I'm not saying anything about Yiannopoulos' better nature. I'm saying regardless of any flame-fanning, Jones is responsible for her own behavior and she fed the trolls of her own free will.
Y'know, I had a huge response written, and I was all fired up, because the experience Jones had is functionally identical to the experience of anyone who is not a white man on the internet. She didn't have to feed the trolls - She was a black woman who was in a movie they didn't like on principle alone and that was enough. Whether she fought back or not, the result is the same, so one might as well fight back. But then I realized - I'm not even sure you really read the article, because you're doing exactly what Serano (and Karl Popper before her, in 1949) argues is the wrong way to treat these people. I read the article that you posted. I wish that its idea of "just ignore them and they will go away" was a viable strategy that worked, but it's never panned out to be true in any situation I've seen, and Popper, who was writing as a Viennese Jew who was on the ground as the NSDAP was consolidating power, also seems to agree that it doesn't work either. These people aren't just trolls, and they aren't on the internet where one can commit hate speech with impunity. Serano herself speaks from experience, and I speak from my own. Perhaps you remember Grendel? We tried to ignore him so he would go away, but it wasn't enough. We basically voted, by the use of Hush, mute, and other functions, and made it so that he no longer had a useable platform. We judged that his intolerant speech was not to be allowed in our community. We had to make the site basically unusable for him. There are now new user tools that exist specifically because of his presence here - that's the opposite of "ignoring". anyways, whatever.
That's exactly my point. We ignored the troll, stopped engaging with him and he went away. I read the article, and it doesn't satisfy. 'Punching Nazis' will not stop Drumpf from getting re-elected in 2020, and in fact, may lead directly to it.by the use of Hush, mute, and other functions
But that's not all that happens when we use those functions. By the coding on this site, if enough people take those actions that person's links stop appearing on the blank front page. We didn't just ignore the troll. We specifically took actions that would also prevent that person's work from being seen by people who are new or unregistered users on this site. and Ignoring them will lead to... what, exactly? There's never been purely peaceful protest that did anything. Even Ghandi's non violence and civil disobedience movement had elements of extreme violence being perpetrated around it - violent protester-police clashes, the INA.That's exactly my point. We ignored the troll, stopped engaging with him and he went away.
I read the article, and it doesn't satisfy. 'Punching Nazis' will not stop Drumpf from getting re-elected in 2020, and in fact, may lead directly to it.
This is a semantic problem. I say 'We used our self-moderation tools to shut the door on a troll and ignore him. We ignored him and he went away.' You say 'We didn't ignore him, we reacted to offensive things and took steps to minimize our contact with offensive things which is not ignoring him.' Freedom of speech lets you knock on someones door and say 'I want to talk about these things, this is what I believe about these things.' It protects a person from being violently assaulted or imprisoned for speaking. It doesn't protect them from someone closing the door. Refusing to engage, making it impossible for the troll in question to engage is the functional equivalent of ignoring it. I can't say who the 'right' targets are for violence. But I can say in the affirmative that giving Milo Yiannopoulos of all people the moral high ground is asking for more trouble. Engaging with him in any manner is asking for more trouble.
Definitely, 100%, demonstrably not a semantic argument. Semantics didn't suddenly make those features appear. Many requests, fights between users, and then some hard coding work by several dedicated people working for free brought them to you. It was and remains a very active process.
I am saying that there is no practical difference between hush/mute/filtering someone and just outright ignoring them. It's lovely that we have tools in place to allow people to decide who is and isn't allowed to participate in their discussions. But there's not much difference in my mind between that, and saying 'I will not be paying any attention to what you are trying to say, bye.' I'm not denigrating the hard work put into the site.
Actually, what I'm saying is that we took steps that prevented not just us, but other people from seeing his content, specifically. That's the difference.You say 'We didn't ignore him, we reacted to offensive things and took steps to minimize our contact with offensive things which is not ignoring him.'