Social media has far more vitriol and shaming because it is radically different in very important ways:

1. Anonymity

2. Mixing of cultures that rarely (if ever) meet in the real world

3. Loss of nuances when speech is converted to text

4. Loss of context due to text constraints (can't write many complete, complex thoughts in 140 characters)

5. Less potential for physical consequences

The people who would hear it would be her friends, who would laugh at the intended irony; anyone around over-hearing would grasp that is was meant as self-deprecation.

You wouldn't get death threats, that's for sure.

But the same people who compare this to yelling in the streets then turn around and tell the sealion analogy. One of the many problems with twitter is that some people perceive it as private dinner conversation and others as public soapbox, and it can very rapidly shift between the two.

She only had a handful of followers.

But the way twitter works, one of your followers can retell the "joke" to all their friends, and they can tell it to all their friends. The system breaks down when they're not sharing something they agree with, but something they think is so harmful that no-one (except all their followers) should ever have to see it.

If the joke is "problematic", I'm not sure why sharing it isn't also problematic.

Maybe a 140 character broadcast system is a good medium for a nuanced analysis of when jokes are funny (and a circuit breaker in a sometimes uncomfortable discussion) or so harmful that they can't be justified, and where the line is.

You can't temper the mob with a look of opprobrium (or disinterest) across the internet.