My guess is that if Senator Joseph McCarthy had had a Twitter account, his damage to the individual lives he publicly destroyed would’ve been a thousand times worse.

You didn't have to be a communist, you didn't have to have friends who were communists. All you had to have was the whiff of possibility—you said something to someone, you complained about your job, you cheated on the wrong girlfriend—if the Committee decided you were a communist, the power of public opinion and the scrutiny of those self-righteous fear mongers using hyperbolic language to paint you as a communist, you were guilty of being a communist.