[SamBam]

No. 10,000 voices braying your name as an evil-doer itself does harm. This isn't a kid being told on a playground that "words will never hurt you," that's always been a lie.

Here is a case [1] of a man being falsely doxxed for the assault on two kids on a bike path last summer. The voices calling for him to be brought to justice, calling him a racist, etc, numbered in the tens of thousands. The retractions from people who realized they had made a mistake for calling for the blood of the wrong person numbered in the tens.

Beyond the psychological damage this may have caused, will this man ever feel safe submitting a resume for a job again? When he does so, does he need to attach a note saying "When you Google my name, all those mentions of me being a racist are false." If he does that, does he already subconsciously look distasteful in the recruiter's eyes?

1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get...

[dionidium]

I'm not so sure proof by counterexample is useful here. My point is that in most cases the people screaming at you seem like they're doing harm, but they can't actually do harm until somebody in a position of power in your life listens to them. [0]

I think you can mostly forgive the cowardly behavior of these authority figures up to about a year or so ago on the grounds that the social media mob sure feels like a real mob that can literally put tires around you and set you on fire. But we know now that that's a mistake. They can't do that. And so people in positions of power need to understand that in most cases they can actually just ignore the mob and nothing happens.

Every institution should have a "social media mob" procedure (i.e. what to do when a member of the organization becomes a target). If you plan to handle this in an ad hoc way, then you'll almost certainly make mistakes (because the ad hoc approach usually boils down to, "Ahhhhh! this feels bad! We have to do something! Quick, get rid of the person!") People should be thinking about how they'll handle it when it happens to one of their employees or members.

[0] I think I'd want to clarify that I actually agree that the braying mob does inflict its own kind of harm; it's merely that it's a harm I'd be willing to endure as a consequence of putting my ideas out there on a platform like Twitter, whereas nobody would be willing to endure getting kicked out of college or fired from their job just to have an argument on the internet. For example, my comment above is getting downvoted to hell. Feels bad! But it's several orders of magnitude removed from losing your job.

[cecilpl2]

Reputational damage is real damage, unless you are arguing that reputation isn't a thing which is patently false.

Careers and lives are made and lost on the back of reputation. Companies can be destroyed by the social media mob.

"Everyone should just ignore them" is not a reasonable argument. Even if there were no actual consequences, fear of consequences or fear of others' fear of consequences... is enough. It's a coordination problem.

[anigbrowl]

I think you're conflating 'getting targeted by a huge social media crowd on a false basis' with 'getting your own opinions trashed by a huge social media crowd.'

The bicyclist in the example wasn't trying to persuade anyone on Twitter of anything. It was the public authority figures who misdirected the crowd's attention to him by releasing inaccurate information about when a (real) crime had occurred.

[dionidium]

Yeah, that's fair. Sometimes the mob comes for something you said on the internet. And sometimes they come for you for something you did in a viral video. Two separate issues that I don't intend to confuse. (But oftentimes the end result and the solutions are similar.)