Where are the free speech advocates (Kevin Hart)?

[PACOX]

Kevin Hart is a popular comedian and actor who, until Friday morning, was scheduled to be the host of the 2019 Academy Awards. And he still would be the host of the 2019 Academy Awards, had he not violated one of the sacrosanct rules of life online: never tweet.

Shortly after he was named host, BuzzFeed’s Michael Blackmon reviewed some of the tweets that Hart was frantically deleting:

“Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughters doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay,’” read a 2011 tweet that Hart deleted sometime on Wednesday or Thursday.

Benjamin Lee, an editor at the Guardian, was one of the first to point out Hart’s old tweets following the Oscars announcement. “I wonder when Kevin Hart is gonna start deleting all his old tweets,” Lee tweeted, adding screenshots from some of Hart’s since-deleted tweets in which he said someone looked like “a gay bill board for AIDS” and called another person a “FAT FAG.”

Hart’s anti-gay ideology wasn’t exactly a secret before now. As Lee noted in a piece for the Guardian, Hart devoted part of a 2010 stand-up special to describing his terror that his son would turn out to be gay — and his intention to prevent it however he could. (“I’m not homophobic,” Hart added.)

And after the year that Hollywood has had, you might think the academy might have done a Twitter search before naming its host. It was barely three months ago that James Gunn, the high-profile director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, was fired amid a spurious campaign to link him to pedophilia over 2010-era Twitter jokes.

Given a choice of apologizing or doubling down on being an anti-gay idiot, Hart chose the latter, Brian Raftery reported in Wired:

In an Instagram post from that morning, Hart appeared bratty, defensive, and completely dismissive of the growing pushback (he also seemed kind of drowsy, possibly because he filmed it from a bed). “Our world is becoming beyond crazy,” Hart complained, “and I’m not gonna let the craziness frustrate me … if you don’t believe people change, grow, evolve as they get older, [then] I don’t know what to tell you.” In the accompanying caption, he wrote, “If u want to search my history or past and anger yourselves with what u find that is fine with me. I’m almost 40 years old and I’m in love with the man I am becoming.”

Apparently, in Hart’s world, it’s OK for a man to love a man — as long as that man is yourself.

Obviously Hart’s brief tenure as Oscar host-to-be is a dumb story that we all will have forgotten about by happy hour tonight. But it reminded me of a good essay about Twitter behavior that I saw recently on Motherboard: “The internet doesn’t need civility, it needs ethics,” by communications professors Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner.

In the piece, the professors encourage us to think about Twitter as an ecosystem in which users have varying degrees of “biomass” (followers).

In biology, biomass pyramids chart the relative number or weight of one class of organism compared to another organism within the same ecosystem. For a habitat to support one lion, the biomass pyramid shows, it needs a whole lot of insects. When applied to questions of online toxicity, biomass pyramids speak to the fact that there are far more everyday, relatively low-level cases of harmful behavior than there are apex predator cases—the kinds of actions that are explicitly and wilfully harmful, from coordinated hate and harassment campaigns to media manipulation tactics designed to sow chaos and confusion.

Phillips and Milner argue that the collective bad behavior of the insects is at least as important to the overall health of Twitter as that of the lions;

This bottom strata includes posting snarky jokes about an unfolding news story, tragedy, or controversy; retweeting hoaxes and other misleading narratives ironically, to condemn them, make fun of the people involved, or otherwise assert superiority over those who take the narratives seriously; making ambivalent inside jokes because your friends will know what you mean (and for white people in particular, that your friends will know you’re not a real racist); @mentioning the butts of jokes, critiques, or collective mocking, thus looping the target of the conversation into the discussion; and easiest of all, jumping into conversations mid-thread without knowing what the issues are. Regarding visual media, impactive everyday behaviors include responding to a thread with a GIF or reaction image featuring random everyday strangers, or posting (and/or remixing) the latest meme to comment on the news of the day.

Unfortunately, the authors’ proposed solution basically boils down to “be nicer” — great advice, but unlikely to be heeded at scale. Still, it’s worth thinking about — especially for someone like me, who enjoys both posting snarky jokes about unfolding news stories and making ambivalent inside jokes because my friends will know what I mean.

Anyway, I thought of the piece in relation to Hart because his tweets showed him to be a lion eating insects — using his enormous platform to go after a large and harmless group of people who are just trying to live! Talk about punching down.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Twitter had been monitoring the accounts of lions like his for ugly anti-gay slurs eight years ago. Perhaps he could have learned his lesson then, and hosted the Oscars in 2019.

As it is, the show is much better off without him.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/8/1...twitter-tweets

Kevin Hart was due to host the Oscars until someone went and dug through his old tweets. He said some stuff in the past, some of that some stuff is also in his comedy specials, but anyway he lost his Oscar job.

Now if you've on the internet long enough you know when someone gets in trouble for something they said or do there are those who can't wait to defend them. Espcially if is something that was said in the past. The first excuses then to be 'well it was a joke, they said it x years ago, taken out of context'.

But as I look around the Internet I see almost none of this for Kevin Hart. Here we have a comdian who tweeted some stuff almost 10 years ago and the free speech brigade is nowhere to be found. What makes what Kevin said different from say a Roseanne, a Donald Sterling, a Charlie Sheen, a Mel Gibson, a Donald Trump. Kevin even addressed his old material in the past before getting fired. I mean clearly the PC crowd is being too harsh on Hart like the others right?















t

[Queen of Hamsters]

Perhaps Kevin Hart is just liberal enough that the usual suspects are content with having him silenced, despite his views on homosexuality and male gender standards?

Also, the Oscars... LOL! It's a circle-jerk for the rich and famous where movies and actors win based on studio bribes more often than not.

[Flatspriest]

You can't really have free speech advocates when it would have to be the government making laws to ban the speech he used. It wasn't the government, it was the consequences for his choice of speech from the board of directors for the oscar's which have every right to do so, whether we like it or not. Kevin Hart has always been one of the commodians who use vile topics to base their humor on. He would never get on toiletvision otherwise.

[Knolan]

Personally I am on vacation with limited access to the internet.

My best guess would be that this guy is a progressive and most free speech advocates are face palming and thinking you made your bed, now lay on it.

Still, if he is indeed being censored for a joke I do hope he does not lose anything by yet another Twitter purity Inquisition.

[s_bushido]

Ugh.

On the one hand, he's presumably not a conservative, so they don't give a shit.


On the other, the writer of that article can go fuck him/herself:

In an Instagram post from that morning, Hart appeared bratty, defensive, and completely dismissive of the growing pushback (he also seemed kind of drowsy, possibly because he filmed it from a bed). “Our world is becoming beyond crazy,” Hart complained, “and I’m not gonna let the craziness frustrate me … if you don’t believe people change, grow, evolve as they get older, [then] I don’t know what to tell you.” In the accompanying caption, he wrote, “If u want to search my history or past and anger yourselves with what u find that is fine with me. I’m almost 40 years old and I’m in love with the man I am becoming.”

I absolutely despise this notion that dipshits like this are owed an apology every time something like this is dredged up about someone.

[Sixnalia]

Seems pretty silly.

Honestly, the position he stepped down from appears to be something nobody wants.
The light gets put on you, and then everyone digs up your history to tear you apart.

Kevin's announcement as being the Host came very late, most likely because they struggled to find someone willing to be put under a microscope.

[Mormolyce]

Well thanks to Disney apparently old tweets nobody remembers is grounds for dismissal and not just like, a simple apology.

Does anyone seriously think Kevin Hart is homophobic? These are just jokes. They're maybe a little old fashioned now? Sure that material might not play well today but that goes for a lot of comedy from the 90s.

Kevin Hart is a popular comedian and actor

Debatable.

But as I look around the Internet I see almost none of this for Kevin Hart. Here we have a comdian who tweeted some stuff almost 10 years ago and the free speech brigade is nowhere to be found. What makes what Kevin said different from say a Roseanne, a Donald Sterling, a Charlie Sheen, a Mel Gibson, a Donald Trump.

What? It's nothing like what Roseanne said. Mel Gibson? Charlie Sheen? These people all have a long history of bigotry and/or insanity. This isn't a few non-PC jokes in old tweets - it's completely different.

It's more like James Gu... oh wait I just got it.

No one watches the academy awards. It's little more than a celebrity circle jerk.

Last year it hit an "all time low"... of 25 million people.

[Pachycrocuta]

As many said about James Gunn, these were back around 2010 (give or take a few years). That's 8 or so years. Like Hart said, "If you don't believe people can change, grow, evolve as they get older, I don't know what to tell you." Just because he said some stupid shit 8ish years ago doesn't mean he still thinks the same shit. Anti-gay sentiments were just fine in the 80s and 90s (and earlier than that it being gay could get you arrested or killed, and still can in certain places in the world). They were even put in movies and TV shows. Hell, for the most part it was still rather ok in early 2000s. Should everyone in Hollywood pre-2012 be banned and shunned? Fuck no. It was stupid for them to fire Hart for this. He'll probably be replaced by an overly PC over-the-top-stereotypically gay man to show the world that the Academy is down with the gays.

[Misuteri]

No one watches the academy awards. It's little more than a celebrity circle jerk.

Ding ding ding...... Winner winner chicken dinner.

First reply, nicely done!

[Deletedaccount1]

It is being talked about, Ben Shapiro dedicated a big chunk of his show to it yesterday for example. That said, the Oscars have become such a nauseating parade of leftism and Twitter muckraking has become so common that it is hard to act surprised or to really care.

He doesn't deserve it of course, the entire thing is insane.

[Mormolyce]

A loss of over 20%. With the way the ratings are calculated....I'd wager lower than that. All this years awards will be artsy movies no one watched and trump bashing. The only thing we can do is call them out over such a stupod decision. Also this should be aperfect reason to delete twitter.

Only counts people watching on TV in the US, not the internet which is where most people watch things these days.

[Seranthor]

.

Or, maybe the folks that you are trying to bait have said, 'Naw, not hungry'

[SirKickBan]

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/8/1...twitter-tweets

Kevin Hart was due to host the Oscars until someone went and dug through his old tweets. He said some stuff in the past, some of that some stuff is also in his comedy specials, but anyway he lost his Oscar job.

Now if you've on the internet long enough you know when someone gets in trouble for something they said or do there are those who can't wait to defend them. Espcially if is something that was said in the past. The first excuses then to be 'well it was a joke, they said it x years ago, taken out of context'.

But as I look around the Internet I see almost none of this for Kevin Hart. Here we have a comdian who tweeted some stuff almost 10 years ago and the free speech brigade is nowhere to be found. What makes what Kevin said different from say a Roseanne, a Donald Sterling, a Charlie Sheen, a Mel Gibson, a Donald Trump. Kevin even addressed his old material in the past before getting fired. I mean clearly the PC crowd is being too harsh on Hart like the others right?

I'm not sure you (or most people) understand what free speech is.

The government can't stop you from saying whatever you like, with some few exceptions. But private individuals absolutely have every right to deny you the right to speak at their events, or on their property, because they don't want to be associated with you, or with what you say and / or believe.

[Jonnusthegreat]

Yeah I don't agree with his tweet so I don't want people to support that. What's so hard to understand?

[SoulForge]

I'm not sure you (or most people) understand what free speech is.

The government can't stop you from saying whatever you like, with some few exceptions. But private individuals absolutely have every right to deny you the right to speak at their events, or on their property, because they don't want to be associated with you, or with what you say and / or believe.

This has been said many times in threads like these. They just choose to ignore this simple fact.

[PACOX]

Seems pretty silly.

Honestly, the position he stepped down from appears to be something nobody wants.
The light gets put on you, and then everyone digs up your history to tear you apart.

Kevin's announcement as being the Host came very late, most likely because they struggled to find someone willing to be put under a microscope.

Yup, not many people want for similar reasons that got him axed. Not what they said but how something in your past an completely ruin it for you.

Google says they are eyeing Eddie Murphy now...whoever is doing the picking should be fired because if Hart was too raunchy Murphy will last 24 hours.

- - - Updated - - -

Well thanks to Disney apparently old tweets nobody remembers is grounds for dismissal and not just like, a simple apology.

Does anyone seriously think Kevin Hart is homophobic? These are just jokes. They're maybe a little old fashioned now? Sure that material might not play well today but that goes for a lot of comedy from the 90s.



Debatable.



What? It's nothing like what Roseanne said. Mel Gibson? Charlie Sheen? These people all have a long history of bigotry and/or insanity. This isn't a few non-PC jokes in old tweets - it's completely different.

It's more like James Gu... oh wait I just got it.



Last year it hit an "all time low"... of 25 million people.

They were the same jokes that made him famous and he has been in the spotlight sense. It is what it is.

[Primemrip]

Ugh.

On the one hand, he's presumably not a conservative, so they don't give a shit.


On the other, the writer of that article can go fuck him/herself: I absolutely despise this notion that dipshits like this are owed an apology every time something like this is dredged up about someone.

Disgusting journalism.

I don't agree with the way people are bringing up the past of a comedian like the jokes he makes are indicative of his actual views and not just the culture of the times.
7+ years ago, making edgy homophobic jokes was just how humor was. Now days you can't even look at a gay person without someone calling you homophobic.

I don't really agree with bringing up anyone's past. A lot of people wouldn't be where they are if the internet was a lot older. I'm probably going to go through my Facebook profile and delete my posts from when I was 12-15 because I said a lot of dumb shit that wouldn't fly.

Glad I'm also a nobody though so I doubt anyone is every going to give a shit about what I said back then.

[draynay]

I think most people are pretty consistent in that they don't give a shit about any of this.

[Zaktar]

You must not be looking very hard.

[Raptor With a Saber]

As ive always said people are too damning and need to let things be words are words, especially ones from a while ago. No one died, no one got hurt just feelings boo frickin who and this is coming from a girl born a buy who fucks men and got their dick turned inside out and has heard way worse. People Need To Lighten the fuck up about what others say.