Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle recently noted that “we live in fear of online mobs.” She writes that increasingly people “are terrified that something they say will inadvertently offend the self-appointed powers-that-be … They’re worried that some opinion they hold now will unexpectedly be declared anathema, forcing them to issue a humiliating public recantation, or risk losing their friends and their livelihood.”

McArdle argues that the rise of the Internet and online mobs may require us to rethink “the hard, bright line that classical liberalism drew between state coercion and private versions.”