Against Signal-Boosting As Doxxing

Against the tactic of 'signal-boosting' someone's public-but-embarrassing statements to get them fired (the case: a Reason columnist retweets a man's sexist joke 'to help ensure his prospective employers know'). Core arguments: free speech is about social NORMS, not just law (a town with no anti-gay laws but vicious anti-gay norms isn't 'pro-gay'); the norm should pass a veil-of-ignorance/universalizability test ('let him who is without sin'); under a Panopticon where anyone with a platform can mine anyone's public record, the power to destroy reputations flows to 'the biggest and most predatory', so he rejects the whole tactic. Byron: 'I wish men to be free / As much from mobs as kings.'

Quality 73 · Strong. 73 — high-Strong. A sharp, principled, memorable contribution to the early cancel-culture debate (free-speech-as-norms, the veil-of-ignorance test, the Panopticon framing). In-the-moment and developing ideas from his other free-speech posts, which holds it just short of Excellent.

Claude’s paradigm shift 54 · Moderate. 54 — Moderate/Major edge. The 'signal-boosting as a dangerous universalizable norm' + Panopticon framing was a fresh, non-obvious angle in the 2017 cancel-culture discourse.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. 3 — influential within the free-speech/cancel-culture discourse; no material reach.