“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you open your mouth about the best or I’m gonna shut it for you real quick.”

Richard Sherman had just sent his Seattle Seahawks to the Super Bowl with an acrobatic pass deflection, capping off a hard-fought game against division rival the 49ers. Now the 25-year-old cornerback was ranting to ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews, and these forty words were being broadcast live into the living rooms of over 55.9 million NFL fans.

Within minutes, the Twitterverse was set ablaze, each refresh of the Web page yielding a tweet more racially charged than the previous.

{shortcode-861c204e665d1c54da1223a536e6a60599f841fa}

Before long, the cornerback found himself lucky to be called “just” a thug or a disgrace, as users gravitated toward increasingly bigoted language.

Even fellow athletes began to voice their opinions.

{shortcode-6ef468cd317edb9f9eef9f9153db7f4e69fb9113}

Basketball player Andre Iguodala tweeted, “[African Americans] just got set back 500 years…” and pitcher Justin Verlander claimed, “If [Sherman] played baseball he would get a high and tight fastball.”

{shortcode-b972a1a738fe5949f79a6dd069040f1de7983549}

Before long, however, Richard Sherman’s 3.9 GPA at Stanford became public knowledge, and immediately a new influx of tweets declared that Richard Sherman was no longer, in fact, the thug we had assumed he was.

The dilemma posed by this episode is not whether Sherman’s comments toward Michael Crabtree (the “sorry receiver they tried him with”) are unsportsmanlike or not. Frankly, that doesn’t merit attention. It’s not for the media—or anyone else—to settle a dispute among grown men. Crabtree is a professional athlete who makes a pinch under $5.4 million (compared to Sherman’s meager $510,000 salary) and will bounce back from these insults like he did his torn Achilles tendon earlier this year. Had the media not latched onto the incident, the world would have been engrossed in the Seahawks’ athletic prowess and their subsequently victorious trip to the Super Bowl, the post-game interview quickly fading beyond recollection. There would have been no public-relations-induced apology a few days later. The saga would have come to an end.

The real matter at play here is the mob mentality that Twitter can encourage. When managed properly, a Twitter account is an incredible resource. Several times a day, I find myself scrolling through the endless stream of content at my fingertips. But a low barrier to entry has its drawbacks. People upload tweets behind the thin veil of their various screens that, prior to the Internet, could never have been deemed appropriate. I’m not talking about the ever-irritating “#teamfollowback” or “#turndownforwhat” posts—certainly those could be viewed as intolerable as well. No. Most people innocently retweet and favorite pictures of adorable kittens and completely implausible Uberfacts, but some netizens are engaged in startlingly-ugly interactions.

Twitter’s privacy settings have lulled some users into a false sense of security, even as many people are beginning to realize too late that their digital footprint will never be washed away. Every single day, thousands of hateful and vulgar tweets are sent without a second thought, and I believe “trending topics” play a significant role in this phenomenon. If a member sees that a hashtag or phrase is in use by hundreds of people, the mental filtration system most of us possess malfunctions: “What’s one more tweet going to do?” The unruly crowd’s tendency to atomize the individual and absolve him of personal responsibility, so disastrous in the last century, reproduces itself on the Web.

The Internet is a potent force, and when its members collectively decide to target an individual, dire consequences follow. We’ve already seen social media help topple celebrities, not to mention regimes. Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise, subjected to her own Twitter persecution last month aptly commented, “I shudder to think what might happen if that type of vitriol were directed at a vulnerable member of our community.”

Declan P. Garvey ’17 is a Crimson editorial writer in Canaday Hall. His column appears on alternate Fridays.