A mechanism or tactic · 2008 · Internet
The pile-on
Enforcement by volume: a position is declared untenable, a pile of people makes it so, and the outcome is a fact nobody chose.
Governance without authority. There is no court, no evidence standard and no appeal, only a critical mass of people who can agree, and the person on the losing end has the same parasocial attachment as everyone else and is treated as the problem.
Manipulation. One-sided attachment engineered for somebody else's benefit. Paid intimacy, parasocial persuasion, sasaeng, grief extraction, the streak. The lane that pays the bills and the lane that causes the most harm, frequently at the same time.
Where it sits
2000 2000-2009 · 2008 2009
Provenance · 3 source record(s)
- unverifiedThe mechanism: people are reluctant to be the FIRST to sanction anyone, but pile on once others have acted. Three experiments.Ahn, C., Lelkes, Y., & Levendusky, M. S. (2024). Sanctioning political speech on social media is driven by partisan norms and identity signaling.
- retrievablePile-ons are learned, not spontaneous: positive social feedback for outrage raises future outrage, and users conform to their network's expressive normBrady, N., et al. (2021). How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks. Science Advances, 7(28), eabe5641. ↗
- retrievableThe outrage-mob shape, stated plainly: a few condemn, then more pile on with little regard for evidence (n=10,343)How reputation does (and does not) drive people to punish without looking. (2023). ↗
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