It's called social media but even the most avid users of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr Pinterest et al know there's not much social about it. In fact, the most social moments on social media come when a massive group of people come together for the antisocial activity of uniting as one voice for the sole purpose of bullying one specific person.
This week, it was Prime Minister Stephen Harper's turn to get a taste of the cruelty of the antisocial media mob. His stupid comment, that wearing the niqab, a face-covering veil sometimes worn by devout Muslim women, is "rooted in a culture that is anti-women," deserved to be challenged, no doubt.
Some of that has happened in a funny way. Page 2 of Friday's Citizen featured a collection of good retorts. Two other good ones:
@DougalFleming "Hey Harper, for babies, do you favor Huggies or Pampers? #dresscodePM @JerryPrag My guess is, there is still a wrong answer to "Does this burka make me look fat." #dresscodePM
But the commentary descends into abuse in a hurry:
@BarbaraXLow @pmharper Wipe that look off of your face. Makes you look like a #Fascist. #dresscodePM #StopC51 #Cdnpoli
@tapeworthy Wait, it took a #DressCodePM fiasco for some people to realize @pmharper is an idiot? Not the 100s of other reasons? Well, reason is reason.
Even the fiercest of Harper's political opposition would never call Harper a fascist or an idiot because he is neither. Unfortunately, some people think they're entitled to their opinion even when it's simply name calling. It's fair to call Harper's comment stupid but it's unfair to call the man himself stupid.
There's a difference.
If Harper is feeling hard done by on social media, however, he really shouldn't. There are examples of Twitter rage that make #dresscodepm a walk in the park. In his book Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One's Looking, Christian Rudder gives two frightening examples of how far and thoughtless the antisocial media mob can be.
His first example is a post put up on New Year's 2014 by a North Carolina high school student. It read: "this beautiful earth is now 2014 years old, amazing."
In the next 24 hours, this happy comment that ignores basic geology was retweeted 16,000 times. Rudder puts that number in context by pointing out the Katy Perry's 49 million Twitter followers retweeted the pop star's New Year's greetings 19,000 times.
Some of those 16,000 retweets encouraged that high school student to go kill herself for being so dumb.
Rudder's second example was this horrible attempt at a joke, made by a woman boarding a flight from London to Johannesburg: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white!." She posted it to her 170 followers.
During her 11-hour flight to South Africa, Twitter exploded.
Before her plane landed, pictures of her, her family, their whereabouts and where she worked were circulated, as was her airline and flight number. Some people even gathered at the airport and one of those people took her picture and posted it on Twitter, according to a New York Times story about the incident. The hashtag #hasjustinelandedyet started trending and was seen by 60 million Twitter users within 24 hours after it first appeared, about five hours after the comment was first posted.
Job lost, family members threatened, privacy eradicated, professional and personal life destroyed, all in a matter of hours, for a 30-year-old woman with a promising career who posted an idiotic comment out of boredom while waiting for a transcontinential flight to board.
The punishment in both cases grossly outweighs the crime but that's the power of the antisocial media mob. Cracking jokes turns to ridicule turns to persecution in an instant.
People who use social media to attack others seem to be unaware that their comments live forever, available online for prospective employers to peruse when doing their due diligence before making a job offer.
What goes around comes around, especially online.
Poking fun at the prime minister for making a dumb comment is one thing, encouraging a 17-year-old girl to kill herself for making a dumb comment is something else entirely.
