I see your point, and in retrospect this situation may not have been the best example of what I was trying to say. I’ll use my response to you here as a sort of jumping-off point to clarify my position on this issue in general.
I’m hypersensitive to the power of social media to do harm, to spread disinformation, and to destroy careers and lives with no justification and no accountability for false accusations. I’ve seen it happen more than once. The Chris Hardwick case is a better example; though he was investigated and reinstated, many lesser individuals have not. There’s an old expression with many variants that basically says “a lie can go halfway around the world before truth can get its pants on”. Social media amplifies this ability to do harm by a factor of about 10000x.
In one case, for example, of which I had personal knowledge, someone on Twitter tried to defend the person being victimized by false rumours that had gone viral. The comment basically said that based on what they knew of this person, they found it hard to believe that these rumours could really be true. This was followed by a tsunami of responses confidently asserting that they absolutely were true. Every one of those responses came from random individuals who could not possibly have been in a position to actually know the facts. There was clear intent to punish based on unquestioned acceptance of rumours, a modern virtual version of a mob-driven lynching.
It was precisely the kind of hysteria that Chloe Dykstra’s post on Medium created. As I’ve said several times, I don’t know either Dykstra or Hardwick and have no reason to take sides in this fight, and I even acknowledged that Dykstra was likely expressing genuine feelings and that Hardwick undoubtedly acted badly in some aspects of that relationship. But how badly? Badly enough to have all his contracts immediately canceled? According to social media, of course! The inevitable mantra is “oh, yes, all these accusations absolutely are true!” The lie has been promulgated literally around the world while truth is still getting its pants on.
In general, once social media, driven by cancel culture, gets hold of a nugget like this, it spreads like a wildfire that’s impossible to control, heedless of whether or not it might be false or exaggerated, and victimizing the target all while the accuser disclaims with wide-eyed innocence that there was ever any malicious intent.
So yes, maybe a lot of the social media hysteria over this guy allegedly having an affair was just people laughing at him and not being intentionally malicious, but what struck me as significant and ominous was how incredibly quickly it went viral. It’s the same force that powers the spread of false rumours and innuendo. It is, in fact, the same force that drives the rapid spread of disinformation in general. When that disinformation is political, it even threatens our democracy.