Angry Mobs

Three recent ugly events:

Earlier this year, Microsoft employee, Adam Orth was forced to resign following a flame war on Twitter.

More recently, Ben Noordhuis quit as a contributor to the open source nodejs project after being labeled a misogynist for rejecting a check-in to change two lines in a code comment.

And just this week, protesters of rising rents in San Francisco took their anger out on Apple and Google shuttle buses.

What do they have in common?

The issues and circumstances around each are vastly different, but they involve a group of people who are angry at something, and taking out that anger at whoever happened to be unfortunate enough to be a target.

Should the individuals targeted have known better? Perhaps.

Adam Orth thought he was having a conversation with a friend, but he did so publicly on Twitter, and observers interpreted his words very differently.

Ben thought he was just contributing code and expertise to a software project, albeit on a public repository.

Apple and Google, well… they drive their buses on public streets.

Being Safe in Public

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” -- William Shakespeare, taken out of context.

Here's the rub: We all work in public now, whether we like it or not. Because of social media and our increasing online presence, more and more of what we say and think happens in public, shared with people we have never met.

When you comment on a post by a friend in Facebook for example, you may think you are responding to them, but what you write is shared with all their friends, perhaps even with the whole world (frankly, I can't really tell anymore, given Facebook's labyrinthine security settings).

Even when you share a “private" email with someone (or heaven forbid a selfie via Snapchat), you have no real guarantee that they won't share it with others. Or that the service won't be hacked.

What to do?

The simplest thing to do is just assume everything you say is public by default, even when you think it isn’t. At best, it’s like having a conversation in a crowded restaurant. You never know who might be sitting in the next booth. So don't say anything you wouldn't want published on Reddit.

Related: Society.