The fate of Sally Bercow suggests it's all to easy to side with the baying mob He's a good man: he didn't back down, and was ultimately successful in convincing the team to change course. But even he felt the pressure to shrug and get on with it. If everyone else says 2+2 = 5, not only is it hard to disagree, it's hard not to say "I believe 2+2 = 5, too." Big Brother (one of Mrs Bercow's friends, I recall) ruled because people wanted to belong. A nagging worry about the baying mob has been growing in me since the Jimmy Savile revelations. Some victims are finding long-delayed justice. But other innocent people must (where "must" is a statistical term denoting high probability) find themselves publicly ruined. I can feel the mob smack its lips with every "revelation." Remember the paediatrician whose house was vandalised in 2000, most likely because of the root of her profession's noun? Television personalities who may turn out to be falsely accused are no less deserving of concern. A more serious point, this most awful of weeks. Given that we know this human desire to side with the loudest majority, what on Earth was the BBC doing giving Anjem Choudary a platform to spew his filth? An invitation to appear on Newsnight (that "flagship" programme, again) is so prestigious that a form of legitimacy is conferred on any studio guest. Was the day after the most shocking atrocity in London since 7/7, the day the victim was named, a good time to confer such a status on Choudary? Not only in terms of its effects on those of us who worry about Islamic extremism from the outside: what do you imagine his interview, hard on the Woolwich horror, caused someone sympathetic to the EDL to feel? More inclined to demonstrate, or less? But also (and more important), didn't anyone contemplate its consequence on those who fight that extremism from within? What about those who are fighting it within themselves? I'm not arguing "no platform," like some (sheeplike) student activist. There's a time to allow the extremists to hang themselves, metaphorically, in debate. But we know that humans have a tendency to gossip (and that while gossip is not always deleterious, it often is); know that humans are more prone to wicked behaviour once their individuality is rolled up into a herd; know that we all wish to belong to a herd; know that the media confers legitimacy upon those subjects it chooses to feature; know, too, that the gossip contingent upon that legitimacy can circle the world in a second. Thus the creation of a mob. Thus the entirely predictable injustices. Shouldn't we be more careful with our words? Because a mob can now form, worldwide, in the time it took me to type this sentence. Did you see Newsnight? What's trending? I think that too!