How To Separate Good Internet Outrage From The Evil Kind

You need to arm yourself against weaponized old tweets. Not your own tweets, hopefully (though who knows). We’re talking about how every time you open social media, someone’s outrageous words are being used against them. Maybe the frequency of that scares you; after all, every one of us is lucky certain things we’ve said weren’t timestamped for eternity. Or maybe that pile of outrage excites you; justice relies on evidence, so maybe the more evidence there is the better the world will get. But take a look past all these maybes and semicolons (we know we used a lot; we feel fancy today, deal with it). Look at what's actually going on with Internet outrage right now. Is all that handwringing the same across the board? Or is some of it intended to ruin lives just to win a political game?

On this week’s episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by Amy Nicholson (Unspooled) and Andrew Ti (Yo, Is This Racist?) for an always-timely look at how you can tell worthwhile online activism apart from digital harassment. They’ll examine recent cases from James Gunn to Sarah Jeong to Roseanne Barr. They’ll lay out basic rules of thumb to help you handle the next hashtag that comes along. And they’ll find a fuller answer to all this than Twitter users usually can, thanks to the magic of being human toward each other in more than 280 characters.

Footnotes: https://goo.gl/izjyN7