In a way it is. I propose that taking someone's messages from an e-mail group and publicly spinning them with intent to cause public outrage to force their employer to fire them is deeply unethical and should be discouraged regardless of and orthogonally to the content of messages in question.

There is a group of people on-line who like to point to the "paradox of intolerance" as a justification for Internet lynch mobs. But this paradox works both ways. What it says is that society needs to combat people who label others as undesirables, intending to remove them from said society. But if someone fighting the intolerants ends up labeling tangential people as undesirable and unleashing pitchforks on them, that person is an intolerant too, and needs to be stopped as well.

Gah. No. Keeping communications compartmented and secret is how creeps keep on creeping. If you write an email to an email list you don't have an expectation of privacy.

I'm not arguing for keeping communications private. I'm arguing for not trying to trigger a social media chain reaction with a general public, with an intent to harm someone, every time you felt angry reading that someone's post.

There's a difference between information being available to the general public, and putting a spotlight on that information.