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posted by martyb on Friday December 28 2018, @03:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the if-it-ever-quacked-like-a-duck dept.

Submitted via IRC for takyon

The year of deleted tweets

In July, Disney fired Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. Cause for termination: a series of offensive tweets, in most cases about a decade old, that were circulated by a right-wing media personality. Gunn’s tweets, many of which were about molestation or pedophilia, were indefensible. But the method in which they were dug up, as well as the people who circulated them — bad-faith conspiracy theorists who used old jokes made in poor taste to brand Gunn as a pedophile — are part of a larger trend in which problematic or out-of-context tweets are being ripped from the past to ruin their author in the present.

Trial by online fire isn’t new. Milkshake Duck, a term coined by Twitter user @pixelatedboat in 2016, gave a name to a cultural internet phenomenon. It goes like this: someone gains online fame for something innocuous, only for it to come out shortly after that the person holds repugnant or problematic views. After a presidential election debate in 2016, for example, the internet became obsessed with a sweater-clad man named Ken Bone. His reign as a viral darling quickly came to an end after people discovered that his Reddit history included comments about stolen celebrity nudes and the “justified” killing of Trayvon Martin.

In 2018, however, the concept of Milkshake Ducking became far more convoluted. Now it’s not just about present problematic views, but holding people responsible for comments they’ve made previously, in some cases years ago. Call it Gunn’s Law: everyone has a past.

[...] Tweet deletion is no longer a matter of curation, but a necessity. Our lives are lived online more each year. We shouldn’t excuse people who spout racist, misogynist, damaging views online in present day. But as we confront our younger, more problematic past selves preserved online, the line between personal growth and punishment deserves breathing room. Until we can accept that, deleting tweets is all we have.

[This concept goes way back in time. Let the one among you who has no sin, cast the first stone. People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Is it just that things are more visible, findable and more easily promulgated, now? --Ed.]


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Friday December 28 2018, @08:55AM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Friday December 28 2018, @08:55AM (#779293) Journal

    There's a deeper root, yet still relatively recent, to this than current social media. US society (can't speak for others) has for at least the past 50 years or so preferred retribution over rehabilitation.

    Looking at the general trends of jurisprudence and so forth, we see the restrictions and roadblocks on those who have records have become pretty consistently more strict, culminating in today's forever felony records, lifetime no-fly, no-buy and various other lists, often dubious stories from long-past acquaintances, the digging up of random dirt in general, however otherwise unsupported it may be. In the age of information, information gets weaponized. Am I surprised? Hardly.

    Old tweets strike me as pretty much just more of the same. Frankly, I'm very seldom concerned with such things on a personal level, but watching how society goes about leveraging them does concern me. It looks to me at age 62 like it's generally getting worse faster, with the occasional bubble of sanity smothered as quickly as possible by the pitchforks-and-torches waving masses.

    What to do? No idea. Really. Sometimes I think it's one of the fairly late signs of a true failure of our (US) society. Perhaps others as well. Perhaps societies are like life: no one gets out alive.

    I'm truly sorry for people who are legitimately attempting to rehabilitate themselves in the current environment. Without a seriously ironclad sense of self, some form of solid legal income, and support from at least some friends, that uphill looks to me to be so steep as to be outright terrifying.

    --
    I had the house child-proofed. But they must
    have done it wrong. Kids still get in somehow.

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