“People can only be punished in accordance with the law”. If that is a principle not many are enforcing it, e..g all those people who lose their jobs because things they are *accused* of doing, or that they say, in the West. Do they have any legal recourse?
Nice article, though it was 4 years ago and things seem to have gotten a lot worse. Is there any progress on the legal front in AU, UK or US? Maybe the implosion of twitter will solve this partially?
Another excellent read Katy. Also, a proposal that has been floated is a 90 day gap between the day of incident happening and social media mobbing. It is during this period that people may lose jobs for "wrongspeak"- not sure how this would work in terms of judicial processes (for example, will the defendant be charged - if yes, then when?) but it is a fair suggestion to let the media outrage die and then take a cool headed approach to events.
Agree very strongly @Justin. Cool heads must prevail. Sometimes someone will lose their job (like the cop who was supposed to be looking after Ethics and was abusing people anonymously). But it must be done in a cool fashion and not in outrage.
“People can only be punished in accordance with the law”. If that is a principle not many are enforcing it, e..g all those people who lose their jobs because things they are *accused* of doing, or that they say, in the West. Do they have any legal recourse?
Excellent point, and why I have stood against people being summarily dismissed in the context of social media mobs. Currently there is no legal recourse, because the law has not caught up to the social media age, but I think there can and should be, for precisely the reasons you outline. I have publicly argued for it here: https://archive.md/0d5mP/again?url=https://quillette.com/2018/07/28/inducing-peoples-employers-to-fire-them-should-be-a-civil-wrong/
Nice article, though it was 4 years ago and things seem to have gotten a lot worse. Is there any progress on the legal front in AU, UK or US? Maybe the implosion of twitter will solve this partially?
I hope so. Twitter is custom made for this kind of mobbing. I don’t see any progress yet, but in the right case… maybe.
Another excellent read Katy. Also, a proposal that has been floated is a 90 day gap between the day of incident happening and social media mobbing. It is during this period that people may lose jobs for "wrongspeak"- not sure how this would work in terms of judicial processes (for example, will the defendant be charged - if yes, then when?) but it is a fair suggestion to let the media outrage die and then take a cool headed approach to events.
Agree very strongly @Justin. Cool heads must prevail. Sometimes someone will lose their job (like the cop who was supposed to be looking after Ethics and was abusing people anonymously). But it must be done in a cool fashion and not in outrage.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
This.
And then we get into the abuse of Red notices through Interpol. I trust DFAT is doing something.
It is.