[coldtea]

It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or "let twitter think for them".

It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one getting kicked is a bad person, of course).

In other words, people are not mislead "against their better nature": they are just encouraged to embrace their badness.

[munificent]

It's interesting that this comment and its replies use the third person "they" where many other comments in this thread use "we" (or the even more othering and accusatory "Americans").

I agree completely that one of the main drivers of mob behavior is that it feels good. However, I don't pretend to be immune to that dark corner of human psychology.

We are a tribal species. Our evolutionary history is imprinted with the reality that for thousands of years sticking with our tribe meant survival, as did warring with other tribes that wanted our resources. And even within our tribe, shunning has always been an important form of social control.

Now, I'm not committing the naturalist fallacy and saying that this behavior is right or justifiable. But the seeds of mob mentality are within us all and we won't make progress by blaming it all on others without acknowledging that they aren't so different from ourselves.

If you want this to happen less often, you need to learn how some people avoid it and teach that skill to others.

[coldtea]

>It's interesting that this comment and its replies use the third person "they" where many other comments in this thread use "we" (or the even more othering and accusatory "Americans").

Well, I for one don't use Twitter or pile on for mob jobs elsewhere. At worst, I can bore someone with my multiple responses and counter-arguments on HN!

>I agree completely that one of the main drivers of mob behavior is that it feels good. However, I don't pretend to be immune to that dark corner of human psychology.

I'm not immune to other dark corners of human psychology, but I'm pretty immune to that. I hate mobs, and I might even argue the opposite way than those who have the upper hand in such a situation, just for balancing things out (a sort of "devil's advocate").

I think because of some spectrum issues, one of my problems is the opposite, being too neutral to bond with my peer group (even if I have one).

So, even though I'm generally leftist, for example, and can defend even Stalin with the best of them, I can also argue for conservative positions just as easily (and at the very least, don't reject the arguments of the other side immediately and impulsively, as many do. I have to analyze them to death, and will happily accept one if it sounds logical to me.

[neolog]

> However, I don't pretend to be immune to that dark corner of human psychology.

I honestly don't think I have that impulse, and I know other people who don't seem to either. It's always disturbing when I see my peers turning into a mob.

[Der_Einzige]

Wish there was a double upvote button for this. Far too often we assume ignorance when malice/sadism is a more correct diagnosis. (reversing the common adage of not attributing to malice what is better attributed to ignorance)

For example, many of my friends don't understand why Americans like to watch biased news. Many think that it's not a concious choice from most Americans. The reality is that most Americans know that they can watch C-SPAN to avoid being lied to - they just don't do it because it's so fking boring. Americans want to be lied to, much as Twitter users want to mob and destroy "bad people"...

[semitones]

I was thinking something similar. If a person has the inclination to jump on the bandwagon for any given situation, they are probably actively getting something out of it.

I have a theory that it could have something to do with the haves and the have nots. Whenever some relatively public figure (by default, without critical thinking, is usually labeled as a "have"), slips up in some way, no matter how small, the have nots jump on the opportunity to join a crusade of righteousness where they strike down the goliath for abusing their unfairly acquired power.

[tachyonbeam]

It's not necessarily the "have nots" who jump on the bandwagon. Many of these mob inciters are clearly middle class or upper middle class. I've even seen news anchors participate, people who earn several hundreds of thousands a year. In some cases, it may have to do with crab mentality. Wanting to pull someone down who has more than them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

However, if you look at the way James Damore was taken down, or that woman who made a stupid joke at the airport, these people weren't particularly rich compared to their peers. I think that had more to do with wanting to silence dissenting voices and kick someone while they're down, never giving them an opportunity to defend themselves or to have an open discussion.

[semitones]

I agree, it's not necessarily the "have nots" in the typical sense of the term, crab mentality is more accurate. It's just about someone who has more of anything than you - money, power, privilege (loaded term these days), status, etc.

[jjulius]

>... and it's not discouraged...

There are a lot of people who have been speaking out against "cancel culture", would that not be a form of trying to discourage social media mobs?

[coldtea]

Sure, that's in a sense a movement to discourage this.

But my point was that it is still a niche movement, in the sense that when you're acting as part of an internet mob or a cancel mob or any kind of social mob, you don't get much of a backlash for it (even if you're not just a cog, but a prominent part of one).

Whereas if you were being a jerk in some other way, you'd immediately be called on that.

[anigbrowl]

A lot of people who most loudly decry cancel culture are themselves big practitioners of it and are just being hypocrites - I'm referring to celebrity pundits and other public figures, not you.

[awillen]

That depends a lot on the context of who's saying it, which leads back to the same problem of a lack of nuance and understanding.

If you're Donald Trump saying that people decrying the fact that you caused the attempted coup on January 6th is cancel culture, then no, you're not trying to discourage social media mobs. You're selfishly employing the cancel culture trope as a shield against any attack, by employing the logic that if a lot of people are attacking you, it must be a raging cancellation mob.

If you're OP, on the other hand, speaking out in an objective way about an event that you're not associated with, then yeah, you're trying to discourage social media mobs and good on your for that.

At this point, many of the accusations of "cancel culture" are from people who are trying to cancel people criticizing them. The only way out of it is for everybody to really understand the stuff they're talking about and provide well-informed thoughts that don't use buzzwords like "cancel culture."

How we achieve that, I do not know.

[sneak]

> It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob.

The "mob" analogy is a bad one here. Sending mean tweets and a group beating someone to death in a town square are nowhere near equivalent.