Nearly every tale of human unpleasantness I’ve heard over the last two weeks has had one word in common: Facebook.

“Did you see what so and so posted on Facebook?”

“I shared a story on Facebook and next thing you know, my aunt chimed in…”

“I just can’t take looking at Facebook anymore.”

A lot of these tales describe small moments of verbal spats online over politics. They don’t amount to much more than an irritant for most people – and one that is self-inflicted. It’s easy enough for most of us to just put the phone down or close the laptop.

But some aren’t so lucky. In certain circumstances, private citizens can find themselves the center of very public moments in which the mechanisms of social media begin to resemble a vehicle for a virtual witch hunt.

The story last week of a woman who alleged she was assaulted by a Trolley Car Diner waitress is a case in point. When the woman told her friend Jack Pobesiac, the Philadelphia chair of a group called Citizens for Trump, he tweeted the incident to his 70,000 followers, and the diner faced an onslaught of threats and intimidation from callers and online comments.

As a result, the diner had to shut down its Facebook page and turn off its phones. Ken Weinstein said he was concerned for his safety and the safety of his staff.

What is remarkable about the story of the Trolley Car Diner and others like it all over the country is that there has never before been so thin a barrier between a minor incident and international viral controversy. Right now, every tweet has the power not only to misinform but to incite.

Much has been made in recent months of the spread of fake news, much of it produced by partisan, news aggregators and actual fake news factories overseas that see fake news clicks as a pretty good cottage industry.

But the constant irritant of incitement may very well be an even larger problem. Yes, social platforms used to spread false or slanted news is a problem. But sharing incidents like alleged assaults and street brawls and racist graffiti on social media without the hand of a thoughtful editor behind it has, I think, been demonstrated to be far more corrosive than early social media proponents could have guessed.

There may be benefits to a decentralized and more democratic method of spreading information – as heralded by many during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. However, there are serious side effects of that digital egalitarianism when anyone with a Twitter account can be a publisher.

Early responses by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg consisted most of a very unsatisfactory “It’s not our fault.” Facebook and other social platforms must do better. There’s more at stake than an easy way to share baby photos and cat videos.

-- Pete Mazzaccaro