Also, featuring the price of his liquor bottles (prominent in the first article about this by the same writer) is indicative of the level of pettiness involved. Maybe there's an actual story here, but this isn't it, and it's not clear that the story is more than "someone said something regrettable on Twitter".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
Stochastic terrorism
When people with power stay things, other people take it as permission to do things that are said or implied in that speech. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
It happened with Trump, who more or less seemed to know he was provoking something dark. Other public figures ought to have more care with their language.
Clearly Garry’s fans are threatening violence here as a direct consequence of Garry’s intentional targeting and signalling here. I don’t follow at all how the journalistic angle is problematic
People of a certain political bent are eager to throw journalists under every available bus, even if that means denying history and common sense.
The standard for free speech in America is that if you're not calling for imminent and specific violence, then you're in the clear. The stochastic in stochastic terrorism does away with both the imminence and specificity; with a large enough population you'll have enough nuts that some of them may take even the most mellow criticism as a call to action.
It's nice that you're familiar with a story from England in 1170, but no, you don't just get automatically blamed in the US when crazy people do things in response to dumb things you said on Twitter.
Regardless, even if you did get blamed, missionlocal is not the impartial jury who gets to decide whether or not quoting 2pac is incitement to violence.
Mission Local is one of the best sources of local San Francisco news, especially anything directly relevant to the Mission District.
If rich jerks don't want to be called out by local journalists, they shouldn't post unhinged public death threats, even as a "joke" or "song reference".
OK. Maybe their coverage of potholes is fantastic, but this article is a terrible, obviously partisan hack job. Both things can be true.
I mean, sure...who are you arguing with? I didn't say nobody should cover this. I said this article is terrible.
> But denying that public calls to violence spurs actual violence is denial of basic cause and effect.
Yeah, except we have laws around this concept, and even if what you're saying were true in the US (it isn't, thankfully), it doesn't magicaly make hack journalism good.
Said differently, "incitement to violence" doesn't mean that missionlocal is high-minded and mature for spending two articles talking about the price of his liquor.
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But tying this potential legislation to the message Tan communicated to his 408,000 Twitter followers would appear to be a serious legal challenge: Half a dozen lawyers and judges told Mission Local that, however ill-advised, Tan’s comments do not rise to the legal definition of a death threat.
Under Penal Code 422, a person making a criminal threat must harbor “specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat…”
“It is offensive, but it is speech protected by the First Amendment,” said Berkeley School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It does not meet the standard for incitement.”
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"This is a fairly standard and boring way of dressing up censorship as something high-minded."
Do you think that speech is not an act? That speech does not have any consequences in the world, and so should be free from all restriction? That's certainly not the law in the US, and you seem to be aware of incitement to violence.
"missionlocal is not the impartial jury who gets to decide whether or not quoting 2pac is incitement to violence."
Please quote where missionlocal decides that is incitement to violence. You are accusing missionlocal of hack journalism where it is simply reporting what happened. You may not think Garry Tan should get heat for doing what he did, but you should not place your ire on the journalists who are reporting what is by any reasonable definition a story within their purview.
It didn't take me that. I knew it within moments of reading the article and it seems the vast majority of readers didn't have this problem.
A wealthy, powerful, influential celebrity figure saying something 'regrettable' on Twitter often has real-world consequences. If he'd posted a tweet that read something like "Upload a picture of you assassinating so-and-so and a Bitcoin address and I will send you $100k" and someone followed those instructions, that would be conspiracy to commit murder. If he'd posted "I feel that so-and-so's politics are misguided" that's totally reasonable free speech.
There's also a question of scale or exposure. We legally define rights by qualitative analyses. I feel strongly that as technology increases the power of an individual that quantitative analyses are relevant too. If someone's speech will be broadcasted to 400,000 or 40,000,000 followers, that's one thing, if it's said privately to 4 friends that's completely different.
Somewhere in the middle of these things there's a line between right and wrong. I'm quite confident that telling an audience of 400,000 that you want a few named people to "Die slow motherfuckers" is on the wrong side of that line.
Probably receiving death threats causes a lot of real anxiety (not just the PC snowflake kind). That's a lot better than an actual assassination, but it's not nothing either.
Then why are we trusting the person to make a rational choice? By that logic, X should simply disallow using certain words when your audience is > 400,000. Because anyone can get incited for violence when they read certain words as you claim.
You say "crack down" but it's just an online comment here, which should be protected, right?
"Die slow motherfuckers" is harsh criticism?
The job of journalists is to report news worth events, and provide extra context with some level of verification.
When the CEO quotes rap lyrics which implies that someone should kill them selves, that is news worthy.
The CEO, who is in a position of both power and responsibility, should really not be saying stupid shit. Why? because the job of the CEO is to make sure a company's image isn't tarnished. (see Gerald Ratner).
Tan should frankly grow the fuck up and do what CEOs normally do, which is pay local politics to change.
He expressed a strong desire for these people to die a slow death. How is that not intending to cause harm?
Garry Tan chose to flaunt the high-end liquor bottles and "Twitter menace" plaque ahead of his sort-of-apology, not missionlocal.
Only one of the articles (not the one linked) refers to them at all. The other one focuses more on the hate mail some idiot decided to send being a screenshot of Tan's original tweet, and both of them are pretty clear about it being a rap lyric.
Kind of hard to argue with a straight face that the real problem with the YC CEO acting like a not-very-smart bro influencer even in his sort-of-apology is that some local rag journalist didn't spare the embarrassing detail.
Sure, Tan was probably more interested in highlighting the "twitter menace" plaque than the fairly expensive liquor and unremarkably-priced wine, but celebrities flaunting wealth with a laughing emoji as a "fuck you" to their critics is a well established trope, and I don't think high-minded, mature journalism is about taking the most sympathetic interpretation possible of bro silliness.
Part 1 is a radicalization chain, where you have several layers of public figures with varying levels of public-facing support for your cause, who guide people down the chain by platforming people with more extreme public-facing views. So maybe a talk show host who mostly just points out obvious problems in our society, who occasionally brings on guest speakers who have slightly more specific framings, who themselves occasionally publicly support YouTube channels that pitch potential solutions.
Part 2 is consensus building. As people trickle down the radicalization chain, it's important to introduce them to new social spaces that present your ideas as obvious truths. This normalizes your radical ideas in the minds of your newly radicalized cohort. Casual "joking but not joking" comments are a basic staple of this, with guillotine memes and blackpill posting and Boogaloo jokes all serving to make the appearance to their community that their extreme views are normal, acceptable, and widely held.
Part 3 (which is somewhat optional) is targeting. Some prominent figure (likely one of those public figures on your radicalization chain) paints a far less vague target than usual: casually calling for people to kill all landlords is one thing, mentioning one specific landlord is a clear escalation from that. Ideally this is done without making any incriminating statements, which at least in the US is easy: as long as your don't make a specific plan, it's typically considered protected speech.
Part 4 is, to borrow some specifically leftist terminology, "propaganda of the deed", "direct action", or just "terrorism". With a sufficiently large pool of radicalized individuals, you'll have people all across the radicalization and "unhingedness" spectra. The "extremely radicalized, completely unhinged" corner is where you find your martyrs, freedom fighters, etc. They hear the targeting speech from part 3, and decide to take it upon themselves to do something about it. They commit some act of violence, and probably end up facing some extreme consequences for it, whether that means death, imprisonment, etc. Then, your entire movement needs to achieve 2 things: outwardly distance themselves from the "lone wolf" to avoid unwanted scrutiny or consequences, while privately lionizing them as someone who "did what needed to be done" in order to encourage the next one.
The elegant thing about all this is that what it lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in robustness. Since it's not a rigidly fixed organization, individual parts can take a fall without crippling the effectiveness of the whole. One lone wolf doesn't incriminate any other members, except maybe the person who announced the target, if they were sloppy about how they worded it. And if someone along your radicalization chain loses their seat in the public eye for whatever reason, you have plenty of redundancy to fill the gap, and they can probably find a comfortable position somewhere further along the chain once things cool off a bit.
Playing whack-a-mole with the people with enough prominence to plausibly select targets is probably the most legally justifiable way of suppressing a standalone complex like this. Most people along the chain, both participants and consumers, are pretty clearly practicing free speech and assembly. They make perfectly legitimate targets for rival radical movements, but the State needs to uphold basic human rights, so it takes a more precise approach. Focusing on the shotcallers, it's easier (not necessarily easy) to get creative with what constitutes a non-protected "true threat", rather than crack down on civil liberties as a whole.
It's the easiest thing in the world to report this in a neutral, factual way. You don't need to focus on Gary's money, his association to tech, his liquor cabinet, or anything else. That the reporter(s) could not do this speaks volumes about their motivations.
Aside from that, I have no dog in this particular fight. I haven't lived in SF in years, and if you're insinuating that I'm on a particular side of the political spectrum, you're way over your skis. Partisan doesn't have to mean "left" or "right", by the way...you can just be partisan against tech.
Is this really necessary? Let he who has made no mistakes (particularly when drunk) cast the first stone.
The term stochastic terrorism (as it is used in literature, as far as I know, eg in “The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism”) is simpler. It means that someone sends a message into mass media with an intention to motivate someone to commit an act of terror. That’s all. The intention part quickly got buried by the users of the term, at least on the Internet (what’s the difference if the outcome is the same, amiright?), so now it just means any mean tweet that can motivate a random nut job to do something crazy, as is demonstrated by the comment I replied to.
> During his online tirade, Tan posted photos of his private liquor stash, and indicated to a fellow Twitter-user that he was inebriated.
Describing the tweets adjacent to the offensive one gives useful context. This is not the reporter dredging up some irrelevant trivia from deep in Tan's past or something.
Readers might not know who Tan is. It is even more essential context to explain that:
> Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator and a heavy campaign donor to efforts to oust progressive politicians [...]
> Tan is a well-heeled donor for San Francisco’s moderate causes and candidates. He sits on the board of Grow SF, a political pressure group favoring moderate causes and candidates and targeting progressives. Tan gave more than $100,000 to the 2022 campaign to recall then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He gave at least $20,000 to the 2021 school board recall, too.
If Tan was just some random person with no influence and no relation to SF politics this would probably not be much of a story. That he is one of the major donors to the political rivals of these supervisors is the reason this is a political shitstorm. Tan's tweet damages the reputation of his "Grow SF" group and the candidates they support, and has possible further political implications:
> Peskin today asked the City Attorney’s Office to look into requiring public disclosures from recipients of political donations from “purveyors of hate and violence.”
If instead, I'm a respected member of a political movement with a pool of radicals, and my target is a rival to my political movement, and I target the radicalized members of my political movement with a call for violence by relying on the movement's normalized justifications for violence, then there is a much, much greater chance of someone rising to the call.
This is a good point. Who is to say if there is a difference between receiving hateful letters to one’s home and not receiving hateful letters to one’s home?
This is bad journalism because it is a report of events that happened, good journalism would have been a levelheaded piece about how Tan is probably a good guy and we should probably agree with his politics
Garry clearly isn't too stupid or desperate for clicks to do any better, and so I'm afraid I'm going to have to continue to disagree that we should save our ridicule for his critics.
People often say things just to express themselves rather than for any planned and considered reason.
I greatly doubt the plan was to cause harassment. The gains are extremely low and this could cost him his job.
I guess maybe you think it isn't criticism at all because it's not constructive criticism. But it's certainly criticism, no reasonable person could construe it as anything less than critical. And because it falls short of a specific and imminent threat, it's legal political speech.
For my part, I hope Trump dies painfully, as well as every other living American president (with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter who was a terrible president but a good man nevertheless.) If you live in America, I know you frequently hear people saying they wish X Y or Z politician would die. Such harsh sentiments are commonly expressed in American society. It's a free country and lots of people exercise that freedom with inflammatory but legal hot takes like that.
It is not normal and should not be normal for major political donors to make public death threats to local officials in the city where they live, even as a joke. It's toxic and corrosive to society and politics, and makes him seem unhinged. Tan is rightly getting excoriated, and he deserves scorn from his own political allies for significantly damaging their common causes.
Tan keeps complaining about SF politics being frustrating, but in my opinion, as someone who supports a significant portion of his policy platform, local politics would be improved if Tan would just move somewhere else or shut up and keep his money to himself and leave political discussions to the grown ups.
Sure, but you don't have to express yourself on twitter... you do that when you want to communicate something to all your followers.
> ...The gains are extremely low and this could cost him his job.
That's true of the tweet by itself. If sober reason was going to hold him back there would be no tweet at all.
Legally, yes. Socially? That's never been the standard. There is no principle in the US that says everybody has to be cool with anything people say short of calling for imminent violence.
Or you do it automatically and habitually. The brain to mouth filter and a brain to keyboard filter are similar, many people don't have either.
This article is anything but neutral (not that I don’t think Tan screwed up here).
I am not saying that they're hack journalists because they literally accused Tan of incitement to violence (that would probably be libel). I'm saying they're hacks because the article (and the prior one) were full of irrelevant details about Tan, while ignoring nearly all of the details about the actual incident. Tan is not the core of the story, unless you've lost all perspective on your job as a journalist.
It's like reporting on a robbery, but making most of your article about Karl Marx because the criminal was reading a copy of Das Kapital. The only way you get to that point is to blame Marx for the actions of the criminal.
Some unhinged person sent a threat of violence to politicians, using Tan's tweet. That is the story. Tan's liquor cabinet, his history of political donations, his wealth...all of that is irrelevant.
How does the sentence "die slow motherfuckers" even remotely imply someone should kill themselves? Do you see the irony of misquoting him in a comment about misleading journalism?
Necessary disclaimer: I do not support the tweet and it has nothing to do with my comment, so breathe and understand my point before hitting that down-vote.
"Die slow" or "I hope you die" are not threats. It's unconstructive venting.
Right. That's why the post I responded to shouldn't object to calling this "stochastic terrorism" on the basis of free speech. In the immediate discussion the argument is inherently self-contradictory.
It also muddies the meaning of free-speech from a profound principle to a cheap argument to club people with online when they criticize something in a way you disagree with.
YES
(Other than incitement of violence and libel)
If we are also continuing along pedantry, it was a quote, it was an incorrect assertion.
But what we can possibly agree on, is that whilst we are both engaging on this particular point, the more important issue of a CEO acting incorrectly goes unexplored.
Where I think we are both aligned: the CEO is perfectly within their rights to say stupid things, however they really shouldn't. Whilst we shouldn't use legal tools to stop CEOs doing stupid things, we certainly should use social tools to encourage them to respect other people.
> "Stochastic terrorism" is just an excuse to crack down on free speech
Implying the term is used to prevent free speech, and not trying to prevent the use of the term. I don't even understand how it's not obvious.
> If we are also continuing along pedantry
We're not being pedantic, we're being correct and honest.
The post says it's just an excuse to crack down on free speech, suggesting that it has no validity as an actual idea, that the term itself is invalid. Arguing that a term is always wrong is surely an attempt to prevent the use of that term.
What's more important to free speech.., that people can use the term "stochastic terrorism" to describe a tweet where they think it fits, or that people should not have to be subjected to having their tweets called "stochastic terrorism"?
To me, it's pretty clear: if you're trying to police language, you shouldn't be using free speech as the justification for that.
It's called stochastic terrorism you dense moron
What else could you even want from this article? That they just elide the liquor angle? That they don't cover it at all or spend the entire article analyzing the person who sent the threats? A person in power wished death on a political figure, and people acted on that wish. This is absolutely news worthy of an article in a local blog, whose beat overlaps with the political jurisdiction of the threatened politicians.