Isn't the real problem the whole dogpiling issue and not the actual viewpoints themselves? At the root of the spiral, the suggestion wasn't so bad ("Hey, that's a bit insensitive, you should consider your language"), but it didn't need to be repeated to her hundreds of times by the all of twitter, et al. Most people with any viewpoint are going to react negatively to hundreds or thousands of people telling them they are in the wrong. Unfortunately while it's reasonable for each individual feeling this way to comment, the effect is much larger than I would bet any of the commenters intended. It would be interesting to track down some of the first commenters and ask them how many people telling the woman she was in the wrong there should be - maybe I'm wrong and they believe it should be "as many as possible". Regardless, sometimes the internet is way too connected.
I have the vague sense that this is a "scaling problem", similar to how a software architecture that works just fine with 1,000 users will break down at 1,000,000. The mechanism for accepting input is not ready for so much, and it becomes a DDOS of sorts.
This is "context collapse", where what was once a private thought is posted as or responded to as a public one, because the platform doesn't make the distinction.
It's one of the big problems with social media. Outside of social media, we act differently in professional or public contexts from private ones. Context collapse merges them to great detriment.
Yup. Especially when (as it happens in these spaces) the loud people aren't the actual subjects of discussion, so you get this weird lack of skin-in-the-game.
I cannot emphasize enough the harm that can come from this and how easily it is exploited.
