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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

But did the first one deserve to be "hounded" and harassed until she left twitter? Those people are just as bad IMO.

> But some of Brent's followers hounded the woman, even after she deleted the tweet. Jacqui tried to rein it in and said she would deal with any "bother" on the account, but eventually the woman was forced off Twitter.

The mother DM'd the woman and she apologized immediately. Lynch mob internet justice can be equally destructive as some thoughtless likely uninformed (that he had down syndrome) tweet.

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It seems like in both cases the problem was lack of context. She criticized him because she didn't realise he had Down syndrome, and then the mob hounded her because they didn't realise that she had apologised.

Perhaps Twitter is especially bad for this because its character limit encourages truncation of context.

Even if her Tweet was uninformed, it's still not a nice thing to say. One of the big problems with social media is that people have very different standards about what they will say on the internet vs. real life. It wouldn't have happened if she hadn't decided to be a jerk to someone she didn't know.

People are sarcastic in real life too. “Want a medal?” is usually harmless.

To people you know and have an understanding with, it might be no problem. To people you don't know, it'll come across as pretty hostile.

Yeah, I'm trying to pick through all the situations where it would bother me. In my imagination, it is limited to (1) if this happened at work (to me or to someone else), I'd see it as toxic or (2) if it happened on the internet, as it did, and it was someone I knew who did it.

And in the second case, it's more of a feeling of disappointment. "I know you're better than this, why are you wasting your time being mean to strangers on the internet?" But I can't quite put myself into the mood of getting angry at them and trying to bully them into deleting their account or even getting them fired from a job. I'm trying to understand that.

Sure, but it's also not nice or polite. "I'm just sarcastic, I'm just having fun" is a great way to dismiss someone else's feelings when they're actually not happy with your chosen mode of mild meanness.

Speak however you want, but as always people can label you a jerk for anything you want no matter how little offense you intended by it. It's a design flaw in language that's impossible to eliminate.

Would you drop a sarcastic comment into someone else's conversation in a public space?

The main lesson here, as always, is don't tweet... it's a context-less shitshow.

I've seen it done. Sometimes justified sometimes not, but in no case was either party relentlessly hounded after the immediate incident.

Obviously it was not a nice thing to say. It was dealt with appropriately by the child's mother. The twitter mob accomplished nothing besides more people being jerks.

Yeah I'm not saying they are in the right either. Twitter (and other social media) is an endless recursion of poor decisions.

> But did the first one deserve to be "hounded" and harassed until she left twitter? Those people are just as bad IMO

It's the same thing. It's people who have to drag others down in order to lift themselves up. I don't think it's a good thing when anyone does it, least of all when I don't realize I'm doing it.

> Those people are just as bad IMO

>> It's the same thing.

...

Leaving twitter, no great loss is it? I never get the appeal of twitter.

Just because you personally see Twitter as insignificant doesn't mean access to social media (particularly under your own identity, not a new/anonymous account to deal with the mobs) isn't a very important thing to a ton of people in the world.

This is a part of the problem, both sides see their actions as "not that bad". Except one person made a single tweet thoughtlessly and the others are doing it with a hero-complex because they think they are making the "world a better place".

Both are equally uninformed but in the justice system motive is everything, as it rightfully should be.

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