Commentary: Gagged by the social media mobs

I spend a lot of time these days trying to tell myself that the "speech wars" are a manufactured problem, or at least not the most pressing issue we're dealing with at the moment. When children and parents are being ripped from each other at the border and we have a president whose incompetence runs about even with his malevolence, stories about the silencing power of social media mobs shouldn't rank high on the concern-o-meter.

But the last few weeks have brought us two high-profile Twitter pile-ons that I see as