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I agree with most of what you're saying here, but those who get discussed on Twitter are not always tweeters. You can get dragged to the public square by someon

• atoav 4y ago
  True. The media spotlight can shine on everybody and improve or destroy lives. This was also true with boulevard press before social media. Within social media this can take the shape of a angry mob with torches and pitchforks — and this is certainly undesireable. My point however was that this is not "a new school of thought" which has been emerging in the past decade or so, but this is emergent behaviour which stems from the communicative system social media has designed. What people might call cancel culture is therefore not a culture that somehow went and inflitrated social media, but instead a culture that formed precisely in reaction to or enabled by the communicative structures of social media. The consequence of this would be that the only way to get rid of online mobs would be to change the design of online interaction on those platforms (e.g. by limiting post visibility, adding friction on retweeting and sharing, highlighting options to privately communicatiate etc).