How To Deal With Online Mobs
How To Deal With Online Mobs
"We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.” – Christopher Hitchens
Almost exactly one century ago, years before his ill-fated presidency, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover wrote the following in his book “American Individualism”:
“The crowd only feels: it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams — but it never builds. It is one of the most profound and important of exact psychological truths that man in the mass does not think but only feels. The mob functions only in a world of emotion.”
Someone once tweeted “Each day on Twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.” It’s become a proverb of social media. But it underplays the extent of the problem. If only it were just a single person devoured per day, like some sort of daily sacrifice to the Twitter sun god. Unfortunately, the mob’s thirst for cruelty and destruction is not so easily slaked. Every hour of every day, people are swarmed, harassed, and publicly shamed on social media. Sadists and vindictive psychos release people’s personal information, threaten them, try to ruin their reputations, harm their careers, or get them fired. And onlookers by the thousands are only too happy to join in the pile ons. It happens to celebrities and public figures, but it happens to random people, too.
What should you do if the pitchforks come for you? When facing the ire of an online mob, you have five general options:
Fight — Double down and tell everyone to go to hell.
Flight — Deactivate your social media and attempt to disappear from the public eye.
Play dead — Take your account(s) private, and/or log off for a few weeks and hope everything blows over.
Honey badger — Go about your business as usual and ignore everything.
Masochism — Stop in front of thousands upon thousands of slavering, bloodthirsty imbeciles and attempt to explain yourself or apologize.
In terms of self-interest, strategies 1-3 are all valid choices, depending on your personality. Not everyone can face down a crowd with a pair of broken bottles and a maniacal grin. And going about business as usual is viable only up to a certain point. If you’re being swarmed on every post you make, if people are tracking you down in real life and harassing you on the street, or sending threatening messages, it becomes increasingly untenable to just shrug that off. Option five is pure insanity, and yet it’s the route an astonishing percentage of people seem to take. We’ve all observed someone getting dragged through the mud, and when they attempt to clarify, explain themselves, or apologize, they just get dragged harder. You can almost detect a sense of mob disappointment in the face of an apology, one that soon turns to anger, like the pugilist who wishes their target would fight back so they can feel more justified in pulverizing them further.
Picture some infernal fusion of Spanish Inquisitors and Genghis Khan’s Mongol Horde. Imagine facing a cavalry charge of these characters at full gallop, and as the oncoming stampede of hooves and steel bears down on you, pleading “What I actually meant was…” or “Guys, I’m really sorry.” Get people’s blood up like that, and for all intents and purposes, you are not dealing with human beings anymore. Compassion, restraint, and nuance are lost to them. You could no more reason with an angry rabble than you could argue with a tornado or a wild bear. Mobs are almost unbelievably stupid and cruel in equal measure. Never, ever show vulnerability — it’s chum in shark-infested waters.
The sad truth is, as a result of the ever-present reality of cancel culture and public shaming as new norms, our social incentives have been shifted in amoral directions. It is now perfectly rational to never apologize for anything in the face of public outrage, even when you are, in fact, in the wrong. When apologies cause nothing but more pain, you can expect a culture in which they become increasingly scarce. Even if you did commit some transgression, even if you feel guilty about it, you’d be well advised to apologize privately to whomever you wronged, but not to do so publicly.
To humbly acknowledge when one is wrong is a moral virtue, but it is one that morons have never respected, and there is no bigger moron on this earth than a human hive mind hijacked by mob psychology. You do not want to present yourself as a softer target for their bullying than you need to, and the mob’s conception of what constitutes strength or weakness is about as evolved as a unibrowed caveman who communicates with grunts. Brazen, unconditional, pig-headed stubbornness is, to them, a strength. If whatever you did broke actual laws, you will face legal penalties. If it didn’t cross that line, I can assure you that the punishment doled out by mob justice will always exceed the severity of the deed.
As Kat Rosenfield wrote in her Persuasion advice column:
"The kind of people who go hunting for kompromat in your college photo album are also the kind who love to demand apologies that they then refuse to accept, because accepting means they’d have to stop attacking you, and what’s the fun in that? And if you try to placate these people, you will lose. They will sense your weakness and squeeze you like a lemon until they’ve extracted every last drop of penance, until you’re bowing and scraping and begging forgiveness and vowing to donate your life savings to a charity of their choice."
The internet has empowered mobs to indiscriminately and disproportionately wield the power of public shaming in the direction of undeserving individuals. Shaming can take your reputation, your job, and expose you to tsunamis of harassment — all against your will. But the most important thing shaming can exact — your self-respect — is in your hands. Nobody can take that from you — you have to give it away yourself.
You may find yourself wrongfully shamed, but you don’t have to be ashamed.
See also: “On Cancel Culture and the Successor Ideology”
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