Posing as a consultant for a fictitious political party, an India Today reporter dredged up rings of young IT professionals who can orchestrate malice and religious polarisation in the virtual world...the reporter visited several so- called IT solution- providers in Noida and Delhi, who readily offered their services to trigger false propaganda against opposing candidates in elections and potentially- dangerous hysteria via social media.

Jaron Lanier, who popularised the virtual reality concept in the early 1980s, said that in rush to forge a new age of collectivism, we risk losing individual identities and dumbing down our understanding of the world.

As of this writing, Carmon's post has generated almost 1,000 comments and nearly 90,000 page views. It's a prime example of the feminist blogosphere's tendency to tap into the market force of what I've come to think of as "outrage world"—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate's own XX Factor and Salon's Broadsheet.

The political divide between conservatives and liberals is growing increasingly bitter. Each side thinks that the other is evil. At the same time, a new currency is emerging within the eco-chambers of social media. It is the currency of outrage, and it is eroding our ability to listen to one another.

Have we reached the point where online trolling and harassment, already a familiar scourge of the internet, are starting to erode freedoms we took for granted long before the advent of the internet? For the latest evidence the answer may be "yes," look no further than the recent firing of a tenured professor at Marquette University.

Take away the free-wheeling, bottom-up, spontaneous interactions, and you'd be left with — what? A series of monitored listservs with a strictly enforced length limit? That's hardly appealing....But neither is technologically facilitated bullying, humiliation, shaming, shunning, and ostracism. Most of us can probably agree on that. Even if we find ourselves at a loss about how to make it stop.

A smart mob is a group whose coordination and communication abilities have been empowered by digital communication technologies.[1] Smart mobs are particularly known for their ability to mobilize quickly.[1]

A Poem

In a study that recently went online in the journal NeuroImage, the researchers measured brain activity in a part of the brain involved in thinking about oneself. They found that in some people, this activity was reduced when the subjects participated in a competition as part of a group, compared with when they competed as individuals. Those people were more likely to harm their competitors than people who did not exhibit this decreased brain activity.

But at this late stage, the dynamic had changed irrevocably: Quinn no longer alleged that Gjoni was her sole harasser, or even that he was the worst. Her meticulously archived evidence — like that of Sarkeesian’s and Wu’s — suggested a faceless multitude, who together were profoundly more frightening and disruptive that Gjoni’s blog post ever was.

A Facebook page critical of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has claimed being briefly deactivated allegedly due to an online mob. The administrator of "Juan Nationalist" said an appeal was sent to Facebook's Global Politics and Government Outreach Director Katie Harbath after the page was taken down by Facebook over the weekend.

“The conversation around online harassment is really a conversation about how you build your democracy.”

Why affix the cyber label to the abuse? ...The Internet extends the life of destructive posts. Harassing letters are eventually thrown away, and memories fade in time. The web, however, can make it impossible to forget about malicious posts. Search engines index content on the web and produce it instantaneously. Indexed posts have no built-in expiration date; neither does the suffering they cause.