When the mob weaponizes your past against you
Who reading has never said anything negative about anyone? Who has never said an inappropriate word? Who has never made a decision or entertained a thought you later regretted? No hands should be raised. If yours is up, you are lying to yourself. We all, depending on how old you are, have at one point or another held beliefs we may no longer agree with; committed acts we may now be ashamed of. We have made decisions we now see were ill informed and poorly executed. But we learn what to correct through experience and over time. We change the parts of us we do not like. The parts of us that drove us to be unfair or jealous; arrogant or cowardly. The parts of us that allowed us to be the manipulated or the manipulator. We learn as we grow and we grow as we learn.
Of course, not everyone changes. Many people are still the same person they were when they were in high school. Many hold the same immature views they did in their youth. But this is not about them. This is about the people who have grown and it is specifically about the people who have grown only to have their past thrown in their present day face. We have a phrase for it now and when something has its own phrase well, you know it is happening a lot. We call it “cancel culture.” The need to cancel someone, get them fired, publicly shame them all in the name of protecting something or someone. Now look, of course there are exceptions, if you raped someone at any point in time, there is no coming back from that. But barring people who commit violent, intentionally hateful acts, we need to be really careful when launching public attacks against someone. It is becoming far too common for people to dig up years old tweets to attack someone’s present day character. My generation did not grow up sharing every thought on Twitter. We are lucky to have grow up with a modicum of privacy, with enough room to make mistakes that were not analyzed through a microscope. For those who have grown up with twitter, with the ability to publish your every opinion for the world to see, well their past is now being weaponized against them.
We are accustomed to reading these stories of people being fired or doxxed because of something they did or said. Last week it happened to someone I recently met. An independent journalist was publicly labeled homophobic and anti-Semitic. In an effort to get people to turn on her, to force the hand of a larger platform that was preparing to collaborate with her, strangers were digging through her twitter to find tweets that go back as far as 2011 to prove that this label was accurate the one calling her homophobic. I read the tweets only because a stranger took it upon herself to message me screenshots. I read them and the first thing I noticed was the dates: 2011/2016. I read them and I did not see a hateful person’s words. I saw a person who used the jargon that was acceptable then, in her youth, and is no longer acceptable now. I saw a person who described people’s accents, and although they may have been insensitive descriptions, they were not racist in nature. They were not dangerous. But the mob won and this journalist was stripped from the opportunity and denied this collaboration with the larger publication. To add insult to injury, the larger publication posted a statement denouncing the collaboration, naming the journalist, and repeating the labels cast against her for their 60,000+ followers to see. Of course it is within anyone’s rights to choose whom they wish to collaborate with but to publicly label someone over tweets that are 10 years old is almost laughable if not for how frustrating it is. The anti-Semitic accusations were hurled at her for having covered a conversation between two public figures.
Imagine now the power a mob knows it has: to be wrong in their opinion but still achieve their goal of attacking someone’s character so much so that people turn on them. Imagine being a person who does not know someone personally but you have this righteous need to dig through 10 years of tweets to find something you can use against them. Imagine people with personal vendettas who know they can mobilize online mobs against someone of their choosing. No one is safe from this. Do you realize? At any point anyone can label you anything and not even have valid enough proof. All they need are some words from years ago or some recent words that may be offensive but not dangerous not actual hate speech. Combine those with enough repetition, a few people to start and spread it, and done. That is the real danger.
We are entering a world where everyone must walk on egg shells. You can’t even describe something anymore without the worry that you might offend someone. Racism is being conflated with simple preferences. Tolerance is turning into intolerance. It is as if people need to find something to be offended about. And not just privately offended, but publicly, loudly offended. What is the need? Why? Where does this self-righteous behavior come from? Because there are plenty of actually dangerous things happening in the world and I for one do not see these same people diving in head first to investigate, denounce, and attack the real threats to society at large. People should most definitely be held accountable for their words, their actions, their negligence, but people also need to be held accountable for their ill-conceived crusades in the name of justice.