You are not an entire legal system. You aren’t even a judge.1 You probably knew that. When you blearily dragged yourself to the bathroom this morning, no bailiff said, “All rise for the honorable Becky!” Opposing counsel weren’t lurking in your closet ready to debate the admissibility of your black sneakers.
And yet whenever you go online you don a (hopefully imaginary) British court wig and prepare to judge the righteousness of any poor bastards unlucky enough to catch your bloodshot eye. You’ll stare at the screen, let loose a disgruntled “begad, no, I’ll show that swine,” and issue your verdict, joined by a few thousand other wannabe hangmen, because while you aren’t a legal system, being a mob is easy.
I hate mobs, lynchings—they sicken me. No matter how wrong the man is, if a mob is against him, I'm for him. The only thing I ever pray to God for is the chance someday to squat down behind a machine gun with a lynch mob in front of me.
— Dashiell Hammett, “This King Business”
Hammett was writing about a physical (fictional) mob—after they’d torn a man to pieces—but online mobs are pretty awful too. They charge forth to render justice as mindlessly as any pitchfork-wielding crowd of French Revolutionary peasants. If you’ve ever been the target of a hate-filled Internet pile-on (and I have) it’s a stomach-churning nightmare.
Below is a negatively-charged Twitter mob particle, a mob*itron. By itself sad and lonely, but linked with its fellows, a mighty force for bile and retribution.
The specific target of stormbringer’s anger is unimportant (in this case an annoying person with silly views on body positivity), what matters is the absolute confidence with which the mob*itron attacks its target. “She deserves all the personal attacks for this thread.” “She’s a danger to society.” He doesn’t yet accuse her of genocide or grooming but that’s around the corner.
An Internet mob is a monster made up of regular people, probably decent in their day-to-day lives, who charge into battle confident that whatever punishment they dole out is well-deserved. What’s worse, the mob is us. If you’re on social media, there’s a fair chance that you’ve joined a Twitter mob, an Instagram mêlée, or a Facebook mosh.
And you’ve been wrong. Mob justice isn’t. Mobs don’t deal in justice, they deal in pique and vengeance.
All by ourselves, we are crappy judicial systems. We’re awful at finding out who did what and even worse at coming up with a fair punishment for them that done it, but that doesn’t stop us.
Think of how the legal system functions in a criminal case.2 First, a cop has to decide to arrest a suspect. Then a district attorney has to decide if the case is even worth trying to prosecute. After that, the case is brought before a judge for arraignment. A grand jury will have to decide whether or not to issue an indictment. If they do, the case goes to criminal court. The prosecution will offer witnesses. The defense will offer witnesses. They’ll get to cross-examine each other’s witnesses. The judge will rule on matters of law. Then a jury of twelve (hopefully) sober citizens will sit in an uncomfortable room and decide if the alleged perpetrator really did it. If found guilty, the judge will then render a verdict in accordance with the relevant laws. Then, in case of mistakes, there are always courts of appeals.
Now think about how you function as a Twitter judge. You see a tweet that makes you angry. You don’t bother to find any exculpatory evidence (Who has the time with fifty more cases on your Twitter docket!) you just furiously type out your angry tweet, joining ten thousand other lunatics calling for the guilty schmuck to be destroyed.
That’s it. See. Type. Send. And never look back at the wreckage you’ve left behind.
And the tweeter who made stormbringer mad? Does he know anything about her life? The people she’s helped, the people who love her? Maybe she nurses an aged parent. Maybe she was abused as a child. Maybe she’s helped dozens, hundreds of people. Stormbringer doesn’t know and doesn’t care. All he’s seen is a stupid few tweets and that’s enough for him to judge her in full. To say he is only aware of the tip of the iceberg would be a gross exaggeration.
Mobs don’t think about the whole story, they don’t think at all, they surrender all rationality and swarm their target like rabid lemmings, pushed along by endorphins, group dynamics, and guttural cries of hate.
In 2010, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart released a short video clip of Shirley Sherrod—then the USDA’s Georgia director for rural development—giving a speech at an NAACP gathering. In the clip, she described being asked for help by a farmer but because he was white “I didn't give him the full force of what I could do.” The clip went viral. Accused of racism by people like Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, facing the braying mob, Sherrod was forced to resign.
Later an extended clip showed that Sherrod went on to explain that her initial reaction was completely wrong. She ended up helping the farmer because she realized that poor farmers, black and white, were all struggling. The farmer and his wife quickly came to her defense:
“If we hadn’t have found her, we would have lost everything, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Spooner, 82, said in a telephone interview.
Sherrod was trying to illustrate to her audience the wrongheadedness of biased thinking, but the mob, not knowing or caring about the full speech, called her a racist.
The injustice committed against Sherrod was eventually overturned,3 but that’s usually not the case. When you pile onto a Twitter target, not only don’t you know the full story, you probably won’t hear about it when new evidence shows up proving their innocence. If they're one of the unlucky ones who end up being fired, they may never get their job back.
You’re not a judge, don’t play one on the Interwebs.
And yes, I know we’re still going to judge things. I’m judging things right now (mostly you). That’s ok. I’ll just offer up a little guidance:
Do your research. At least check out one news story from a reputable source showing something really did happen. Read the whole damn article, not just the headline. A tweet is not evidence.
Focus on criticizing bad ideas, not people.
And if you’re going to attack a person (and we all do it sometimes), don’t try and mete out punishment. You may call the Letzte Generation protesters who threw mashed potatoes on a Monet painting “a couple of whinging narcissists whose methods are pure codswallop,”4 but don’t threaten their safety or try to get them fired.5
Seriously, if you want to be a good human, never ever try and get a stranger fired.
Are there crimes so awful that mob justice is appropriate? Not usually. Did they commit murder? Pedophilia? Fine, let the courts find them guilty and punish them. Do the courts ever screw up? All the time, but they’re still a lot better than you (or me). And sure, there are rare cases where it’s not illegal but you’re still positive that it’s wrong and deserving of punishment. I can see why folks are pressuring Adidas to cancel Ye’s6 contract because of his anti-Semitic statements. Still, most stories aren’t that obviously awful. (And even there, I don’t know what the proper punishment is for Ye’s words. I’ll leave that to music fans.)
You aren’t Dredd. Don’t play judge, jury, and executioner.
On the off chance that you are a judge, my apologies, Your Honor.
To any lawyers who find mistakes in my description: Please don’t sue!
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack apologized and offered her another job, which she turned down. President Obama spoke to her, and although he didn’t offer a personal apology, Sherrod said she was “very, very pleased with the conversation.” Sherrod sued Breitbart and later settled out of court with his estate. In some double deja vu, Sherrod was recently rehired by the USDA to serve on its Equity Commission, serving again under Vilsack, who had been named by Biden to again serve as Secretary of Agriculture. She didn’t seem to mind working for her old boss. “That happened about 12 years ago and Vilsack apologized. I accepted his apology and moved on.”
Said by me about five minutes ago.
Even those annoying folks have their own backstory. The climate is worth caring about. Being frustrated that people aren’t doing enough to try and save it is understandable. And the people in the protests are humans, not monsters. Well, probably not monsters.
The artist formerly known as Kanye West.
Even Ye's horrific words, while flat-out appalling, are part of a larger story of untreated (intentionally untreated) mental illness, as written about with a base level of compassion and clarity by Freddie deBoer and Ben Dreyfuss. Even the worst crap is often complicated.
Mobs are bad, I wholeheartedly agree. I would add one more point of guidance
• Did I understand the tweet correctly? We can all be a little sloppy with our choice of words, did the person really mean what I think he meant?
Case in point: you seemed to imply in the penultimate paragraph that pedophilia should be punished in court. Pedophilia is not a crime (it's not a synonym for child sexual abuse). When someone tweets about pedophilia, it's very easy to conflate the two.