Sandman did more than wear a maga hat at a right to life rally. He also led his school group in “school cheer” exercises, which included one that was mocking of indigenous culture. Sandman probably didn’t realize that, but the indigenous people who were holding a rally at the same time and place (bad planning, anyone?) certainly did.
But of course an ignorant 16 year old doesn’t deserve death threats for that.
And the initial reporting completely missed that the school group had been riled up by a group of Black Israelites who insulted them in a variety of ways before the viral incident began.
Really, the story strikes me mostly as an example of “Twitter is evil”. (It was still called Twitter then, and seems to have become more evil in it’s latest incarnation.)
From the Wikipedia article:
In the wake of the publication of the longer video, CNN Business reporter Donie O’Sullivan described the twitter video uploaded by “2020fight” as the one that “helped frame the news cycle” of the previous days, and characterized the video as a “deliberate attempt” to mislead and “manipulate the public conversation on Twitter”—a violation of Twitter rules.[75] According to Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher, the tweet had been boosted by a network of anonymous Twitter accounts to amplify the story.[75][44][46]
Who was behind those anonymous accounts? What was their motive? They bear a lot more blame than random people who expressed outrage.
Look at our own little example of cancel culture. @wolfpup read a story about a fracas between a man and a woman that started with her publishing some complaints about an anonymous man she had a relationship with. And he immediate jumped to nasty insults, assuming she was horrible.
He says, counterfactually that Hardwick’s career ended. (It was briefly interrupted.) He says that the woman has no “shred of credibility”.
In his earlier posts he said that since Hardwick wasn’t died after the investigation, she must have been lying.
He backed off a little after pushback. But he’s acting out the very “cancel culture” he derides.
But does he want the woman to get death threats or become unemployable? I doubt it. And i doubt that more than 1% of the people who expressed outrage over Sandman wanted him to get death threats or become unemployable, either. They just felt outrage and wanted to express it.
“The mob” isn’t actually out for blood in these cases. “The mob” just feels outrage. And sadly, they amplify a story that attracts a few extremists who do things like send death threats or even murder people.
Were those anonymous Twitter accounts out for blood? I doubt it. I doubt the people behind those accounts gave a shit about any of the human beings involved. They might have been Russian trolls, trying to sow disharmony. They were probably just in it for clicks, and thus cash in some form.
But there’s the problem.
Sadly, we are busy defunding real news sources that can investigate and write balanced news summaries (if you can afford it, i suggest you buy subscriptions to real newspapers, and give money to NPR.). And removing what little moderation there was from social media.