The end of the online mob and the end of shared reality

I have to admit that I have always been a realist, yet, when it comes to technology, I tend to side with the enthusiastic optimists. For many years, I shared the illusion (and perhaps common delusion) that the Internet was a force for good in the world, believing it would lead us to become more connected, informed, educated, and engaged citizens, with a positive knock-on effect on society as a whole. I still remember the early days of the Web: the dizzying feeling of new technology, the thrill of discovery, hours spent on IRC or online gaming, finding communities of shared interests, chatting with people from all over the world in online forums, and sometimes even meeting them in real life. This thrilling enthusiasm persisted into the early days of social media. Although I was never interested in MySpace or LiveJournal, I found those spaces fascinating. When Facebook and Twitter took over, I could imagine a future where shared information was the norm. The Techno-Utopia seemed upon us.

And then the dream came crashing down. It’s difficult to put an exact date on when that dream turned into a nightmare, to me it was a confluence of events, how the promised political change failed to materialise, how social media started turning ugly, how online abuse became the norm, how the Web started dying, being replaced by apps and centralised services. But I would definitely put one event as the evidence that things had finally turned beyond repair, and it took place on December 20, 2013.

On that day, Justine Sacco, a senior director of corporate communications at a US firm, was taking a trip from New York to South Africa. During the trip, she kept posting some silly jokes on Twitter to her 170 followers. Medication and wine may have been involved, given the nature of the tweets. While at Heathrow airport on a lay-over, she tweeted the following controversial tweet: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

While she was on the 11-hour flight with no internet access, the tweet went viral, causing massive outrage on social media. Many people accused her of being racist and insensitive. By the time she landed, she had received numerous angry responses, and the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet was trending worldwide. As a result of the backlash, Sacco lost her job, and became a figure or widespread hatred and derision. She later apologised for the tweet, saying it was intended to mock her own privilege and ignorance, but the damage to her reputation had already been done.The story was immortalised in Jon Ronson’s fantastic book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed“, and it could be said to have sparked what some people now call “cancel culture”.

I’m not keen on opening that particular can of worms, yet there’s a reason why I’m marking this event as a watershed moment in Internet history. The Justine Sacco incident irrevocably altered my perception of social media as a force for good. I recall being on Twitter at the time, whilst on holiday in Costa Rica. Although I found the tweet rather foolish and indeed racist, I could not fathom why people felt compelled to join the pile-on. A sort of bloodlust descended upon Twitter, a mix of schadenfreude and wilful hatred that I had never witnessed in real time, eerily reminiscent of historical accounts of public shaming events or crowds assembled to watch public executions. What the Sacco event, and many subsequent public shaming incidents have taught me, is that there’s nothing novel about social media; we may well be doomed to perpetuate a cycle of hatred that dates back millennia. Social media cannot transform us, primarily because it consists of people, and people love a public stoning.

While I never understood the need to join an online mob, and never understood what makes people hate someone they’ve never met with such fierce passion, that is not the point of this blog post. Rather, I would like to comment on something strange that has been happening on social media: The power of the pile-on may have disappeared, and that is actually a bad thing.

There was a reason why a mob had power, they acted as a uniting force, a catharsis in which people from all walks of life could join and converge. Sure, it signified the ugliest part of humanity, but at least it gave us an indication that people could come together to cry “shame!” against the latest victim. But something interesting has been happening, and it is that the power of the mob has been dissipating.

There are various reasons for this. The first one is that the public shaming square of choice has lost a lot of its former power. Most public shaming incidents took place on Twitter, and this was not a coincidence, this was because while it was never the most popular social media site, it contained some of the most influential people, including journalists, media personalities, and politicians. So any shaming campaign on Twitter used to have a wider effect, and it was the reason why being tarred and feathered on the Bird Site would result often in real-life consequences (pun intended). But when Elon Musk took over the site, a migration took place, and now some of the influential people who could direct the mob in one direction on another, particularly on the left, are now on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, or LinkedIn.

The other thing that has happened is perhaps that it has become evident that social media campaigns are often inauthentic. One of my favourite podcasts of recent years is the amazing “Who Trolled Amber“. This describes the reason why most people on social media were being presented with a barrage of hateful social media activity against the actress Amber Heard in her legal dispute with Johnny Depp. I won’t spoil the podcast for you, honestly you should listen to it, but it presents compelling evidence of substantial social media bot activity that was directed towards making Heard the subject of ridicule, when a legal defamation case in English courts had concluded that she had been the subject of physical abuse. So it is quite possible that modern shaming campaigns could have a significant amount of bot activity, particularly in things that matter, such as politics.

The third reason for the end of the mob is hinted at in the title. We have lost the capacity to understand each other. One of the biggest disillusions that I have mentioned above regarding social media is that we used to believe that the Internet would bring us together, but actually the opposite has happened. Part of this is natural exercise of finding people who share interests with you, but the social media has overclocked the human desire to congregate, with the creation of impregnable filter bubbles, but also the creation of exceptionally niche communities. This is better known as the “toaster fucker problem“, and apologies for the language, but it’s honestly one of the best descriptions of this phenomenon. So imagine that you have a toaster fetish, sure, it’s a bit weird, and you’re ashamed of it. Before the Internet you would live your life with that shameful kink, never mentioning it to another living soul, and you would live your days with the secret. But the Internet allows you to search for toaster porn, and one day you find a community of like-minded individuals. You’re happy! You’re not alone! There are others like you! Quickly you become part of the community, and you live your life with the impression that your fetish is more common than it actually is.

So now we have groups of Nazis, conspiracy theorists, niche interests, all making the most bizarre propositions. You can become part of the most niche communities where your every idea is met with a wave of dopamine hits. This means that you will never even try to listen to the other side, and the algorithms will serve you more content that conforms to your interests in order to keep you online. You can now live an entire life online without encountering an opinion that contradicts your own.

Concluding

This is a rather sad end for what was once a great dream. The dream of humanity educated and thriving as a whole, even if we had to endure the occasional public stoning. While I welcome the end of public shaming, it is a symptom of much darker forces at work in our society. We have lost our shared sense of reality. We can’t talk to each other any more, we’re trapped in our algorithmic bubbles, talking to other toaster enthusiasts about our niche interests. Perhaps that’s a good thing, but looking at what has happened in the last four years, I doubt it.

On the meantime, I have to erase the phrase “toaster porn” from my search history. Please, don’t try this at work.