In March Alexi McCammond, recently appointed editor of Teen Vogue magazine, resigned over controversy over a series of offensive tweets she wrote ten years ago when she was 17. In January Will Wilkinson lost his job as vice president of the Niskanen Center, a conservative study center, over a satirical tweet ironically saying that Republicans wanted to hang Mike Pence, who was then vice president. Wilkinson was also suspended from his post as a New York Times columnist.
Discussing whether these sanctions were right or not is wrong, because these were not considered judgments taken in the interest of the community, but actions of companies that do their own thing, and that decided that their employees had become a burden. . Teen Vogue, part of the Condé Nast group, has built up a reputation as a left-wing magazine inspired by anti-racist principles in recent years. The Niskanen Center builds on its alleged influence over Republican Party deputies. Both companies were trying to protect themselves.
This suggests a different, and more useful, way of thinking about that amorphous entity we call cancel culture. In these cases, “cancellation” – a kind of ostracism sentence, achieved through dismissal or economic boycott – occurs when an employee’s opinions generate public attention that threatens the employer’s profits, influence or reputation. of work. It is not a question of wokeness, of political and civil conscience. The reason is economic, and the protagonists are the companies that own social networks and the employers of the people who have lost their jobs.
Establishing boundaries beyond which opinions are not acceptable is not new. Do you remember the anger after the attacks of September 11, 2001 against any candidate who did not show a pin with the US flag? What has changed is the role of social networks in concentrating outrage and scaring employers. And this too is an economic problem, not a cultural one. Social platforms and media owners want to attract people to their sites. They do this, in part, by adapting platforms, homepages, and articles to bring out content that outrages audiences.
Out of context
Charlie Warzel, my former colleague at the New York Times, points to the trending box of Twitter – a map updated in real time showing the most talked about keywords – as an example of this phenomenon. It shows well how the invisible hand of technology and economics works in what we consider a cultural problem. Twitter often highlights someone who has said something stupid or offensive. Or even someone who said a harmless thing but was simply misunderstood.
The trending box spreads messages designed for a specific community to all communities. The original context of the tweet disappears, and anything that could justify it is lost. The lack of context is worsened by another Twitter feature: the quote, through which, instead of replying to the original conversation, you extrapolate a tweet and write something cutting edge about it. So the trending box focuses attention on a single person, who is already having a bad time, and the quote function of the tweet encourages others to manipulate the message.
It is not just a problem of social networks. Just watch Fox News one evening to see a riot of news bringing local issues to the attention of the whole country with no respect for the people involved. Fox is not against the cancel culture, he just wants to control it.
The ostracism is sometimes deserved. It is right that expressing an opinion has consequences. But many times those who participate in digital fury don’t want to hit anyone in particular. He simply intervenes in the online conversation of that day. He criticizes an offensive idea, makes fun of someone who deserves it, goes on the hunt for retweets. He’s not trying to get anyone fired. But, adding up all the individual tweets, sometimes you get this.
Business models of companies that profit from user attention clash with employers’ incentives to avoid bad publicity. One of the ways in which social networks have structurally changed the management of large companies is by making it more difficult to ignore public relations problems. An outrage that once would have manifested relatively discreetly – through letters, emails or phone calls – is now unleashed in public. Meetings are called in a hurry, executives are bothered, and it is in these situations that people get fired.
An even more harmful version of this phenomenon acts retroactively through the search results on the net. An employer who is evaluating a person for a job can do a simple Google search, learn of an embarrassing controversy from three years ago, and choose another candidate in his place. Today the wokeness it exerts a particular economic weight because large companies, rightly, do not want to be considered racist and homophobic. But imagine how social networks would have overloaded the censorship trends that prevailed after 9/11 when even french fries, french fries, were looked upon with suspicion. Sociologist and cultural critic Tressie McMillan Cottom shared a reflection on the subject in a podcast: “One of the problems is that social shame, in my opinion, in itself normally sufficient to discipline most people, is now linked to economic, political and cultural capital “.
People should be reprimanded when they say something terrible. Social sanctions are a fundamental mechanism for changing things. The problem is when a sentence uttered by a person ends up defining his identity on the net, and his future economic, political and personal opportunities. I do not agree with the statement that no one deserves to be defined by the worst action they have ever done: it should be seen how much damage that action has caused. But none of us deserve to be reduced to the dumbest thing they’ve ever said just because Google’s algorithm noticed it attracted more links.
I think all this should make us reflect. Twitter should rethink its trending box and at least think about the role that tweet citations play on its platform. Fox News should stop being Fox News. All social networks should think about how their algorithm brings out indignation and overloads the human tendency to turn into censors. The rest of US companies – including my industry, publishing – must think that firing a person in the public square is a serious punishment. When the dismissal derives from private behavior or poor performance, it remains a private matter. When it happens over something that has made the web indignant, it can destroy a person’s economic prospects for years. It is always difficult to assess a specific case from the outside, but I have seen a lot of layoffs that probably only deserved a suspension or a scolding.
This also raises the question of our digital identities. Google search results for a person can define the rest of their life, economically but not exclusively. But we have no control over what those results show. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but the digital identities we carry around are too important to be determined by a company’s “terms and conditions” pages.
Finally, it would be important to focus on the behavior of those who want to delete other people. We must pay attention to our way of expressing ourselves online. Unless a claim is really dangerous, and we want the firing of those who made it – a very heavy goal, but sometimes justified – we should not use social networks to increase the dose of attacks on a person. If he’s a politician, a TV host, or a senator, then it’s politics. But things work differently when the person in question is not prepared to receive such a level of attention. We’d all do better to remember that what appears to be an impromptu tweet could have real consequences. Proportions matter.
What I’m proposing could, I hope, mitigate one problem: the fact that so many online accusations can lead to exaggerated economic consequences. My suggestions will not resolve the political conflict over what is acceptable to say, and rightly so. There have always been things we cannot say. Those things are changing, and it was about time they did. Demographic balances of power are shifting, and groups that had little say are gaining a new voice. And they are using it.
Slowly and painfully, we are creating a society where more people can talk and express themselves about the way they talk about them. But I hope that we will be able to avoid this conflict doing a favor to the economic models of social networks and the priorities of the marketing departments of large companies.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
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