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Western Carolina University and the new āscriptā for appeasing the mob, Act II
This blog entry is part 2 of a series. You can read part 1 here.
On Aug. 25, Western Carolina University, a public university in North Carolina, announced that students depicted in two videos that made waves online the prior week were no longer enrolled at the university. There is, at this point, absolutely nothing surprising in WCUās actions. As I wrote in the first entry in this series, this story will likely seem familiar, since we have been reading the same story over and over again since May. It is barely an exaggeration to say that this series of stories needs only the Mad Libs-style replacement of names, dates, and locations to keep it up to date.
What happened at WCU is a paradigmatic example of this trend. In my previous entry, I described Act I of the āscriptā that so many colleges and universities are following these days when students (and even faculty members) are called out over the internet for saying or writing things that offend against or dissent from the mainstream. I detailed what was said in the videos, pointed out that offensive speech is rife on social media platforms despite efforts to combat it, and noted that restrictions on offensive speech, including so-called āhate speech,ā depend for their very viability on their not being enforced in an evenhanded way.
What comes next in the script?
Act II: Anatomy of a Cancellation
Imagine that out of the thousands (more probably, millions) of items of offensive speech or expression posted each day on the English-speaking internet, your own expression is one of the few per day that, for whatever reason, inspires someone out there to start a campaign to get you ācanceled.ā Whatās in store for you?
This use of the term ācanceledā has come into vogue awfully quickly, but there is as yet no agreed-upon definition of what it means to be canceled. and have both come forward with some useful definitions. After my friend, professor Mike Adams, committed suicide after being forced into retirement earlier this year because of something he tweeted, I came up with some proposed criteria of my own:
- Is the aim or predictable effect of the would-be cancelerās actions to silence or deplatform the target, rather than to persuade the target or others that the target is wrong?
- Is the would-be canceler demanding that the target be fired or otherwise punished for the targetās expression rather than his or her actions?
- Is the would-be canceler endeavoring to get others to join in making these demands, or participating in such a campaign?
(Thanks very much to Jonathan Rauch for suggesting to me the addition of the predictable effect language in point 1.) If all three of those criteria are met, I would suggest that whatās happening is a cancellation effort. Itās hardly the final word; right now, the real definition is basically āI know it when I see it.ā So what does that look like when youāre scrolling through your social media feeds?
Here, again, the WCU case is a great example. There were two videos at issue, one posted to Twitter, the other . was the video with the three women I described in my last entry and is the one I will examine here.
I hope handling this cause yāall donāt want the Black students to act out!! ?
ā D (@deon_bond)
At 12:07 p.m. on Aug. 22, the initial poster, āD,ā posted the video with the accompanying comment, āI hope @WCU handling this cause yāall donāt want the Black students to act out!! [vomiting emoji].ā D need not have worried; WCU was soon āhandling this.ā Less than an hour later, WCU replied on Twitter to say it would send him a direct message. That message was apparently a link to WCUās ā.ā Anyone, on or off campus, can use the form to send in a bias report. No names are required, so thereās no risk in reporting that member of the WCU community that really gets under your skin as many times as you feel might be necessary.
Itās clear that everyone knew this was a cancellation effort, including WCU, and nearly everyone was pretty enthusiastic about pitching in.
Reading the thread, itās clear that everyone knew this was a cancellation effort, including WCU, and nearly everyone was pretty enthusiastic about pitching in. A person self-identifying as an RA at WCU encourages people to use the reporting form, the link for which WCU helpfully tweeted out for general use: āI do really hope that there are consequences for these students because it is unacceptable!ā Account after account makes demands that action be taken against the students, from the summary (ā@WCU expecting 3 expulsions here, thank you), to the indignant (āANY OTHER SCHOOL would look into this and remove these students. But Iām SURE that @WCU will just brush it under the rug and allow these asshats to continue to go to school here instead of actually punishing themā). A person claiming to be a WCU professor weighs in with support: āAs a prof here, Iāve got your back. This is not acceptable behavior for catamounts.ā As another tweeter prophetically put it, āTheyāre finished [skull emoji] Black Twitter will handle it.ā
Several comments encourage violence against the women in the video: āYāall might as well beat they ass tbh,ā āFuck it , best em all up . People always wanna test boundaries until it come to getting they ass whooped,ā and āSomeone beat they nasty asses.ā Such comments are not legally incitement and are protected by the First Amendment, but would appear to violate Twitterās āWishing or hoping serious harm on a person or group of peopleā since they, er, wish or hope serious harm on a person or group of people. Yet no action seems to have been taken. No surprise there, since, as I discussed in part 1 of this blog series, the very viability of such restrictions depends on them not being applied evenly. The scale of such a task makes it impossible, so decisions to enforce or not to enforce them are instead made unjustly and arbitrarily, as they were here. Thanks, Twitter, Inc., for so neatly proving my point. (To be extra clear, this is not an argument for Twitter to work harder at censorship. That will always fail. Itās an argument that they should not attempt it in the first place.)
The one or two people who popped up in the thread suggesting that perhaps the women in the video should not be severely punished or kicked out of WCU were swiftly disabused of any such notion. One wrote,
As an alumni of @WCU Iām disgusted by this.
That being said I think teaching them a lesson (community service, classes on racial injustice & a lot of other requirements) would be better than expelling them. Again I HATE what these kids said but maybe they can GROW from this. [man shrugging emoji]
While what this user recommends would still be an unlawful punishment for constitutionally protected speech, this user is one of the very few who actually suggests that persuasion might be preferable to punishment. But that doesnāt last long. Another user replies, āIf we have a zero tolerance policy for plagiarism on the basis of integrity, we can have a zero tolerance police of racism on the same grounds.ā This is enough to change the alumās mind: āLove the argument here and I agree.ā There is no sign that this alumnus or his interlocutor recognized the irony here: The alum was persuaded, through (admittedly specious) argument, to change his mind about whether the students should have the chance to be persuaded to change their minds rather than thrown out of school.
Campaigns like this also highlight the detective skills of the internet community. Exactly one hour after Dās initial post, a user posted a screenshot of a womanās Instagram page, replying to D and WCU and saying, āThis one of they instagram,ā referring to the second woman who appears in the video. Ten minutes later at 1:17, the same user reports, āThis the first girl [in the videoās] insta,ā to which another user replies with her alleged twitter handle, āif anyone wants to drag her on Twitter too [woman shrugging emoji].ā Yet another user chimes in with what is allegedly the same womanās āfinsta,ā a term for a userās alternative, usually more candid Instagram account. The third woman in the video evades notice until 2:40 p.m., when the user posts her alleged Instagram page with the note, āPlease donāt forget the third girl instagram right here !ā The whole process was finished in three hours.
In such an environment, staying silent is a kind of insurance ā it protects us (mostly) from the risk that we will ourselves be stripped of something we canāt afford to lose.
While amazingly efficient, the random-Twitter-users-as-informants investigatory method has some flaws. There have been of people being misidentified during one of these campaigns, and while we have no reason to assume that happened here, one can only imagine the panic of a student wrongly identified to WCU being questioned about why she appeared in a video about which she knows nothing, knowing her denials are unlikely to be believed for some time if she resembles the person in the video.
The justification, such as it is, for social media campaigns against people who use racist or offensive language is that the use of such language, even when not directed at a given person, is disrespectful to those who hear it, potentially contributing to their emotional distress and a hostile environment. Yet these campaigns frequently and predictably produce a plethora of deeply personal attacks against the targeted individuals, sometimes including their friends and family members. When aimed at women, it frequently includes insults about their appearance, as it did here in response to a screenshot of nine Instagram photos of one of the women: āGod has punished her enough [laughing with tears in eyes emoji].ā This comment received 112 likes. Far from advancing respect for one another, the only message this sends is that on social media, two wrongs somehow do make a right.
Another characteristic of such campaigns is the groupthink that arises out of them, and which chases out any dissenting views.
Another characteristic of such campaigns is the groupthink that arises out of them, and which chases out any dissenting views. Dās thread displays a near-total lack of anyone willing to disagree with the premises ā this video proves that these people are bad, and they must be made to pay ā that are, at this point, assumed without even needing to be stated. Itās hard to believe that while all this was going on, nobody who ran across this thread thought to themselves that perhaps this was not the best approach to dealing with these students. Registering dissent, under oneās real name or pseudonymously, is a matter of a few keystrokes. Yet in the entire, multi-page thread of comments, only one other user does so, and itās literally the very last thing on the thread, hidden with some others under a warning that it may contain offensive content. It reads, āWhinny ass people. Like none of you ever said anything stupid. Get over it.ā (Why Twitter would consider this comment to be more offensive than many of those not hidden, no small number of which also contain the word āassā along with the usual panoply of four-letter words, is unclear.)
Groupthink is a serious problem in many settings, the most obvious of which is college and university campuses, ¹ū¶³“«Ć½app¹Ł·½ās speciality. Even so, generally there will be a few people willing to stick their necks out and assert their right to be part of the conversation. ¹ū¶³“«Ć½app¹Ł·½ās case archive is full of them. So why not here? This is where , also mentioned above, provides some important insight. He mentions āsecondary boycottsā as a characteristic of cancel culture, writing:
Do people who defend you, or criticize the campaign against you, have to fear adverse consequences? ā¦ By choosing targets unpredictably (almost anything can trigger a campaign), providing no safe harbors (even conformists can get hit), and implicitly threatening anyone who sides with those who are targeted, canceling sends the message: āyou could be next.ā ā¦ In the resulting climate, people will often join public denunciations or refrain from defending targets they believe to be innocent, to avoid becoming controversial themselves.
In such an environment, staying silent is a kind of insurance ā it protects us (mostly) from the risk that we will ourselves be stripped of something we canāt afford to lose. But insurance is never free, and the āpremiumā for this protection is the ability to use the right to free speech that belongs to each of us, individually, as an American.
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