I was commenting that buying instagram followers was relatively innocent, not that the act of cheating in a race was innocent. Sorry, I thought that was clear from the context.
> To call this "trivial" seems like maybe you have no interest or experience with marathons? It might be trivial to you,...
I never used the word trivial in my comment. You've successfully made a straw man and beat it to death :)
I hope you don't mind if I take your double mis-reading of my comment to make a broader point: I think your reply is an unintentional but apt example of the righteousness that can get whipped up in these types of stories.
Righteousness does some messed up stuff to our thought process. It filters things in a way to amplify the negativity of the behavior in question, crowding out nuance in the quest to reinforce belief.
It looks like you latched onto the use of the word "innocent" and started your reply, and each follow-on sentence in your reply is your thought process reinforcing this emotion, which is increasingly divorced from the original post's point (how we police behavior in the age of the internet).
Sorry to make a bit of an example of your post, but I recognize it because I've done the very same thing myself - it's something we're all susceptible to. I think the environment of internet comment threads supercharges this, as threads gain steam because they're public and can have many more participants dropping in to make a point or build on something someone else said. There's often no feedback loop to this bottom-up aggregate behavior, which can outsize the real world effects (the 'punishment') relative to the person's offense.
This site [1] has a good summary of the emotional chain of causation for why we feel this way:
* Intuition focuses the mind on a single strategy. An angry person can only see the reasons for anger.
* Anger is an unconscious choice by the system. The whole body responds to the emotion.
* Indignation also gains its power from the territorial instincts.
* The amygdala triggers the anger emotion.
* LTP (long term potentiation) makes the amygdala sensitive to imagined offence.
* Self righteous indignation permits anger without guilt.
Within the context we're talking about, this is really instructive. There are examples that describe each one of these points. And the sum of many people's anger without guilt can be fearsome.
For what its worth, I'm in full agreement with you - it bothers me too seeing people cheat, or stolen valor, or any of these types of reprehensible behaviors. What I hope for is a society that polices bad behavior by giving appropriate punishment - where we find the right response that prevents future activity rather than simply seeking to satisfy our emotional desire for revenge. I worry internet shame posts may be more the latter than the former and may have terrible unintended consequences.
[1] http://www.effective-mind-control.com/self-righteous-indigna... (I have no idea about the rest of this site and cannot vouch for all of it, but this one page was pretty darn good)