Not a mob in Egypt. But still: Same idea.

The first three things you learn in high-school sociology are:

A. Sociology is the study of people in groups.

B. The more people in a group, the more powerful the group.

C. The more people in a group, the worse the decision-making abilities (or collective intelligence) of the group will become.

There are few places better equipped to learn that lesson firsthand than high school. Or the Internet. But for all the praise dumped upon social networks after they (sorta) helped Egyptians shape their country's destiny, we're still missing something. There's still an aspect of Twitter just as dark as the "dangerous element" that put Lara Logan in harm's way recently: The Mob Mentality.

(Click here for Lara Logan's exclusive pre-assault interview with The Politics Blog >>)

It was an estimated mob of 200 people that seized on Logan, separated her from her crew, and commenced what's been characterized as a "brutal" attack on her. It took physical and psychological momentum only a mob could provide. To say that anger was misplaced is a vast understatement. These are people revolting against a government, not the news media. And not just a news media, but one that's been (mostly) reporting from the side of the people, and among them.

Try telling any of that to a mob, or the one that went after her. You won't get far.

Stateside, another successful mob attack on a journalist went down... On Twitter. Yeah, that Twitter: The same technology oft-credited for its role in empowering otherwise socially un-empowered people, like Egypt's.

Nir Rosen — a New York-based international affairs journalist who's written for The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and others — resigned yesterday from his fellowship at the New York University Center on Law and Security. Rosen said some incredibly stupid things on Twitter — as people sometimes do — about Lara Logan's assault. For what it's worth, he soon deleted the offending Tweets, and apologized, but not before he was called every variation of "appalling" out there by a decent-sized slice of American Internet. Surely his comments both were and were not taken out of context by his digital assailants. And everyone is entitled to their opinion, ugly as it might be.

But to have to resign from a fellowship? There's no evidence to support the idea that Rosen's resignation was forced, though the chatter around it says, well, a lot. A Washington Post columnist: "Why didn't NYU fire Nir Rosen over Lara Logan?" A Dallas Morning News editor: "After Lara Logan news, maybe it's better to remain speechless." Never mind that the ever-sensational New York Post somehow (?!) got a source claiming that the Tahir Square crowd shouted "Jew!" at Logan as she was assaulted. Or that the Washington Post has a columnist trying to incite outrage over the fact that CBS didn't report Logan's sexual assault sooner, because "what happened to her was news" as "not everyone in Tahir Square that night had democracy on their mind."

Really? We apparently couldn't discern that by the reports and/or video of every other journalist already assaulted in crowded Cairo squares before Logan. Yet, to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, "her privacy" — a woman who was just sexually assaulted in a crowd of 200 people, with two children and no doubt plenty of others waiting for her return back home — "was not as important as the story." There are US Weekly subscribers out there sensible enough to disagree with that. But there was little outrage to be found over anyone's comments except over the ones Nir Rosen made. And it snowballed until he resigned.

Yet Rosen was the sacrificial lamb, because, what? He's got a brutish build and said this not within the safety of an institution, but a public place like Twitter — the crowded chattering free-for-all square of the Internet — where he could speak as openly as he could be assaulted. This is far from the first firing of a journalist because of a stupid thing said somewhere, or on Twitter, institutionally-protected or otherwise. For all the freedoms Twitter is giving the world, the fact that it's also empowering us to shout down and disable the free speech of others (something fought for in Egypt) is beyond incidental.

Lara Logan and Nir Rosen were attacked by the same thing. Or more precisely, the same sociological profile. Between the two of them, there's no comparing the gravity of what happened, not by a long shot. But the fact that people can't see them as birds of a feather while they scream over connecting the two is just ironic, and beyond that, depressing.

CLICK HERE FOR CONTINUING COVERAGE OF THE REVOLUTION IN EGYPT >>