From Salem To Social Media: Stop Rewarding Fast Lies
My work takes me to interesting places. This time, I want to tell you about my trip to Salem. We all heard about the witch hunt in movies and in school. It is a tidy story, easy to package, and now the city sells it back to us as entertainment. It looks like a permanent Halloween.
Costumes, broomsticks, and selfie spots where a justice system once failed. Walking through it you feel the disconnect. We turned a civic tragedy into a souvenir stand. Salem is not a fantasy about magic. It is a record of how quickly ordinary people can destroy each other when fear meets bad rules. If we do not learn from that, we will repeat it.
Here is the story without the costume. From early 1692 to mid-1693, more than 150 people were jailed on witchcraft charges in Massachusetts. About 30 were convicted. Nineteen were hanged. One person was pressed to death for refusing to plead. At least five more died in jail. The colony later admitted wrongdoing and began to undo verdicts. Only in 2022, the state clear the last remaining conviction. That is the timeline. Let the weight of it land.
The panic began with a few children reporting afflictions, then pointing fingers. Accusations spread through a tense community. A special tribunal made the worst possible choice. It accepted spectral evidence. That means testimony about dreams and visions that no one could test. Once you treat visions as facts, suspicion turns into convictions at scale. When leaders finally raised the bar and barred spectral claims, the panic burned out, and prisoners were released. The practical lesson is simple. Lower the evidentiary bar, and you can ruin lives fast. Raise it and panic loses oxygen.
That connects directly to our world. In Salem, a handful of accusations plus a court that rewarded the uncheckable produced a moral stampede that outran the truth. Online, a handful of posts plus platforms that reward outrage do the same. False or decontextualized claims travel farther and faster than corrections. Moral and emotional language boosts spread. The feedback of likes and shares trains people to post more outrage. That is the engine behind modern witch hunts.
People like simple stories because simple stories feel like certainty. Heroes and villains. Good and evil. Complexity slows virality because nuance creates hesitation. Our feeds punish hesitation. The result is a culture that treats speed as accuracy and volume as proof. Add moral language to a post, and the odds of sharing go up. The platform rewards the heat. The crowd reads the heat as truth. That is how reputations get destroyed today.
There is a modern version of spectral evidence. In 1692, dreams counted as proof. Today it is anonymous claims, cropped clips, and screenshots stripped of context. No one in the feed can verify them, but the moral frame makes them feel obvious. A few visible accounts endorse the claim. People copy the signal and stop weighing their own private knowledge. One confident post becomes a thousand angry posts that look like a thousand witnesses. It is not collective wisdom. It is a loop.
Now add artificial intelligence. We already rush to judgment. AI lowers the price of plausible lies and raises the price of verification. Text, images, and audio are easy to fake. Worse, once people know fakes exist, liars can point at authentic evidence and say it is fake. That is the liar’s dividend. You do not need many fakes to poison the well. You only need enough to erode trust. Courts need evidence. Societies need trust. Eat away at both, and you get Salem again with better graphics.
You asked to link this to Nazi Germany. The resemblance is not in costumes. It is in the mechanism. The regime primed a population with relentless propaganda, turned neighbors into suspects, and wrote laws that made persecution look like a process. The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and civil rights. Kristallnacht normalized mass violence in a single night. When propaganda meets law, cruelty looks orderly. Salem shows what happens when untestable claims become evidence. The 1930s show what happens when a state manufactures certainty and then legalizes it.
This is where it hits close to home for me – Look at how many people now treat virality as proof in judging Israel. Keep it precise and factual. The 1988 Hamas charter calls for the elimination of Israel and quotes a hadith about killing Jews at the end of days. On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas-led fighters and a few and other Palestinian armed groups killed about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted about 251 people as hostages, including civilians and soldiers.
Major human-rights organizations classify those acts as war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the continued holding of hostages is an ongoing war crime. The UN Secretary-General condemned the October 7 attacks unequivocally, though the UN General Assembly’s October 27 resolution did not mention Hamas by name. Don’t let virality replace evidence; read the texts and the records before you argue the narrative.
Now, the part people avoid. The virality of misinformation and the sheer volume of content make people believe they know better than those who have been there. As someone who has served on the front line, I can tell you that fighting never has good optics. Cameras love clean angles. Combat is not clean. You cannot win with double standards of judgment where one side is expected to be perfect in seconds while the other is excused for planning cruelty for years.
I know mistakes can happen in the fog of war. Do not mistake that for a lack of values. Those mistakes are not celebrated. Those who believe they understand better than those who have been there simply never served in a warzone. The complexity of each situation is far greater than what a one-minute clip can explain. If you ever catch yourself feeling certain because you scrolled a thread, check yourself. Ask what you really know and how you know it. Ask whether your sources are reliable. Ask whether the clip you saw had a beginning and an end you did not see.
This is not only about personal pile-ons. It explains how entire narratives tilt. A society that treats virality as evidence will talk itself into any cruelty. Salem shows what happens when a community accepts visions as proof. Nazi Germany shows what happens when a government fuses propaganda with law and gives hate a bureaucratic face.
The internet shows what happens when we accept a viral clip as truth and punish first. The AI era adds the last twist. Reality itself becomes optional on demand. If we keep rewarding instant moral certainty and keep lowering the standard of evidence, we will not only destroy people online. We will degrade the shared reality that lets nations make decisions.
So what do we do? Raise the bar. Treat viral claims as leads to be checked, not verdicts to be enforced. Slow down. Time is an antidote because heat fades and new facts appear. Separate accusation from punishment. Institutions should require verifiable evidence before acting on a storm.
Inoculate before the storm. Teach people how manipulation works and how cascades form. Publish receipts. When you respond, show primary evidence in one clear statement. Do not confess to what you did not do. Correct what you did do. Then stop. These are not soft skills. They work.
Now, the part about readiness. If the world keeps moving toward easy judgment and quick execution, I refuse to be naive about it. I want to be ready. I want all good people to be able to defend themselves, physically and mentally. Learn how to control your body under stress. Learn how to protect your family. Build the will and the capability to intervene when innocent people are targeted. That is not a call for cruelty. It is a call for competence. Jewish communities in Europe learned this the hard way.
Imi Lichtenfeld did not wait for officials to grow a spine. In the mid-1930s in Bratislava, he organized trained defenders to protect the Jewish quarter from fascist gangs and distilled what he learned into practical self-defense. The message is preparation. Start before the crisis arrives.
Salem is not a costume. It is a mirror. It shows how fast we can ruin lives when we want a simple story more than we want the truth. Nazi Germany is not an analogy to throw around. It is a record of what happens when a culture gives hatred a legal shape and calls it order. The charter and the atrocities I cited are not debate props.
They are declarations and acts that should weigh more than any viral thread. If the world does not correct its behavior, if we keep rewarding speed over truth, we will all become victims of this trendy style of easy judgment and quick execution. If that is where we are headed, I am going to be ready. I want the people I care about to be ready.
I want good people to be able to defend themselves and their neighbors, and I want our culture to relearn the discipline of proof. That is how we avoid repeating Salem. That is how we keep a free society from turning into a tribunal with better graphics.
Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh
Founder & CEO
Krav Maga Experts
Relevant Articles:
1. How Groupthink Leads to Collective Blindness
Why virality feels like truth and how engagement beats expertise on social platforms. Practical mindset shift so you think like a warrior, not a follower.
2. Will AI Make Us More Violent?
Lays out concrete AI risks: manipulation, propaganda at scale, and autonomous harm – plus how to counter with awareness and training.
3. What to do when you witness a violent crime in NYC
Actionable bystander-to-upstander guidance: how to break the bystander effect safely and intervene
