Anyone of us can be attacked on social media.
Yesterday, I had the bad luck of being attacked (metaphorically) by an ideologue on pitchforks.
The nasty thing about ideologues is that if you do not share their hatred of someone or some group of people that they hate, you will be attacked. You are not allowed to sit on the fence. Your lack of hatred is proof to them that there is a moral deficiency on your part, and therefore, you are the bad guy.
Musk Derangement Syndrome (MDS)
When it comes to Elon Musk, there seem to be a lot of people hating him. So many people are being deranged by him that a new ‘syndrome’ is being coined: Musk Derangement Syndrome (MDS).
For me, I was attacked not because I was praising him. My critique of him was met with an attack by someone with EDS. The irony is that not a single Elon supporter has attacked me for criticising him. I was attacked for criticising Musk by someone who already hates him.
It goes to show how toxic social media has become, where feral ideologues roam around with pitchforks to attack anyone who is not as extreme as them.
How did it begin?
It all started with this article by Gary Marcus: Is Elon Musk “dumb”? That article asked the question of why Elon Musk, who is someone of high intelligence, ends up making dumb decisions. Gary’s last paragraph nicely encapsulates his conclusion:
I am not at all hopeful. Intelligence, no matter how great or small, mixed with poor intellectual self-discipline, enormous ego, and enormous power has historically proven to be a toxic brew.
I wrote a comment on his LinkedIn post, basically expressing his argument in my way:
Elon Musk is human. Humans, regardless of how high their IQs are, have limits. Elon has spread himself too thin beyond his limits. As a result, the quality of his decisions deteriorates as he holds too many jobs and spends too much time on X.
That should not be controversial, right? Oh boy! I was wrong! I was accused of being an Elon “apologist”.
You can see the entire toxic thread here.
The crux of the matter as accused by this ideologue was:
Review your original logic of “human limits” and “Elon has spread himself too thin beyond his limits” as a means of absolving him of responsibility for the quality of his decisions and by implication, their consequences. In my opinion, that is an apologist position, and I’m certainly not willing to entertain this sort of proposition, as an ethical means of accounting for responsibility in business and even more so, when an individual is groping for the power of government.
My reply was,
I don’t see how it is absolving him of all responsibility.
As the thread progresses, you can see him both denying my claim that he hated Elon and then justifying hate as a “civic virtue”.
Where is the logical flaw of this ideologue?
To explain his logic flaw, let’s have a short exposition of logic.
Let me state 3 objectively true facts:
- All humans have character flaws (this is so self-evidently true that I did not even bother to state that in my comment thread).
- All humans have limits to what they can do (in my original comment)
- Elon Musk is a human (in my original comment)
From these 3 objectively true facts, it follows that Elon Musk has
(A) Character flaws
AND
(B) Limits
Both (A) and (B) shape the quality of his decisions. Both are not mutually exclusive.
That ideologue was attacking me because he thinks that if I believe that (B) shapes Elon’s decision, then I must be excluding (A) from shaping his decisions. Therefore, he thinks that I am absolving Elon from responsibility for what he is doing.
This is complete nonsense. Both (A) and (B) shape his decisions simultaneously.
Worse still, that ideologue thinks that if I absolve Elon from responsibility for his decisions, then I must be morally deficient myself, and therefore, a legitimate target for attack.
When you look at the last paragraph of Gary Marcus’s article (see quote above), he listed both a mixture of (A) and (B) for the cause of Elon Musk’s poor decisions.
The feral nature of social media
This goes to show the quality of discourse in society has deteriorated over the years, thanks to feral ideologues who roam social media to attack anyone they deem morally inferior.
I had been falsely accused of hate speech by them before. One of my posts was removed for hate speech, only to be reinstated later with an apology from LinkedIn. One of my friends had his LinkedIn account suspended because of a malicious complaint, only to be reinstated after a review. Ideologues are weaponising LinkedIn’s complaints feature to shut down accounts, comments, and posts that they hate.
LinkedIn is also partly to be blamed for amplifying political posts to attract engagement. My experience of going viral on LinkedIn opened my eyes to this. Their algorithms are encouraging feral behaviour. Worse still, their Trust and Safety Team are taking a side, with vindictive and inconsistent rules.
Future of LinkedIn
People fled Facebook to LinkedIn because of the toxic discourse of the former. Now that LinkedIn decided to follow in the footsteps of Facebook, toxic discourse has migrated to LinkedIn too.
Sooner or later, a critical mass of people are going to flee LinkedIn too. For me, I have made the decision to increase my presence on my websites. I will certainly not pay for LinkedIn’s premium features. Why should I pay to undermine my mental health on their platform?