Eventually, tech theorist Clay Shirky has argued, so many people will have nude photos on the internet that there will be no shame in one of them being yours. Privacy will no longer be necessary. It will be a halcyon time for politicians: no matter how much dirt your enemies dig up, none of it will stick because having done bad things and making stupid mistakes will be considered normative.
Eventually isn't here yet. So in the meantime, people who are either too boring to have done anything wrong or so lucky that they haven't gotten caught are deploying social media in a vicious online pogrom against those deemed politically incorrect. It's Orwell meets the Salem witch trials via "The Lord of the Flies," social justice warrior-style.
Thoughtcrime is already a prosecutable offense. A U.S. federal court has indicted WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for thinking about — merely for what-if musing in conversation with U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning — hacking a government computer. The government admits there was never an actual hack. Undercover FBI agents entice young Muslim men into nonexistent terrorist plots in order to entrap them. An Ohio man on probation for possession of child pornography was sentenced to seven years in prison for a handwritten diary he had written for his own use that depicted rape and torture of children — disgusting but purely theoretical.