or Notes? Maybe not.
The best I've been able to do is to do some minor engagement with a person on the issue, and if I get lots of hate and / or over-emotionalism with no real substance, just cut bait. I remember early in Notes' history I had an interaction with someone about free speech and online bullies on Notes. I expressed sorrow for their trolling experiences, and wanted to understand what they thought should be done, and which tools they'd already tried to use, and each query I made landed me heaped with abuse from them. After the third attempt to understand their point of view, I just wrote them off. I'd looked into their other posts, and saw that they often bombastically castigated their enemies online, and it seemed that most of the hate they received came from the groups they'd rather rudely engaged. At that point, I figure they have set their asshole filter to *encourage assholes* and that's why they had such a problem with trollish content and "bullying" (which they were engaging in themselves).
Aye - the best way. Love the phrase "People who are thick as mince are best ignored with extreme prejudice". I live in hope that this can be in some way encoded in social media without resorting to political judgement. However the pressure to make 'metrics go up' disincentives this as outrage produces higher engagement than other sentiments, as we know.
I enjoyed an article and title (from someone with experience of running social media at least) when Elon took over twitter: "A social media site isn't rocket science - it's harder". I cant' find a link to it now.
In the pub, we knew to ignore the pub-bore. On social media we don't manage that sufficiently yet.
Another essay this makes me think of is about "Status As A Service" (describing humans as "status-seeking monkeys") by Eugene Wei.
This is a really hard question for me. My values dictate that opposition should be by dint of argument. The solution to bad speech is more, better speech. If we're not willing to speak out against people who are making poor arguments, especially *influential* people making poor arguments, we're missing the boat.
However, I am sympathetic to avoiding doing battle with the truly non-influential. Someone who publishes a story in The Atlantic? Worthy of disagreement for certain. Some random dude in a comments section or Notes? Maybe not.
The best I've been able to do is to do some minor engagement with a person on the issue, and if I get lots of hate and / or over-emotionalism with no real substance, just cut bait. I remember early in Notes' history I had an interaction with someone about free speech and online bullies on Notes. I expressed sorrow for their trolling experiences, and wanted to understand what they thought should be done, and which tools they'd already tried to use, and each query I made landed me heaped with abuse from them. After the third attempt to understand their point of view, I just wrote them off. I'd looked into their other posts, and saw that they often bombastically castigated their enemies online, and it seemed that most of the hate they received came from the groups they'd rather rudely engaged. At that point, I figure they have set their asshole filter to *encourage assholes* and that's why they had such a problem with trollish content and "bullying" (which they were engaging in themselves).
Aye - the best way. Love the phrase "People who are thick as mince are best ignored with extreme prejudice". I live in hope that this can be in some way encoded in social media without resorting to political judgement. However the pressure to make 'metrics go up' disincentives this as outrage produces higher engagement than other sentiments, as we know.
I enjoyed an article and title (from someone with experience of running social media at least) when Elon took over twitter: "A social media site isn't rocket science - it's harder". I cant' find a link to it now.
In the pub, we knew to ignore the pub-bore. On social media we don't manage that sufficiently yet.
Another essay this makes me think of is about "Status As A Service" (describing humans as "status-seeking monkeys") by Eugene Wei.