[rootusrootus]

> c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter

Ding ding ding! This is the fundamental problem. We collectively seem to care entirely too much about the fringe people who bother to vent their minds on Twitter.

[inglor_cz]

A lot of influence with no responsibility, that is the hellish combination. If the Twitter mob drives somebody to suicide, no one is going to punish them.

Power without responsibility is a wild combination, very unstable.

[rootusrootus]

I think we have to resolve that a real person (or at least a discrete identifiable group) has the actual power, and the responsibility lies squarely with them. That may require them to take heat directly rather than fire some random employee the Internet has decided to hate, but I don't think they get to deflect responsibility for taking the easy out.

That doesn't necessarily address the suicide part, except to observe coldly that the person directly responsible for the suicide is the only one who can stop it, unfortunately. So they have to figure out how to stop the assault from reaching them.

I don't have any particularly good answers, this is a fairly hard problem to solve. Probably some combination of things, up to and including involving law enforcement and giving them the tools to identify people and hold them accountable (as much as we'd like the Internet to be an anonymous place, that may be a pipe dream). Of course, what constitutes breaking the law? If someone on the playground taunts you, they're not breaking the law, and the risk to you is pretty low. But if a million people on the Internet taunt you, this is a different thing.