As someone who has long been skeptical of the power of social media to destroy the lives of those deemed unfit for polite society—average citizens who made a joke that didn’t land, artists who failed to hew to the proper ideologies—I nevertheless acknowledge that mass pressure can be a good thing. We simply need to move toward a more ethical mode of social media shaming.

First and foremost, we should avoid launching into vigorous shaming campaigns when we have no idea whether or not allegations of wrongdoing are true. It strikes me as deeply unethical to constantly be on the hunt for “problematic” behavior so you can yip “First!” when a scandal breaks. This should be a common-sense, unnecessary statement, but when you read essays such as this one—essays that spend hundreds of hand-wringing words worrying about whether or not the subject of a potential Two Minutes Hate is worthy of scorn—you may come to believe that common sense is dead.

Next, we need to better define our terms. Consider, for instance, the strange case of “The Fat Jew” Josh Ostrovsky, a social media superstar who has risen to prominence and received several business deals thanks to his talent for blatantly stealing jokes. He has come under heavy fire on social media for profiting off the skills of others, with famed comics like Patton Oswalt leading the charge. How did “Variety” co-editor-in-chief Andrew Wallenstein describe the efforts to expose Ostrovsky? “What’s prompted the lynch-mob treatment—which seems to be achieving daily regularity on Twitter these days—was the news that the Fat Jew had signed with CAA.”