1) The Cultural Revolution (China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
Several hundred thousand to maybe a few million people were killed, often at the hands of angry mobs, for not being the right kind of communist, for not being communist enough or for just not being friends with the right people. A person could be accused by someone who didn't like them with zero evidence of any wrongdoing and still the victim would lose their home, all of the belongings and potentially their life. This lasted from the mid 60 until the mid 70s.
2) Something current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia
>Religious minorities do not have the right to practice their religion. Non-Muslim propagation is banned, and conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death
http://www.economist.com/node/21541719
After Martin Luther printed his Ninty-Five Theses, Europe promptly lost its collective shit across the board. My European History is a bit rusty but a cursory glance at the Wikipedia topic should give a good idea of how much chaos the ability to spread ideas quickly and widely created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation
We're talking years and years of civil war and strife. All because people who were once separated and thought they were alone found out they were not. If we use this as a barometer, we're in for some stormy seas.
Do some searches on Korea about the escalating fight between Feminist and Anti-Feminist groups. Megalia is probably the most well known and infamous organization. It's difficult to comment on due to the sheer . . . well. I'll give some links as an example:
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/07/29/487...
https://www.10mag.com/megalia-south-koreas-radical-feminism-...
https://www.koreabang.com/2016/features/the-rise-of-radical-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/4vb3lb/megalia_south...
http://i.imgur.com/1uePL0H.png
I've given more than several different links for a reason. The difference in perspectives is really jarring and it's difficult to reconcile the two perspectives. Depending on who you talk to, Megalia is anything from a beleaguered feminist organization under attack from a misogynistic society, to a radical feminist group that is deeply hateful towards men of all kinds (straight/gay). If you dig deep enough, you'll see that a lot of important details in accounts on both sides get shaved away to create a compelling narrative. The end result is a real online bloodbath that has touched a lot of different aspects of Korean society.
I'm just grateful that so far, Korea seems an outlier of this, at the present moment --not that it doesn't happen elsewhere or that it could not happen in places where it's rather tame. I hope as a species we find ways out of this kind of unfettered rancor.
To be fair, not unlike a few other countries out there, S.K historically has been pretty patriarchal, so given this new outlet, this vehemence is not all that surprising as they learn to navigate these waters (who other might have to learn as well).
That being said, Korea might be at the forefront, but other countries have it simmering underneath as well. Take this article on China for example:
https://www.economist.com/news/china/21704853-online-mobs-ge...
One of the reasons I've heard that the Communist Party heavily censors their web is to keep the nationalist elements of their populace under control. The article makes it sound fairly tame, but I've read around and seen some pretty ugly stuff. Obviously harder to find sources due to the nature of the Chinese web. You can see it in their media as well with how deeply patriotic many of their productions are.
How they happen now: Speaking as a [member in X class], I believe [idea].
We've started to tie up our identities into our arguments, and when you do that you can't get around attacking who someone is as a person when they link their membership in a group to the epistemology of why they think something. This is my working theory for why people have started to equate speech with "literally violence". Disagreeing has become an attack on their identity, so it's only natural to interpret that in an extreme form.
The definition of hyperbole is "exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally."
My statement is not hyperbole, it was not at all exaggerated is meant to be taken literally. People have gone to war over this shit.
Most of us would be better off if we went back to those days, I expect a lot of HN users already don't have social media profiles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07...
It's because there's an asymmetry - students neither have jobs to be fired from nor the life experience to understand why it's such a serious matter to do it to someone. The accountability will come when the record of having been arrested for rioting/vandalism shows up in background checks when they do eventually enter the workforce. That's not much comfort I know to their victims. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they do grind exceedingly fine.
Looking at photos of the recent rallies in Boston as well as Charlottesville, I think any reasonable observer would conclude that those opposing the nazis tend to have better jobs than those they are opposing. I'm drawing this conclusion for the distinct difference in the amount of face tattoos between these two groups.
I think you are projecting your own fantasies onto what I wrote, such as everyone you disagree with is "a nazi". I am talking about indiscretions of youth coming back to bite people, and online spats that we used to call flamewars spilling over into the real world.
For me, the line is crossed when an act of physical violence is performed, and we already have laws to deal with it. We don't need online mob justice too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine
From the description, this might encompass phenomena that we would call both coordinated harassment and public shaming, and maybe the original article by Megan McArdle also means to encompass both, though it seems to have more focus on public shaming.
I think the biggest change is that it's pretty low effort to send harassing tweets, relative to (say) figuring out someone's address and sending them threats via snail mail or phone call.