Coronavirus has people calling the police and shaming neighbors on social media

[Igel]

24. Meh. It's been the same for some folk since time began.

They see somebody doing something they disapprove of, steps must be made to bring them into conformity.

In my old church we had our "mabels", named after a particularly active moralist who insisted to bringing others up to her level of morality and purity by badgering the ministers to do something about it.

In elementary school classes, "Miss Smith, Johnny isn't doing his work!"

On social media, "Look at the video I took, please everybody judge this horrible, horrible person." And then some decided to doxx the person and ruin his/her life. Only to find out that the person so doxxed was actually just reacting to crap flung at them in the first place. (Who has a phone out to record the first few seconds of an exchange, anyway?)

HOAs are great for this. "Mr. Smith's yard is 0.01" too long" or "They have a variety of petunia that isn't listed in the acceptable plants list". My parents ran into the "the rock in the front yard isn't an acceptable color of light brown".

Same attempt at idiocracy. It fued the inquisition, it fuels Stalin's little purgatory, I assume there was some "social network" in Nazi Germany, and in every society there are suck ups who love authoritarianism because they treat that bit of authority as their own private enforcer. It's all a power game.

And it's enabled by people who react emotionally, assuming that they have all the facts and that they really have the authority to sit in judgment.