To say nothing of all the proliferating random stationary surveillance cameras and police bodycams out there. Which if you're "fortunate" enough to live in Orlando FL or Washington County OR, is now connected to a facial recognition ML model.
Where is the backlash, where is the outrage about this? Why do people just stupidly let dumb shit proliferate, and only years later say "Oops we did it again?"
It does seem no different from what society seems to be ok with towards celebrities. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea that because someone is on a TV show, society is ok having photographers follow them around 24/7 and reporting on their personal lives.
We have set a poor precedent.
So it seems the confusion is two fold. People believing that their access to celebrity lives are anything other than arranged PR opportunities, and then believing everyday people should be subject to that incorrectly interpreted behaviour.
In practice, most of us are somewhat protected by sheer numbers and the fact that people move on and a lot of information does effectively rot over time.
Balanced against that though is the increasingly number of cameras and automated recognition and categorization systems. And the whole mob mentality. Obviously in the cases where it has actually led to deaths. But also in the, perhaps rare, but well-documented cases where a stupid off-hand remark or action triggers the social media machine and the path of least resistance is career-ending firings and the like.
Then there's the mob mentality issue you mention, and perhaps more relevant to this article. Even after it passes the names and images are still around when people search your name. It's on your permanent record.
Absolutely, I have an effectively unique name as far as the Internet is concerned. So, if I were to become "Internet famous" for something problematic, it's pretty much a given that would be near the top of search terms any time someone searched on me whether a recruiter or anyone else.
Worse though is probably if you share a name with someone Internet notorious and plausibly could be confused with that person. A story I like to tell is pre-Web but someone I know in NYC shared a name with someone who got into a very public and polarizing local spat and something. My friend literally got death threats left on his voicemail.
The Atlantic should be outraged at itself along with all the media family.
Right here The Atlantic is masterfully playing the issue from both sides. It could have addressed the issue genetically, of course.
Most obviously relevant is Black Lives Matter. Police brutality and other biased policing has been happening in America since the beginning. The media have been generally happy to ignore it. (Even when they cover mob killings, it's often been with a neutral or even approving tone. [1]) BLM happened because of social media, because 300m people are now publishers and editors, not just article subjects.
Since then we've seen plenty more. If you're not on Twitter, you may not hear about these things until you see media coverage. But that doesn't mean they're not significant events, both societally or for the people involved.
I think one reason things blow up on Twitter has to do with with the magnification and positive feedback loop that goes on between itself and other mediums. If it were self contained the impact and general awareness would be much reduced.
It's the job of the media to report what's going on, and Twitter is at the size where something happening there is a legitimate news topic. I would agree it's probably overrepresented, as the great bulk of journalists use Twitter, and it makes many of the aspects of content-generation much easier.
At one point there was a clear distinction between "online" and "the real world". But I think that is now misleading. Online is now one important part of the real world. We won. Now we have to figure out what to do about it.