Watch what you say, everybody else might be

Age of the Geek Column: How hard can it be to not be terrible on the internet?
It's a question that seems to come up a lot lately. Politicians, performers, and regular old people, nobody seems immune to the internet's limitless ability to draw out the worst in a person.
For a brief, shining moment, Tyler "Ninja" Belvins looked like he was going to be the exception to the rule. Blessed with both charm, skill, and composure, the "Fortnite" streamer was already a rising star in the Twitch community when he made national headlines after an impromptu encounter with the rapper, Drake.
The outrageous night shattered concurrent viewership records for an individual streamer as the video game world collided with not just the world of rap music, but professional football as Pittsburg Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster came in for a game. The celebrity filled spectacle left Ninja as the undisputed king of videogame streaming, gaining him tens of thousands of new paying subscribers and an audience most will only ever imagine.
So, of course, days later he casually dropped the n-bomb while fumbling around some lyrics on stream.
It's like a curse.
Ninja should have known better, but the same could be said about anybody. While most of us will never have to deal with the pressure of having 100,000 eyes on us at any given moment, thanks to social media that potential is always there.
There has been a lot of talk of late about the power that social media can have on large groups at the command of an individual, but the reverse is also true. Social media can wield great power on individuals at the command of large groups. We are just starting to learn the extent of the former, but the latter should be well known by now.
It's been five years since Justine Sacco made a dark joke on Twitter before boarding her flight for South Africa, only to find out she had been fired for it before her plane touched down. Perhaps, even at the time, a PR exec should have known better. Today though, we are all in PR.
We should all know better, yet we still see it all the time. It seems every time you turn around somebody gets in trouble for behaving badly on social media. Not just media personalities and politicians, who should definitely know better, but otherwise everyday people can find themselves caught up in the storm.
The vigilante mob of internet justice can be swift and unforgiving. Sometimes it's deserved, other times mountains are made out of molehills. One could take a legitimate issue with a police officer making explicitly racist comments on his social media page. But there's probably less urgent need for action against the same kind of guy that works at a hotdog shop.
In some ways, social media is kind of a trap. Most of the time, it's functionally no different than sitting at a table with your friends in a large karaoke bar. The way you'd act and the things you'd say in the relative privacy of your booth would be different than they would be on the stage.
But what's tricky about the internet is that it's a karaoke bar with hundreds of millions of people and you never know when you're going to be the one on stage. The dirty joke, insensitive comment, or even just temporary failure of good judgment can suddenly become placed front and center in front of a wide audience.
Should it be this way?
On the one hand, maybe it should. It's no secret that the internet is full of deplorable people that feel comfortable saying deplorable things simply because they assume the consequences will never reach their real life. Look at the comments section of any news article anywhere and you'll find them.
In a strangely counter-intuitive mentality, these people feel empowered to say terrible things because they think their comment will be lost in the sea of voices. That bravado melts away quickly once the spotlight turns towards them.
On the other hand, let's not pretend that none of us have never let loose a stream of expletives from the safety and privacy of our car towards another driver. Imagine if the potential existed for our road rage to get broadcast over the FM waves to every car in the country at any given moment.
Not everything offensive is worth taking offense of.
We all need to learn how to behave online, for our own good and for the good of everybody else. At the same time we should also appreciate that society as a whole isn't prepared to have a potential spotlight on it at all times. We're in uncharted waters here and it's inevitable for somebody to sail off course.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and has never ever ever made dark jokes about babies on the internet… so don't go looking now.