You're trying to examine the morality of the mob. Obviously the mob doesn't have a consistent and justifiable moral stance; it's a mob.

My point is that when you post online, you're not publically speaking to your neighbors from the sidewalk. You're broadcasting nationally. Including to an angry mob.

So no, I wouldn't agree with "As long as you don’t tweet obviously racist things, you’ll be fine."

I would rather say, if you don't post online, don't have any recordings of yourself posted online, and otherwise manage to prevent yourself from having any significant online presence, you'll be fine.

That’s tantamount to saying as long as you don’t share your opinions, you’ll be fine. (That’s the conclusión people have reached, hence the article.) A huge amount of our communication is digital. Neighbors talk to each other over Nextdoor. Coworkers email, slack, and zoom. People whip out their phones to record strangers behaving badly/strangely/in an arbitrary way they don’t like. Any of that can and does get posted online and it doesn’t matter how irrelevant your online presence might have previously been.

Nothing about internet broadcasting is new. We’ve been doing that for decades. People were already talking on forums and Usenet in the 90s, which could be easily shared with a link or televised. In 2010 Facebook had been open to the public for 4 years and Twitter had millions of tweets each day. We didn’t see this same type of mass mob behavior back then. Diversity of opinion was far more tolerated, and the majority of internet users today developed an online presence of some kind in this environment.

Now in 2020, even those past posts can incite the mob, regardless of whether they were controversial or not at the time.

The internet was, and still is, in it's infancy.

You can be frustrated with internet mobs all you want. I am as well. I've had people I care about cancelled over nothing.

But let's not deny reality. The world and the internet is VASTLY more connected, in the mainstream sense, than it was 10 or 30 years ago. My grandma is on Facebook and my employer pays top dollar to curate their businesses' online presence.

The internet has never been a more dangerous place to share your real opinions with your real name attached, and people need to recognize this. There's no reason to believe it's going to get better from here, and there's all the reason to believe it's going to get worse.

> Obviously the mob doesn't have a consistent and justifiable moral stance; it's a mob.

Problem with that is that one mob is given unhindered support for venting their spleen, whereas whereas the opposing mob is deplatformed, doxxed, etc. etc.

I don't even need to say which side is which, do I? We all know.

Sure, I mean it's basically tautological, but the populist mob enforces the popular opinion.

I'm sure someone's gonna chew me out for this opinion, but even though i disagree with "mob justice" on principle at the same time i DO feel good when I see mob justice taken on someone who, in my gut, I feel really deserves it.

I acknowledge that feeling is the problem. I'm aware of that.

For a probably not-too-controversial example, I hate Scientology. And way back when, Anonymous/4chan took on Scientology, and maybe didn't completely take it down but certainly made a good effort. And I cheered the whole way, because I hate Scientology.

But I don't agree with mob justice.

I don't know, it's a contradiction logically but that's definitely a thing.

You're backpedaling. Now you're acting as if you were giving self-preservation advice in the face of a mob, whereas in your original comment you were supporting said mob. What is your stance?

Those two things don't sound mutually exclusive to me, and I'm not sure HK's actual stance is relevant to the larger discussion.

> in your original comment you were supporting said mob

I did no such thing, please re-read my original post

I see, I misunderstood what you meant by "Would you feel comfortable that you still have your job". I now see that you probably meant it as "Would you feel confident that you still have your job". I originally thought you meant "Would you feel comfortable with a world in which people would still have their job if ...". My apologies.

> you probably meant it as "Would you feel confident

Ah yeah that's exactly right. My bad on the wording

I actually care far more about potential employers and governments scraping through my history for inconvenient opinions than any mob.

The odds of being noticed by a mob are like getting hit by lightning, the odds of some lowest bidder contractor building a tool to detect inappropriate twitter hearts are almost certain.

I wonder if enough felt that way if there would be grounds for legal action [1].

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect