The most socially conscious sports league (some exceptions apply)
It's easy to speak out against injustice when it's from the people who didn't like in the first place.
Steve Nash in 2017, in response to Donald Trump saying there were “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville:
Steve Nash in 2022, in response to one of his players promoting blatant antisemitism online:
"I just hope that we all go through this together," Nash said prior to Monday's 116-109 win over the Indiana Pacers. "There's always an opportunity for us to grow and understand new perspectives. I think the organization is trying to take that stance where we can communicate through this. And try to all come out in a better position and both more understanding and more empathy for every side of this debate and situation."
One group thinks Jews are Satan worshippers who controlled the slave trade and usurped their heritage and traditions from Africans. The other is against that.
Very fine people on both sides, I guess.
But maybe I shouldn’t be picking on Nash, the greatest basketball player to ever emerge from my country, and a guy I respected until about ten minutes ago. It’s not like he’s the only NBA legend who is outspoken about social issues until it might directly affect him and his wallet.
[UPDATE: Nash has been fired as coach of the Brooklyn Nets. Now that his job isn't on the line anymore, we'll see if he has more to say. ]
Of course, it’s impossible to talk about antisemitism and hypocritical virtue signaling without talking about Twitter, which I’m told will be ruined by Elon Musk owning it.
To which I respond, where the heck have you been for the past decade or so? This isn’t like Tim Hortons replacing fresh store-made donuts with frozen ones, but more like a restaurant where the food tasted awful and gave you crippling diarrhea, which just got a new owner and now you’re worried he’ll reduce the portion sizes.
Yair Rosenberg points out that if Elon Musk wants to “ruin” Twitter, he’ll be pleasantly surprised to find out most of the work has already been done for him:
…in the days since Elon Musk took control of the site, users have taken to blaming [the spread of false information] and the platform’s other long-standing issues on him. When a doctored video of former President Barack Obama being mocked at a Wisconsin rally went viral, the writer James Surowiecki rightly lamented, “Account posts totally fake video of Obama, presenting it as real, and it’s retweeted and replied to by thousands of people who think it’s real.” But he prefaced this observation with the words “New Twitter,” as though this didn’t routinely happen on the Old Twitter. “Is this what we are to expect on Twitter moving forward: zero content moderation or fact checking?” asked one Democratic political consultant, seemingly without irony. (In fact, Twitter’s nascent crowdsourced fact-checking system, Birdwatch, quickly labeled the video in question as misleading, though as usual, this did not stop it from spreading.)
Others have suggested that Musk’s reign has introduced a new era of bigotry on the platform, thanks to allegedly lax moderation policies. “Hours into Twitter’s Elon Musk era, the company has apparently undone its ban on the term ‘groomer’ as a slur against LGBTQ+ people,” wrote The Advocate, when the term had never been banned in the first place. “Ye’s Twitter account appears to be no longer suspended as Elon Musk takes the helm of the company,” reported Bloomberg. But the rapper’s account had never been suspended; it was merely locked following his recent anti-Semitic outburst, which the corrected article now notes. As both Musk and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s longtime safety chief, have said, the site’s content policies have not changed.
I note all of this not to exculpate Twitter but to indict it. Because as it turns out, whether viral misinformation or rampant bigotry, most of Twitter’s pathologies that people are pinning on Musk predate his ownership. I know this from personal experience. During the 2016 presidential-election campaign, I was inundated with anti-Semitic invective on Twitter over my critical commentary on Donald Trump’s candidacy. An Anti-Defamation League study found that I received the second-most abuse of Jewish commentators on the site during that cycle. Twitter subsequently vowed to clean up its act, but though some strides were made, most anti-Semitic bigotry remained. After the election, I built a bot that exposed neo-Nazi accounts impersonating Jews and other minorities on the platform. In 2017, Twitter banned the bot and left the Nazis. In 2019, an account impersonated me and photoshopped a swastika onto a photograph of a baby, claiming that it was my son. When I reported this content, Twitter said it did not violate their terms of service, and backtracked only after embarrassing media coverage.
And that’s just the obvious stuff. When the bigotry moves beyond swastikas and slurs to conspiratorial anti-Semitism—the sort made infamous most recently by Ye—Twitter, like most social-media companies, has never really tried to fix it. The same is true of other bigotries; once hate is cloaked in coded language and euphemisms, it typically goes unchallenged.
[…]
Twitter’s problems run far deeper than a problematic owner. To begin with, it’s structurally designed to impede complex discussion by forcing users to reduce all topics to 240-character soundbites. This can be a fun way to react to Game of Thrones, but it is not a good way to litigate economic policy or geopolitical conflicts. The constricted format impedes free-flowing conversation while privileging performative sloganeering. This is why Donald Trump, who seemingly never had a complex thought in his life, loved Twitter. Why our intellectual elite has decided to yoke the public discourse to a site whose most successful users are people like Trump is less understandable.
The platform’s structure also encourages fabrication. With so many voices talking at once, it’s hard for any individual to go viral. But there is one dependable way to cut through the noise: Say something no one else is saying. In theory, this should reward funny or novel thinking. But in practice, it rewards dishonesty, because it’s a lot easier to come up with something genuinely new if you just make it up. The internet prizes originality, but hoaxes are by definition “original” because the person spreading them simply invented them. Claiming that the communists cured the coronavirus is a big advantage in the social-media game. And because there are no social consequences for sharing concocted content on Twitter, such material proliferates. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.
Just as guns don’t themselves kill people but make it way, way easier for people to kill people, Twitter is just a micro-blogging site that lets people say what they want. And what people seem to want are for their pre-existing beliefs to be validated. Hence: conspiracy theories, misleading and false news stories, groupthink and mobbery.
Blaming Elon Musk for Twitter is like blaming Admiral Dönitz, who took over from Hitler after Hitler killed Hitler, for the Third Reich. Neither were without blame (Donitz was a true-believer Nazi who waged an aggressive war as commander of the Kriegsmarine, and it’s not like Musk has been trying to elevate Twitter discourse in all the years he’s been using it) but nearly all of their organizations’ worst aspects were in place long before they were put in charge.
These Mad Libs are getting out of hand.
Laugh out loud comments on "ruining" Twitter