Fire has historically been used in battle, and as a fear tactic. Take the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed thousands upon thousands of homes, churches, and businesses. While that fire may have been an accident, it's a testament to the destructive power of fire.

There are many things, passive and active, that white supremacists could accomplish with such tiki torches, including burning people of color in direct combat. Considering the nature of white supremacy, I'm surprised I have not seen such accounts of violence on the news.

Well, that's a heck of a way to start off an article.

Honestly, there's a certain sort of camaraderie within protests. Not all of them are jovial, as what seems to be going on here, but by their nature, they're very passionate. At the BLM protest in Walnut Creek I attended, we were blowing out our lungs chanting in support of the fallen, and I ended up getting swept away on a wave of justified anger by the time we flooded onto the freeway. A large source of anger amongst the protestors is that the cops overseeing the protests, for the most part, covered their badge numbers and other identifying teachers, meaning that by the time tear gas and rubber bullets were on the table, there was no enemy more specific than the Walnut Creek Police Department. You can't exactly doxx a whole police department and expect it to have as severe of a consequence as if the individual police officers were prosecuted individually.

P.S.: I note the bias in my annotation, but the difficulty in diffuse consequences stands.

This is a remarkable insight. While I can definitely empathize with the entertainment value of such a livestream type of entertainment, having watched people make fools of themselves online or play video games, the involuntary aspect of it is unsettling. Saying that these happenings didn't piss them off means that the Twitter user came in with an expectation that this unfolding story should be consumable and intriguing while not breaking off or taking a drastic turn for the worse, as many "first-date" type scenarios do. And I wouldn't even consider this a real first date! Then again, I'm not one to speak for the duo involved.

We don't get to control our own coverage online. Sure, with lawyers and copyright strikes, you can control the spread to the extent, but without an overruling power, such as in the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (AKA: North Korea), people are free to access, interpret, and share information mostly at their own discretion. This is a great thing in the context of freedom, but this also can lead the the spread of misinformation, confusion, and untoward feelings.