It is deceptive to characterize an online lynch mob as not a "receptive audience".
Read the article again... some of the lynch mobs weren't even factually correct about what they mobilized for. The attempt to implicitly pull in the "well, they sorta deserved it defense" fails on the grounds that you're leaving the determination of who deserved it up to a mob.
Hi, I'm one of your friendly neighborhood HN libertarians, and everyone take note, I'm about to defend government here. If someone does something seriously deserving of that level of opprobrium, firings, and social tarring-and-feathering, they deserve the protections that government processes can bring to bear to try to do our best to make sure that we only fire the big guns at people who, to the best of our knowledge, have been determined to deserve it by processes with a longstanding historical pedigree and centuries of back-and-forth tuning. There's a reason we have trials and such, a deep and important one.
Do not be so hurried to give up that social standard because, let's not mince words here, you're playacting at being offended because that's what your social group expects. Let's not pretend that anybody was actually offended at the statement of someone with 170 twitter followers, and if anybody really, truly was somehow "offended" it was only after the actions of the lynch mob itself! They're the ones who actually spread it around... maybe they're the ones we should lynch. Without trial, of course.
Scale matters. And it has real-world effects... people get fired over this sort of thing, among other things.
The only thing preventing the lynch mob from doing what things the physical lynch mobs used to do is simple, sheer lack of physical proximity, so A: I consider it a valid use of the term and B: It should not be viewed by any sane person as a normal and healthy social correction mechanism, it should be condemned by all. It is still dangerous, and if everyone acts like it's no big deal or even a good idea, it will get worse, until the lynch mobs do do what lynch mobs used to do.
And I mean that 100% fully literally, with absolutely no exaggeration whatsoever. In the real world, the line between "dozens of death threats", which we've already handily reached, and "an actual attempt on your life" is very thin. As easy as it may be to tell others not to worry, if you personally were betting your life on that line, you would not be happy; it is not to be relied upon. There are crazy people out there. Failure to take that into account while passively accepting that online lynch mobs are OK is just stupid.
This stuff isn't a joke. It's one of the foundational bricks between having a civilization and not having one. It is unwise to be so lackadaisical about it, if you like living in a civilization.
It's hyperbole, as the victim doesn't actually die. But there are certainly similarities.
They were able to get Sacco fired. They were able to mobilize someone to take her picture right after her plane landed. And she had to leave Cape Town because "no one could guarantee her safety". So, it could have easily escalated into a real lynch mob.
How about people getting "swatted" by internet vigilantes?
So the "not dying" part is about the only significant difference I can see in some of these more extreme cases, and, God help me, I wouldn't be overly shocked if someone actually does end up dead from an "internet shaming" some day.
Not only is someone bound to end up dead, based on past human behaviour the majority of shamers will claim they deserved it, and feel no shame themselves for their part in the death of an innocent. Diffusion of responsibility is a terrible thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
Read the article again... some of the lynch mobs weren't even factually correct about what they mobilized for. The attempt to implicitly pull in the "well, they sorta deserved it defense" fails on the grounds that you're leaving the determination of who deserved it up to a mob.
Hi, I'm one of your friendly neighborhood HN libertarians, and everyone take note, I'm about to defend government here. If someone does something seriously deserving of that level of opprobrium, firings, and social tarring-and-feathering, they deserve the protections that government processes can bring to bear to try to do our best to make sure that we only fire the big guns at people who, to the best of our knowledge, have been determined to deserve it by processes with a longstanding historical pedigree and centuries of back-and-forth tuning. There's a reason we have trials and such, a deep and important one.
Do not be so hurried to give up that social standard because, let's not mince words here, you're playacting at being offended because that's what your social group expects. Let's not pretend that anybody was actually offended at the statement of someone with 170 twitter followers, and if anybody really, truly was somehow "offended" it was only after the actions of the lynch mob itself! They're the ones who actually spread it around... maybe they're the ones we should lynch. Without trial, of course.