I really dislike Miley Cyrus. And there already is a line. You canât use someone elseâs privage property. Or harass them on their property.
What Miley is doing isnât any different than what people did to Blizzard over Blitzchung from a legal perspective. Itâs the exact same thing. The difference is the morality of the causes. And government has no business deciding what is and isnât a moral cause.
Not really. Thatâs why I brought it up, because I see no difference. I donât find miley reprehensible specifically, what I find reprehensible is this phenomenon in the modern age where people gather on social media and use numbers to try to bully businesses. It can be seen all the time these days. Just recently a female product removed the female symbol from its packaging because it offended transgender community. GoT fans unite to demand they remake the entire season 8 because they hate it.
I believe social media has allowed for these mobs to form easily and they feel empowered, mostly because private businesses are too scared to go against them. They have to compromise their own standards out of fear. I donât agree with that.
People should be able to say what they want on social media, so long as it doesnât violate the TOS of that social media platform. People should have the right to assemble on social media.
You can easily just not read social media.
I stay away from it (except forums). Sadly it is impossible to force it to stay away from me.
I think one thing that people seem to be forgetting is the consequences of the affected players, if Blizzard were to allow it.
I completely understand that some people have views either or against, however what I say now I mean with the utmost respect⌠Most players generally wouldnât care about the core topic if this didnât even happen. I see a lot of instancing where players are standing up and supporting something which they either a) have no knowledge of or b) have no interest in. With respect, it almost feels like people are standing up to paint themselves in a better light simply to make themselves look/feel better. Deep down, a lot of these people wouldnât even care about the topic at hand. As much as I despise the term, I believe it may be called âvirtue signallingâ.
Letâs take the scenario that Blizzard would have allowed this on their platform. What would happen if China were to suddenly restrict their entire country from playing Blizzard games? Well, first of all, it would be incrediy unfair on the Chinese people to be roped into something if it was a fight between a company and a government. All those players would lose everything in all their games - and considering how much the Chinese people enjoy the games, that would be terrible for them and disastrous for Blizzard. We arenât just talking about a tiny 0.2% revenue here, we are talking a LOT. More like 20-30%. That will surely have an impact on the little content that receive already. It was in the companiesâ interest to act the way they did by punishing those involved.
The broadcast casters - I absolutely agree on the decision to sack them. I have seen the video - and it almost looks like they were laughing as they lowered their heads when it all went down. Either they thought that the issue was funny and a joke to them, or they knew what was going to happen. Either way, their reactions made a mockery of the subject.
People can say what they like but there will be consequences, which Blizzard had noted in the terms that should have been read and understood beforehand. Blizzard were simply protecting their company. They wanted to be left out of it to be able to continue to provide content for everyone, without exclusion. Eventually they were dragged into a political subject; they then panicked and penalised the player involved (maybe a bit too harshly? I canât really comment).
Either way, given the backlash, it was clear the thing shouldnât have happened in the first place, because the amount of resources Blizzard have wasted on players (customer support/tickets/etc) is absurd. They could have been using that time to do something more constructive such as providing new content.
You break the rules, you pay the price. Freedom of speech doesnât mean freedom of consequences (although to be fair on a personal note, I would absolutely LOVE the Westboro Baptist Church to be dissolved, but thatâs a different matter).
Jack
Edit: just on a note here, I would kindly ask people to look at the bigger picture. I am sure many will disagree with what I have said, but this is just my opinion.
Just donât read the news articles about the topic and donât click on your social media page. Itâs an option people retain. They donât have to interact with these protesters.
They choose to because they want their money.
Presuming to know the minds of people youâve never even met because they donât agree with you is rude af. You donât know what people knew beforehand. And people canât be upset about something they didnât know existed in the first place.
Also btw people laugh when they are nervous. The casters were told to interview Blitzchung. They didnât know he was gonna say but had a feeling because his attire. They tried to balance doing what their boss told them and what he had earned a right to do with protecting Blizzard.
And Blizzard has since admitted their firing was too harsh and changed their penalty.
⌠Which is pretty much what happened to the player.
He didnât get fired, but he got suspended.
I donât have a social media page. And I didnât even read the article about miley. All I saw was the headline and thatâs how I know about it.
Well thatâs a whole different can of worms for another time.
Itâs not a presumption. Check out other sites like MMO-Champion for instance - and the lack of threads on the topic before it happened (compared to now). If it was a hot topic in the gaming world beforehand then I would understand your view, but it wasnât. If they never knew it existed then maybe they should look at BOTH sides and think objectively instead of instantly jumping on Blizzards back with pitchforks. Itâs called being intellectually objective.
It is highly unlikely that both people would have that ânervous laughâ at the same time. They looked up at the player a couple of times, each time giggling. It was like they were at school, and yes I stand by my opinion that they shouldnât have reacted that way. What they should have done was calmly got up and walked away. That would have been the most diplomatic route.
Blizzard were then made to feel bad because they are a company that strives to give the players what they want. They felt the pressure so they wanted to side with the player base. Again, if people hadnât have expressed their disgust, the punishment would have stood. It was pressure that reduced it.
Jack
Again. Just donât read the news headlines for a couple of days and your golden. Companies do this all the time and just cutoff communication when they want something to just blow over.
And most of the time it does unless you screwed up royally.
It is an assumption. It wasnât related until now. Assuming other peopleâs motivations are less pure than yours is just gross. This ticked a lot of people off because a lot of people already had a lot of animus towards China for itâs human rights abuses.
You donât know the motivations of people you havenât met.
The casters themselves said they didnât know and that they hid so people wouldnât think Blizzard had anything to do with it. People laugh when they are nervous, it means nothing.
I think weâre on different tangents here. Iâm not talking about the news, Iâm talking about the freedom of speech argument going both ways. But yeah, thanks for the chat. Bye.
I was addressing your comment that social media pressure is harassment. Companies choosing to engage with a conversation because itâs profitable isnât them being harassed.
thank you for being smart OP.
Not everyone on this community is.
Not on a personal level but you can certainly put 2+2 together based on the public conversations people have. If people were that passionate about what was going on before the incident, there would have certainly been more coverage of it in forums, for instance. Even places like Reddit where subjects like this are allowed. The instant jumping by the community seemed suspicious. If people were so adamant on free speech, surely they wouldnât have stayed silent until something happened? It looks a little suspect.
I find it very strange that players suddenly start to boycott and cancel their accounts so suddenly. I understand that there are some people who were genuinely concerned about the abuses - I get that - but when you put a mob mentality together with a moral crusade things can get out of hand very quickly. I am not invalidating peopleâs opinions - that isnât the intention - but if people didnât even know what was going on then they should read the news a little more and become educated on it. Then they can rationally think about their responses first instead of aggressively saying what they think without understanding both sides.
I am not debating whether what is right and wrong at a political level. I am simply suggesting that people look at the bigger picture. Think of the players that would be affected if China were to ban Blizzard games.
People say itâs 100% about the money but I am sure that itâs also about providing entertainment content to people everywhere regardless of where they are. Unfortunately, they canât sit on both sides on the matter, which is why they wanted to be left out of it in the first place.
Again, in my own opinion they should have got up and walked away. There was nothing to stop them doing that.
As for freedom of speech, again I stick to my original opinion that there are still consequences. That should have been understood beforehand.
It was a disallowed topic on many forums until it became related. Many people use video games to escape the things they find stressful. That doesnât mean they donât care.
Itâs a terrible thing to put together. Itâs rude, presumptuous, and nonsensical.
Itâs enough of an issue that banks actually write guides for businesses about the dangers of cyberbullying. These are guides specifically for business owners, not individuals. To help businesses to avoid being destroyed by angry neckbeards on the internet.
Hereâs an example.
h ttps://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-insights/articles/protecting-company-business-cyberbullying/
Thatâs about already disallowed stuff like libel and death threats, not about people protesting a company for whatever reason on social media.