The article requires that you accept that &#x27;shame mobs&#x27; are real, and a threat to free speech on the internet.<p>If you, like me, don&#x27;t know what that term means, then did that article make sense to you? Here are the uses of the term &#x27;mob&#x27;:<p>&quot;You may be liable to legal sanctions or a twitter shame mob.&quot; - in the context of &#x27;like-minded souls [who] via social media ... hold you answerable to their moral standards&#x27;.<p>&quot;The shame mobs that spontaneously form&quot; - that being those people who learned about Hunt&#x27;s sexist comments at a meeting to support women in science, and attended by international journalists, and who then spread the word. It did not qualify <i>which</i> actions were mob actions.<p>&quot;The internet allows ordinary people to exercise 18th Century mob justice in a 20th Century way, destroying people&#x27;s lives bloodlessly from their mobile phones thousands of miles away.&quot; - That&#x27;s an analogy .. and really should be the 21st Century, not? Plus, we&#x27;ve got 20th Century lynch mobs, so there&#x27;s no real reason to reach back a couple centuries.<p>&quot;Full scale shame mobs are still rare or course, but that is not all we have to fear.&quot;. I think it&#x27;s appropriate to quote Alice&#x27;s Restaurant here:<p>&gt; And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in, Singing a bar of Alice&#x27;s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it&#x27;s an Organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said Fifty people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice&#x27;s Restaurant and Walking out. And friends they may think it&#x27;s a movement.<p>&quot;Third, we could call on the government to save us from the mob [... for example] installing fire-breaks in social media networks that make the formation of flash mobs less likely making it illegal to fire the target of a shame mob without cause and due process&quot; - &quot;flash mob&quot; are also considered good things, like the dance flash mobs that sometimes appear. So &quot;mob&quot; itself isn&#x27;t the issue, but something more specific.<p>The author wants there to be legal job protections against the targets of a shame mob. There are already projections for those who complain about discrimination (on the basis of sex, race, religion, and a few other protected categories) in the workplace, so many of the people who protest against sexist comments are already protected.<p>It&#x27;s mostly only those who advocate sexism which don&#x27;t have these protections. So if I read this correctly, it&#x27;s arguing for more protections for those making sexist and racist comments. And I wonder how the law might define what &quot;shame mob&quot; means in an actionable way.