Social media empowered the mob, and gave them an inflated sense of worth for their own opinions. Because your opinion can instantly be broadcast to millions of

Social media empowered the mob, and gave them an inflated sense of worth for their own opinions. Because your opinion can instantly be broadcast to millions of people, it must have value. But along with this came the mob mentality, where this new power will be used to silence opposition. The fault really lies in the companies, politicians, and media outlets who have given credence to what "the mob" on social media has to say. Example: a comedian/author makes a tweet that is mildly offensive to some small minority, but they didn't mean anything by it, or it was just a joke. Somebody sees the potential to kick up a stink, and retweet it with "can't believe they just said this. apologise now". It gets maybe 10% the "likes" of the original tweet. A media outlet sees this tweet (some intern is browsing "latest tweets") and writes an article saying "Internet in an outrage: is x a racist?". Author immediately issues an apology, resigns from their job, and goes into hiding, their career destroyed forever. What could have been done differently? The company they worked for could've stood by them. The author/whoever could have just ignored it. The media outlet could have had higher quality standards of publication. And almost nobody would even know what was said in the first place! Our society thrives on conflict, and any small hint of a conflict is blown up beyond all proportion.