My only point is people should look closely and think twice before cheering any erosion of privacy or speech rights. As @TooGoodToCheck_ says, the Harvard case is a terrible one to make any points about. I do not defend them. But too often I see people cheering privacy invasions until it falls on them. With a few tweaks of the facts the case could easily be very problematic and most people would still be cheering the arrogant shits getting their due.
There’s an old saw “a conservative is a liberal who buys a house, and a liberal is conservative who’s been arrested”. I own a multi-family rental house and had to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees after refusing an attempted warrantless search of my tenants homes. So what does that make me? Stupid? When I called the NJACLU for advice, I was told I should have let them in if I had nothing to hide!
So yes. I have a thing for privacy rights, they’re too precious to give away without careful thought even if it feels good at the time. And the point of discussing it is that this is often not a matter of law but of culture and acceptable behavior. Ex: If we all make clear bringing someone’s private life to the workplace was unacceptable, then such acts will be inhibited.
I think the recipient needs a VERY good reason to act on it, it would have to be corroborating other evidence. The idea of “outing” as a sport is horrifying. The only time I condone it is in cases of public hypocrisy. Say you are a journalist and someone tells you the Mayor’s housekeeper found bondage porn under his bed. Publish? By me, not unless he’s gotten up on a soapbox and railed against BDSM. To be clear again, I’m not talking about law but culture, I don’t want a culture where outing is universally approved of and privacy a quaint concept. Do you? Is there nothing you would prefer kept private?
Speaking of horrifying, did you read the passage in the original article, which contained the phrase “piñata time”?
I’ll grant that maybe there’s some possible universe of text that provides enough context to merely make that distasteful, rather than shocking and revolting, but I can’t imagine it. If I were a student faced with the choice of either reporting, or of seeing the grinning assholes who made that joke around campus, knowing full well that they think the death of a non-white child is hilarious, I would absolutely turn them in. Because fuck those guys, and fuck any kind of dehumanizing pro-lynching “humor”. Just because their speech is protected by the 1st amendment doesn’t mean I want anyone who talks that kind of shit in my life
ETA:
sorry, I’ve been kind of seething about the lynching joke since I first read the article, and I may have gotten a bit heated. I just want to comment on another point you made:
A message board with 100 of your co-workers is never really a fully private non-work setting. The larger the group, the less private it is, and the fact that the members were all admitted to harvard is also going to kind of pierce the veil separating the private group from the institution
I can’t, and have no desire to, defend those “students”. I just see the slippery slopes from there to someone being outed for something you or I don’t have a problem with, but others in their life do. Back to Ms Avelenda or my hypothetical mayor. Cases like this Harvard story are EXACTLY where we need guard against emotions causing us to toss away our freedoms, just like we did after 9/11 when our sensibilities were also outraged.
Yeah, I’m also just trying to be really careful to separate the white-hot anger I feel about the harvard humoristsadmitees jerks from a debate about privacy with @gellfex.
If anything, the rage I feel should make me consider the privacy issues more carefully, because I don’t want the specific details of this case to get in the way of a reasonable argument about principles. And I also don’t want that anger to accidentally morph into some kind of fight with @gellfex, 'cause lord knows that kind of thing can happen online all to easily
I still disagree with the notion that this specific case represents an erosion of privacy rights, but I quite specifically don’t want to make the argument that their behaviour was so disgusting that we should suspend concerns about privacy as a consequence. I think there have already been lots of better arguments for why this case does not represent a breach of privacy social norms or laws.
All that seems pretty fair to me! I don’t think these are easy questions at all and we should consider them carefully. There aren’t easy answers, but part of the question is just how much privacy we can and should expect online. I’m not sure anyone has answered that in any satisfying manner so far. Is the internet an extension of the public square or is it something different?
Wait… fairness in an internet discussion? Seems fishy!
Exactly my point. Please note nowhere in either thread have I defended the Harvard clowns, only pointing out how close the case is to the edge of privacy and how few people really think about that distinction. There’s precious little privacy left, best to be protective, no? I guarantee there’s people out there that hate some of your values, and would use them against you if they could. You don’t have to leave BBS to find people that hate some of my values.
i can’t find anywhere in either thread where you distance yourself from those harvard wannabes either. even in the quoted comment you fail to do so. is there anything wrong with finding racism and joking about lynching a child of color despicable? is it even exceptional? if you share those values would it really surprise you to find those values hated?
as far as privacy rights go, what expectation of privacy does someone posting to group of dozens of other students have? on the one hand, i would accept that they have a higher expectation of privacy than someone taking out an ad in the media proclaiming their excuse for a sense of humor to the general public but surely they would not have the expectation of privacy as someone who writes in a journal or who speaks face to face to a close friend.
I was unaware the rule was “if you don’t explicitly denounce them when you’re talking about something tangential, you’re with them”. Thanks for letting me know.
But we’re not talking about mere values. They were enthusiastically supporting violence and other criminal behavior. They would have made a private institution more dangerous for many others. And to the credit of Harvard, when the institution was made aware of the behavior they chose to protect their students, faculty, staff, and reputation.
I still say this was a case of whistle-blowing, similar to the situation of a relative turning in a family member who has committed murder.
Hm. I think there is no real expectation of privacy in a “secret group” on Facebook.
I’m in a group that has had a problem with a small clique bullying other members who wouldn’t side with them on an issue. The officers were sent screenshots of text messages, Facebook posts in secret or closed groups, and other social media that showed the bullying behavior. We’ve got basic codes in our bylaws about respecting other members, and these communications were shared with the group during a hearing to have their membership revoked.
Should the victims of bullying or others witnessing the bullying not share the proof, even though it was violating the expected privacy of the messages?
Where should the line be drawn? At inconvenience? Threats? I understand there has been erosion of privacy since at least the 90s, when US citizens believed it when the government told them it was patriotic to give up rights for security. But where should we draw the line? Can we even draw one?
What do you believe would have been an appropriate consequence for the Harvard 10? If you aren’t defending them, what are you defending?
I don’t see anyone here suggesting zero tolerence, nor has anyone brought up grade school children. We’re talking about legal adults on a school related Facebook page who have been accepted to an Ivy League school, not 5 year olds.
Wait, is this in response to the post above being hidden? It looks like it got flagged – not even yet removed by a moderator – because you started making personal attacks, accusing chgoliz of driving trollies. If people enforcing board rules counts as being silenced, well, that’s a pretty extreme definition of free speech in itself.
That does seem to encapsulate a new thing from the right these days, doesn’t it – “Your disagreement that I can’t find a way to disprove is silencing me!”
I think the problem you might be having is that you’re connecting abstract privacy issues to a set of facts that don’t really relate to those issues that you care about.
If a student had been suspended for anonymous posts on stormfront, that were only discovered because the university is his ISP, then there are legit privacy issues we could discuss.
But since this case doesn’t offer much in the way of actual concrete privacy issues, it’s hard to connect it back to abstract privacy issues. And I think we agree there aren’t legal issues. So there’s not much left to talk about but how terrible the student behaviour was (very), or if the university response was appropriate (IMO it was).
I would like to respond to the post that insulted me, because there are points to be made.
It is lazy to call a long-standing, reasonably-well-regarded poster a “troll” just because you don’t like what they’re saying. If you can’t even get a basic term like that correct, why should anyone invest any time trying to understand what you say?
Furthermore, I don’t understand why it was important to indicate that your wife has “unassailable Liberal values” (complete with an elite education). I’m not a Liberal and the argument I’m making isn’t liberal, so why would the fact that your wife is convince me of something? Seriously, what were you trying to say with that?
But more crucially, I am concerned that a trained social worker would equate something an underprivileged 5-year-old says with a coordinated team effort by young adults with all the privilege in the world. That’s a serious conflation of very different situations. Unprofessional. Doesn’t matter how good her schooling was.
And why do you assume that the equivalent scenario for “nonwhite” admitted students would be to trade “rap songs with horrifying violent & misogynistic lyrics”? Do you know anything about rap music? Other than a few bad examples trotted out to ‘prove’ how awful the entire industry is? And what makes you think the students in this group are all white? Or don’t listen to rap music? There’s a lot of potential intersectionality that doesn’t seem to register in your arguments, or in your assumptions of what I must be thinking.
So here’s one last question, because I do think it’s at the crux of the situation: do you believe that adults who go out of their way to gather together to make nasty violent bigoted statements pose no risk to society? (Or, as little risk as a 5-year-old repeating something he’s heard?)
