Unfortunately, I don't think it's necessarily all down to zealots.

Much of it comes down to just mob mentality.

As much as there are people who will join a protest just hoping it turns violent just so they can 'kick ass' and/or rob/loot, there are people who join in on internet mobs just for sport. Just to see if they can help get someone fired, or just plain miserable.

Many people get involved in real life of internet protests over things that have very little if any impact on their own lives. Just a bunch of keyboard warriors on Reddit of 4Chan waiting to unleash holy hell on some poor sap for some minor slip.

?? Not sure what you're talking about.

To clarify, BK's OP is about speech between private parties. So it doesn't fall under Constitutional free speech. Yet, in the U.S. we also have a tradition not just in preventing government from interfering, but providing broad protections for private speech. And sometimes those issues intersect with Constitutional free speech.

As a topical example, Charlottesville Nazis vs. protestors. Some protestors wanted to shut down Nazi speech. So the government (local, Fed, etc) actually intervened in a way that prevented one private party from excessively interfering with the speech of another private party while on public property. Part of that is also public safety, but some of it is just the tradition of protecting people who want to speak publicly. So this is the government intervening to help a private party - nothing to do with a Constitutional restraint on government.

And sometimes there's a tough balance for the government. By regulating when, where, and how people speak on public property they're choosing to meddle in speech. Sometimes public safety trumps free speech.

The same thing extends to other issues. Say the movement to have Twitter terminate Trump's Twitter access. Not a Constitutional free speech issue at all. But it's still an issue that extraordinarily powerful private parties (Twitter, FB, Google, etc) have the power to broadly control access to very powerful tools used in modern-day expresssion.

This is sort of what BK is getting at. So far the position of most of those very powerful Internet tools is to give people a lot of rope, which I'm glad for. But giving people all that rope can have negative consequences sometimes, like this sort of mob mentality that can end up having very coercive influence on individuals and businesses.

So that's what I meant. Don't know how you arrived at "asshat who's for free speech as long as its speech I like."

Unless it was in Greenwich Village

OK, maybe not Stalin ... Lenin or Marx, though = "pinko commie hippie fags" - Archie Bunker

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

I have obviously misread or misinterpreted your post.

Not. 60 years ago if you had a picture of Stalin people would have expressed their displeasure. Some may leave and never come back. Then if you took the picture of Stalin down some of those people would forgive you or whatever. A lot of people might never know you had a picture of Stalin if you didn't keep it up for weeks. At least in most places where the kind of people who would put up a picture of Stalin would live. Now reactions are way out of proportion. No context. That is one of the reasons we allow people privacy it allows context. You now see one thing about someone and know nothing else and responding the way these people did is just wrong.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

#1. Some people just want to watch the world burn. They fall into the first group of protesters you described.

#2. Other people, owing to the way social media works, now go from zero to full-on outrage in oh-point-two-seconds. They fall into the second group of protesters you described. The nature of social media assists them in this regard, because it can broadcast their outrage to thousands or even millions of others in a very, very short amount of time.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."