StingingVelvet: I'm somewhere in the middle on this, but that's a realllllly shit comparison.
Of course, but I wrote this simply because its not fully wrong but perhaps a bit too strongly worded in parts. It was honestly quite inconsiderate to phrase it in the way i did so let me elaborate a little bit.
Basically my intent was to imply that people have an inert sense of moral truth. Let me give you an example, lets stick with free speech. Like anything, simple but important arbitrary concepts like free speech should be allowed to discuss and perhaps it even kinda is important to discuss even abstract things online even if nobody knows the full truth about anything, like us of course.
The problem that arises is when people believe what they're stating is "the full fact", which is the crux of the issue when it comes to discussing things over at the large social media sites. So why is there a form of idiosyncrasy surrounding this? Its simply because some people favor things that are directly in front of them, like their social media friends, over talking abstract concepts like the discussions at hand.
What I mean by this is simply that as long as people don't become the lynch mob then even extremely inept and untrue statements shouldn't exactly be disallowed, as those would direct people from considering not speaking their minds if they feel like it. If things reach a little bit too far of course its always best to step back from the thread and care about something else, but thats a different thing. I'm a firm believer in the way that even if you apply anonymity to people they still have a sort of intrinsic and individualistic sense of civility and a degree of justice, however misdirected or even dangerous it might be. I mean you can actually observe this behavior as well of what happened with ProJared (hes from what I know just the most prominent, which is why I take him as an example) before his recent response.
People thought they knew the full truth, based around misinformation and half-truths which causes people to direct the inert sense of justice in the wrong way, which in turn gave power to those that manufactured the whole incident.
The creation of the lynchmobs can be compared to the action like shouting fire in a crowd that actually believe that the fire exists, even if reason tells you otherwise. An online lynchmob basically annulates the sense of individual civility quite adeptly in order to give people inside these groups a sense of urgency and extreme justice. But with most things as extreme and narrow minded as these sort of groups, things change immediately once people have more information. You can kind of think of this like calming down after you've been very angry about something, the process is seriously similar. Most of those people who're in those lynchmobs are actually seriously invested in the things they do.
There is also a thing about memes and how they can be uses to deflame people under the guise of jokes but thats a different beast and honestly quite complicated, memetheory (not internet jokes but rather forms of information that are passed on fluently, Wittgenstein is a good start if you want to read into that sort of stuff and then Dawkins who coined the term).
Last but not least, this ain't my first time saying that social media is bad. But overall, the people that partake in these sort of witchhunt activities are probably even less than 0.3% or even less but thats just an educated guess. Its still several hundred thousand folks but overall the very vast majority are just people who just want to have fun inside their group not careing about the latest dramanews while just having fun online, which is also why you can read that many people are shocked when they actually notice these things as well.
EDIT: This comment came out much longer than I thought it would. I also think in order to dissolve the entire problem of twitter/facebook hiveminds is learn some simple self dicipline and understanding that "the whole truth" is something that people must take some time and patience in in order to fully grasp. Something that we all learn as time goes by. In a time where "fake news" are prevalent its more important to be viligant and not jump on a certain bandwaggon nor reach towards a certain conclusion to quickly.
