'The Room Had Started To Smell. Really Quite Bad': Stephen Fry Exits Twitter (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: For a man so readily associated with words — and certainly for a wordsmith so enamored with technology — Twitter seems like something of a natural home for Stephen Fry. Over the years he has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, but last night he closed his account. Fry's latest exit from Twitter (there have been several over the last few years for numerous reasons) came about because of the backlash he received for making a joke at an award ceremony. Hosting the BATFAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) on Sunday, he referred to costume designer and award winner (and, indeed, friend) Jenny Beavan as being 'dressed as a bag lady'. 'Offended' Twitter users attacked Fry in their droves, and he fought a valiant battle, before eventually giving up and terminating his account. It comes just days after Twitter set up a new Trust & Safety Council.

Comments

These people don't stop existing, though

[gnaarly]

Closing your account stops them from tweeting at you. But they are still out there.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[Anonymous Coward]

So? They were their before, but it was web forums, email mailing lists, newgroups et al. Life if full of cunts, twats, and fucking morons. Social media merely gives these tossers a global voice. Ignore them.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[barc0001]

But you can also never reason with them. One of the reasons I don't use social media is I don't feel like engaging with random idiots who are either some tenuous friend of a friend coworker's cousin by marriage 14 places removed or complete strangers who just happened on a comment. Dealing with that crap can sometimes be draining even if you're only reading their comment and then completely ignoring it afterward. It takes up mental cycles no matter what, and when some of these people are trying to get a deliberate rise out of you, you occasionally feel a stab of wanting to respond to the provocation.

Much easier to not be in that situation to begin with. For me the "ups" of being on social media and engaging with friends is outweighed by the potential for conflict with random clowns. Plus I find a lot of people on social media overshare waaaaaay too much.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[Anonymous Coward]

These people don't stop existing, though

Well, in a way they do.

"If you don't like the jokes stay out of the comedy clubs... If you don't like criticism stop googling yourself every 10 seconds." (Louis C.K. on The Daily Show, July 16th, 2012)

By leaving Twitter he's no longer giving those people his ear. They don't matter to him anymore, they stop existing to him.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[TheRaven64]

Twitter might end up looking like nothing more than a place where whiners go to whine

I doubt it. Even Twitter's management isn't stupid enough to position themselves as a direct competitor to Facebook.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[spire3661]

The context is different. Our idiots are less random, and are more easily dismissed due to our focus on a particular subset of life. If you say stupid shit here, it gets culled or refuted and then buried pretty quickly.The true obvious trolls on Slashdot are easy to ignore. (APK, GNAA posters etc)

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[serviscope_minor]

Surely it's just as stressful dealing with all the contrarianism here.

No it isn't.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[ArmoredDragon]

Well this is a whole new breed of cunt. The previous generation of cunts would call you dirty names and shit, however the new generation of cunts call themselves "politically correct" and will use clean sounding but still inappropriately placed words like "racist" "bigot" "misogynist" "homophobe" or label you as one who uses "hate speech", even when none of these terms apply to you in any way possible. In other words, the old cunts were hecklers, the new cunts are self-righteous assholes.

In fact, here's a video of what it's like to be assaulted by a hoard of these cunts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish it were as easy as ignoring them. These kinds of mobs are now driving policy and causing the concept of free speech to be rolled back on what is now a rather significant swath of communication on the internet.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[serviscope_minor]

No it isn't!

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[JustOK]

it *might* be. Further govt funding is needed...to uh, well, funding is needed, study, things, money. needed.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[Shadow of Eternity]

That's astoundingly gentle and well behaved. this is more representative of the level of violence disguised as victimhood you can expect from these people.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[myowntrueself]

I love how an AC came out of the woodwork to illustrate my point.

I very rarely post as AC. My point is just that slashdot is not particularly hostile and if you think it is then your experience outside of slashdot must be pretty limited.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[brantondaveperson]

So wait - he closed his twitter account, and that makes him an attention whore?

Dammed if you do, and dammed if you don't, I guess. He does have a good point though, Twitter genuinely is a waste of technology. I defy anyone to point to anything even halfway interesting or significant that has ever been posted on that site.

Re:These people don't stop existing, though

[Mashiki]

Why do you think that people are not entitled to their opinion? The irony is that you complain about 'political correctness' while complaining viciously about 'other people's language'. I can only come to the conclusion that they aren't 'politically correct' for your tastes

In reality, what you seem to think are earnest 'self righteous' (let me use the word you almost said) 'Social Justice Warriors', are simply a new version of trolls.

They're welcome to their opinion. Though their viewpoints end when they decide that their version of letting other speak, doesn't exist. The thing is, they're not trolls. They see themselves as "doing the right thing" or "the right side of history." You'll find that many of those SJW's subscribe to the "no bad tactics, only targets" theory of doing things. And would rather shut down any speech that's contrary to their narrow viewpoint on the world. See the university protests for example, or pulling fire alarms to stop people from speaking, or the most recent examples of no-platforming BS with Rutgers with Milo Yiannopoulos. Or Dawkins, Peter Tatchell, or Julie Bindel and so on. That's only a small sampling of the BS going on. And all the while, they're engaging in overt racism, such as safe spaces...for anyone but those whites or asians. Any place except for those hetrosexuals...or gays that don't do what we tell them, and so on. That moves them from trolls right into authoritarians.

  People just see the writing on the wall with Twitter, the second they put a bunch of groups in place that have a history of shutting down speech because it hurts their feelings, or the feelings of other people it was enough. Especially groups that believe that dissenting viewpoints are harassment like Feminist Frequency.

The ironic thing here

[Anonymous Coward]

The ironic thing here is that it's very unlikely that Twitter's "Trust and Safety Council" would have sided with Stephen Fry. Remember, he insulted a Protected Class of individual, and it's therefore just as likely that he would have been banned for his remarks. He pissed off SJWs and couldn't deal with the fallout, which I can completely understand. SJWs are nasty individuals who will never stop harassing people in their supposed crusade against harassment.

Still, this is just yet another example of what we all know: Twitter is pretty much just a platform for anonymously trolling famous people. Once it finally fails (and it's circling the drain, the Trust and Safety Council is just one example), the world will be a better place.

Re:Who's Steven Fry?

[JustOK]

He's the guy from Futurama

Look at the pictures

[jtownatpunk.net]

She was dressed pretty meh for a costume designer.

Listen to George

[Anonymous Coward]

Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.

DNA

[Hognoxious]

BATFAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts)

Brought to you by DNA (National Dyslexics Association).

Will Twitter's destruction wake anyone up?

[Kohath]

As the politically correct SJW crybullies slowly destroy Twitter, it will be interesting to see if Silicon Valley's shallow cultural leftist elite finally wake up and start pushing back. A lot of them like Twitter and some of them invested money in it.

The media like Twitter too, but the media are unreformable; a lost cause in every way.

This is why Twitter is "write only" for me

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I work in a job where (as a "thought leader") I'm supposed to tweet regularly, but I never, ever find time to read anything from Twitter. It's a write-only assignment as far as I'm concerned - it could be /dev/null for all I know or care.

I'll bet there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people like me out there too, all dumping regularly scheduled 140-character tweets into a space probably half populated with advertiser's bots using keyword-based algorithm to retweet, favorite and react to my stuff, all for the benefit of even more robots.

Re:This is why Twitter is "write only" for me

[cardpuncher]

I wouldn't worry about Twitter, I'd be more concerned about having a job description of "thought leader". That's just a pink slip waiting to happen.

Re:Twitter, like the internet, is the mirror

[spire3661]

Humans ARE fundamentally good. The good outweighs the bad by a huge margin or there wouldnt be 7 billion of us. That doesnt mean that the good can 100% suppress the bad. We are still part beast, and are often driven by base animalistic desires. Until we admit that, there will be little progress in this area.

SJW Tyranny at its finest

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

The tyranny of the terminally offended special snowflakes....

Seriously, you could tweet "I like kittens" and you would probably get 1000 SJWs berating you for triggering them or appropriating "animal culture" or contributing to the objectification of animals.

The fact that a guy like Stephen Fry up and left the festering cesspool known as twitter gives me hope for the human race.

He's a hell of a nice guy, yet that was no defense against the perpetually offended crybullies that infest twitter.

Trust and safety council?

[dudpixel]

I was of the understanding that the Trust and Safety Council was specifically invented to protect the "offended" crowd.

These people seem to turn "being offended" into a profession.