If you're hurt by something a stranger said on the internet, you've never faced real oppression

Also, a more general case against internet mobbing and cancellations

If people are determined to be offended, if they will climb up on the ladder balancing it precariously on their own toilet system to be upset by what they see through the neighbor’s bathroom window, there's nothing you can do about (that)

—Christopher Hitchens

Lots of people claim to be hurt by things strangers said on the internet. They seek out, like a swarm of drones, something that someone said at some point that runs afoul of their perverse, narcistic, and draconian sensibilities. People claim that something that someone who they’ve never met, who some of their friends perhaps have viewed favorably at some point said something offensive, and they’re deeply hurt by it. Sometimes, the person who spoke the unspeakable is no one they or anyone they know has ever heard of. Yet this does not stop the outrage mob.

For example, on lots of college campuses, people claim to be hurt by random things that people have said—conservative commentators, professors they don’t have, and more. You can see more examples here.

This is very stupid. Nearly all people throughout human history have said some things that we’d now regard as offensive. If you’d be hurt by random statements from nearly everyone ever, you should seek professional help. If your standard for offense is sufficient to deem nearly all actually existing humans as worth canceling, then your standard is absurd—you support the social equivalent of broken windows policing.

It is utterly insane to expect people to never say anything that will offend you at all. If you’ve never said anything that you’d be worried to say to a party of the caviar caste, you’re not very interesting. Saying things that will piss people off comes with the terrain of having interesting thoughts. It would be a coincidence of ungodly proportions if no true statement ran afoul of modern sensibilities. If a person has never said anything offensive, this is because they never stray from orthodoxy or say anything interesting.

The people who have time to be endlessly offended by the statements of total strangers are not the downtrodden. There is an inverse correlation between having a cadre of well-connected twitter followers with whom one mobs strangers who made unforgiveable utterances and having faced serious oppression. If you’re being bombed by the U.S.—as happened to 10% of Laotians, for example—offensive utterances made in 1996 will never cross your mind. If you’re a victim of mass incarceration, you do not care about offensive jokes people are making—you don’t have time to care about that, nor do you have social media to inform you of the transgressions of strangers.

The mobbing tendency of too many on the left represents a method of norms enforcement by a small, privileged subset of elites. Only these people—the types who think that the real project of anti-racism has more to do with getting white people to self-flagellate than getting the U.S. to stop bombing small middle-eastern children, are the people who have the time and social capital to mob those who have stepped outside of the bounds of civil society.

These mobs no doubt disproportionately target neurodivergent people. We know this based on repeated observation of who gets canceled. This is what we should expect—a quintessential characteristic of autism is that it tends to cause people to make untoward utterances—ones that run afoul of the norms of polite society. If speaking one’s mind in a way that runs afoul of social norms becomes a fire-able offense, one that should lead to permanent excommunication, it’s no surprise that this will disproportionately harm the autistic. As Miller notes

Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse

Mobbing people for saying controversial things creates horrible incentives. It encourages people not to share their views out in the open where they can be challenged. More importantly, it encourages people to become milquetoast robots—unwilling to express anything interesting for fear of backlash. The ones who do express interesting things are quickly shunned.

Now, this is not to say that one can never be bothered by something a stranger has said. For example, suppose that Trump said he’d like to kill all Jews. Suppose additionally that Republicans continued to support him. This would bother me—not because I’m offended by what he said, but because it says something bad and frightening about the character of most Republicans if they’d support Trump despite him having said that.

Of course, I don’t give most people who claim to be hurt by things strangers said on the internet very much credit. I don’t think they were actually hurt most of the time. It’s just an unfortunate fact that in our culture, one gets the authority to cancel people if they claim to be hurt, so they have an incentive to pretend to be offended. Maybe after a while they even manage to convince themselves that they are hurt by things random strangers have said on the internet. But if they really are hurt, they have not faced real oppression.