Social media team gone wild
Having to agree (mostly) with Reason again:
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is very sorry for rewriting a famous quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that it would be gender neutral.
Well, no; unfortunately that’s what they didn’t say. It’s what Romero didn’t say. He said he regrets that it was said, but that’s different from saying he’s “very sorry” – which is apology language as opposed to regret language. I know it’s subtle but the subtle items are exactly the ones we have to be careful about.
“It was a mistake among the digital team,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”
That’s what he said. It’s not an apology, not a “very sorry”; it’s an explanation of what happened (what other people did).
Regardless of one’s position on trans issues and the rapidly evolving demands of progressive activists with respect to conscious language choices, it is wrong to go back in time and pretend that people used different words.
Mind you, the social media twerps didn’t pretend that RBG used different words. That would have required leaving off the brackets, which would have made it an outright lie. No, what they did is indicate what she should have said, and would have said if only she had been as enlightened as the twerps who handle social media for the ACLU. What they did is change her wording to something they liked better.
At least the ACLU is admitting that the RBG tweet was a mistake, though the apology Romero offered was a weak one.
So weak that it wasn’t in fact an apology. He left the apology bit out altogether.
Indeed, Reason has been quite…reasonable…lately. Their write-up of the latest white-woman-getting-fired-by-Twitter-mob fiasco was also quite informative.
Not only does whoever’s responsible for the bastardization of RBG’s quote not taking responsibility for it, the people making excuses for it aren’t taking responsibility for it either. The ACLU is full of immature fucktards. Talk about a swamp that needs draining…
Having occasionally done what passes for work in what occasionally passes for the real world I can see how the RGB bowdlerisation might have happened by committee because meetings. I’ve certainly gone along with some idiotic ideas just because I wanted to get out of an endless meeting and back to doing something important like idly press buttons for eight hours before going home to press buttons furiously [1].
But I think there genuinely is a clear hill-climbing path of good intentions that could lead to all the square brackets. Every step of that path could have looked good to the people making those decisions because with every step, their sight of whatever they were trying to achieve in the first place receded further over the horizon. Monsters are born wherever the rules for judging the value of an endeavour change with every step taken. I can say this with some authority because I’ve been a software developer (professional, hobbyist and subversive) for more than forty years and I know for a fact that this is exactly the process used for every single piece of software ever written. If you don’t believe me, tell me how many times you’ve sworn at your computer already today and think about it again.
Anyway, I’ve been there. And because I’ve been there I find it especially monstrous that Romero blamed the ‘digital team’ (the only team with digits, so the only ones who can tweet?) I can virtually guarantee that the digital team will be two or three unpaid or poorly paid kids with no remit, clear instructions, proper management infrastructure or person looking out for their interests. They will receive no praise when times are good but the blame and malignity of an entire organisation when they fail to cause the executive director’s day to be anything other than perfectly pleasant.
As someone said on another thread (can’t remember who, sorry!) blaming someone at the bottom is an extraordinarily shitty thing for the boss to do. Whenever people have had such ill-considered moments as to put me in charge of anything, I’ve tended to see my main job as manager as to protect those I’m managing from whatever mercurial, auto-felating bullshit swirls on above. I’ve always been better able to shoulder blame than my minions, even on those rare occasions where the Gigantic Fuckup Of The Week wasn’t actually my fault. If nothing else, it made a great story to tell when in consequent job interviews.
It’s also poor strategy: does Romero have such little control over his organisation that he’s hired people with such poor judgement and given them such little instruction, encouragement and support that they’ve ended up making a mistake that he’s had to fail to apologise for in not-quite public? It doesn’t look great, Romero, mate. It really doesn’t. And it sends a message to the staff, you know? It sends a message to all the Chief O’Brien characters like me in your organisation, who are absolutely vital to its functioning and have the undying loyalty of everyone who knows how to get anything actually done. We were already openly plotting against you just for the hell of it and because there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. Now, you’ve made it personal.
[1] After a while I took to just standing up in meetings, collecting all my stuff and leaving without a word. Nobody ever asked where I was going or told me to stay. Sometimes, I feel that I’m a great loss to the corporate and academic worlds. Most of the time, I suspect that if I ever tried to go back, there’d probably be a petition or something.
If they have such little control over the social media that is done in the organization’s name, then they really need to have a reorganization. This is a legal organization, and every message should specifically be vetted by a PR team with legal knowledge. Now I’m not sure if I would ever want them to take case if they treat their messaging cavalierly. The company I work for does not allow uncontrolled tweets.
If Strangio controls all of their messaging then it’s a group that needs a new board of directors.