This article, if written by someone else, might be more impactful for me. This is the story of a woman who fled half-way across the world from a Twitter-storm, but who, when confronted by a refugee who had been shot and tortured in his home country, that his suffering did not mean he had the right to seek asylum. This is a woman who admires Marine Le Pen and Trump, but is happy to seek her own asylum when a minor shit-storm goes down.
But to address the articles concern - the reason we all seek mob justice is because a) it works, and it hurts, and it can ruin the lives of even the richest of us and b) we have no other buttons left. We mash the twitter/facebook/HN button because it is the last place we have any agency. Corporate interests have taken over out politics, rendering even the power of the ballot box moot since most parties appear to be in someone's pockets, the power of our consumption is dulled by decades of moribund growth, our ability to protest curtailed by an ever-present state of surveillance. This is what we have and, by god, we will keep mashing those buttons until things change.