DAVID THOMPSON: An Inexplicable Dislike.
At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities.
The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here.
Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
And then there are the brave warriors inside Twitter: Ex-Twitter Executive: Elon Musk Is Putting Us ‘In Harm’s Way’ By Showing How We Censored Content.
Taibbi tweeted out screenshots showing that company officials were in regular contact with Democrats and censored content that Democrats wanted removed.
“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” Roth posted on Mastodon.
On the frontline! Whole lot of leftists really leaning hard into the century-old “moral equivalent of war” concept.