https://xkcd.com/1357/

I didn't think Tay's tweets were a big deal. I didn't think Microsoft's apology was either. But some people have a strong persecution complex and are offended that you can't make racist comments on Twitter.

Hate speech, in the broader form of being speech that vilifies marginalized people is rampant throughout society and it's completely hypocritical to pretend most of us don't do it. Look at any workplace lunchroom, or any group of friends hanging out in their house, or any school, any gossiping housewives, 99%er protesters, etc. Just about everybody vilifies vulnerable people. Not always categorizing them by race, but sometimes by personality type, job, country, city, status as a customer, company they work for or individual identity.

Just to be clear, it's not merely the corporate statement. It's a lot of the comments here, and not what they say directly but the assumptions they make. A thousand little nothings that make up culture - this concept is also part of the argument against casual use of slurs, right? What I'm calling out is the subtle yet pervasive idea that the content on Twitter, or otherwise subject to mass media exposure, is real serious business that must remain completely free of heresy. It's effectively a guilt-by-association that seeks to attach responsibility to the conduit of speech.

> I find it amusingly ironic that your post is the most I've seen someone offended over this whole situation.

Mea culpa. The phenomenon of feeling marginalized and repressed is certainly at the root of the sensationalist mess we are in, from all sides.

Meatspace situations cannot be generalized, and there will always be some injustice. There are people who are legitimately grieved and lack recourse, just like there are people who are are persecuted over fabricated allegations. Each group will react to the injustices against their group, with social media magnifying the frequency to seem much more common than reality. And the only way the disconnect can be bridged is through talking and better application of situation-by-situation justice.

But you know, there is such a thing as objective reality. And the objective reality of the Internet is that the absolute extent of harm that can be done is someone having to walk away. That is the Shelling point of pure communication. If one is exposed to the Internet (the single-most individual-empowering creation of humanity) and their reaction is to continue applying victim mentality to communication itself and seek to police content, then they are opposed to the very mechanism by which understanding can be achieved.

And while you may be tempted to apply that characterization to my complaint as well, there is a key difference - despite the usual contemporary aim of ranting, my goal isn't to convince people to convince people to form a virtual pitchfork mob or whatever. It's to directly address like-minded people who are in the position most able to create change, by writing code that fosters decentralization instead of the monetization-driven clusterfuck of the past decade. Microsoft, being a corporation, will always be subject to rule-by-groupthink. But that does not mean us individuals must also continue being beholden to those arbitrary whims of centralization.

I actually appreciated knowing that someone else saw the same condemnation. Microsoft is a world authority. That it just apologized for these things in the same motion makes them offensive. The reality was rather mundane. They didn't do anything wrong. They got pranked. This should be something we laugh about. It's only upsetting for the 5 seconds it takes you to realize: no one intended this. That should have been Microsoft's response imho.