She had always protested her innocence. Satan's hand had never touched her. "How long have ye been in the snare of the devil?" she was asked at her trial. "I know nothing of it," she told them. But that didn't matter to the mob. So they took a length of rope one September morning in 1692, placed it around the neck of Mary Parker and let her swing.
Parker's death, along with 19 others during the Salem witch trials, is offered as a textbook example of mass hysteria. We peer back in time like scientists squinting into Petri dishes, taken aback by these simple, self-righteous believers, amazed at how easily they fed off the frenzied accusations and beliefs of other like-minded souls, all hell-bent on cleansing their little world of evil.
How could so many prey with such relish on the hapless and the hopeless? How could groupthink mutate to such a point that broken lives and bodies were held up as trophies in an ongoing war against those who thought or acted differently?
Anyway, enough with history. Who needs it when you have Twitter?
The social media platform is suffering a declining user base and a marked slowing in its revenue growth.Credit: Glenn Hunt
For those who have never felt the desire to express feelings online, share a well-worked witticism or join in a brutal character assassination on someone with differing opinions, then Twitter, the social media platform that promised so much when it appeared a decade ago, has probably never been for you.
In that, you're not alone. Twitter is suffering a declining user base and a marked slowing in its revenue growth. Its biggest problem is that unlike Facebook, its engagement levels are poor. People join up, eager to find out what it's like to comment publicly in 140 characters or less, and depart just as quickly, disenchanted with the difficulty of having to filter a growing amount of garbage and hate, much of it spewed forth by anonymous users who patrol the Twitterverse like storm troopers, living out their fantasies of being noticed so their real lives – still living with Mum and tending to their comic book collections – no longer feel so pathetic.
At its best Twitter is an information source that has, sometimes, made the world a better place. But lately, at its worst, it has become a sewer, a race to the bottom where marketers shriek and hype their products and others shriek and promote themselves.
It's why I've stopped looking at Twitter. I no longer have the time – or the stomach – for it.
Go read John Ronson's excellent book So You've Been Publicly Shamed and you'll understand why Twitter has turned itself into a global echo chamber where millions examine one another's navel lint and then stage real-time pursuits of anyone deemed politically incorrect or in need of re-education.
Justine Sacco was an aspiring public relations consultant who had only 170 Twitter followers when she boarded a plane to South Africa in 2013. In the next few days her name would be Googled more than a million times. Her crime? Before her flight took off she tweeted: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"
She later said she had never been racist and was attempting an ironical observation on the privileged status and health of white people in black nations.
Poorly worded and open to misinterpretation? Possibly. But the Twittersphere (another quaint title users bestow on their little world) erupted into frenzied hand-wringing.
Justine Sacco was in the snare of the devil and deserved a length of rope. As her flight proceeded, hundreds of thousands piled on, calling for her company to sack her. The attacks were brutal and vicious. Several posted links so others could follow her flight path. Someone lay in wait and snapped a photo of her once she'd landed, tweeting it to all sections of the globe. Sacco was sacked from her job, shamed, vilified and hounded. She later collapsed from exhaustion and stress.
But it wasn't just the speed at which the mob decided her guilt without trial. It was the venom on display that showed how brittle that divide is between individualism and mass hysteria. Justine Sacco was easy prey, hunted down by gangs of assassins showing all the humility and judgment of a pack of salivating hounds.
It wasn't so different with the recent passing of the talented and often controversial cartoonist Bill Leak. Again, the pack suited up, whooping and celebrating over the death of an enemy figure, a man who, in their eyes, had flirted with the devil, daring to dabble in the heresy of hypocrisy and irony.
Read some of the vile outbursts, note the lack of sheer human decency, and you'll understand why Twitter is in so much trouble. It's no longer a social media platform.
It's just a cheap mirror we hold up to ourselves.
Garry Linnell is co-presenter of The Breakfast Show on Talking Lifestyle