The Internet Rage Firehose

I've been watching this debacle unfold practically in real-time. The Internet Rage Firehose is scary and fascinating.

Short version:

1. 9yo girl in Scottland starts a blog where she photos and reviews her school lunches
2. Blog grows, kids around the world start sending pics of their lunches (inducing several fits of "in <i>my day</i> we were lucky to get food that looked as good as that!!" in me)
3. Local newspaper writes an extremely critical article about the school lunch program, citing the blog
4. Local council has girl pulled out of class and told that she's no longer allowed to take photos of her lunches
5. The Internet hears about it, rage ensues.
6. Council posts a statement defending its actions, saying the 9 year old wasn't portraying them fairly, and that they did it for the sake of its cafeteria employees, who feared for their jobs. No, it didn't make any sense to me either.
7. Rage continues.
8. Council replaces previous statement with one from the head of the council that basically takes it all back, "advises" that the school lift the photo ban, announces an upcoming "school lunch summit" to talk about it, and acknowledges that the council's issue is with the paper and not the little girl. 

I actually took the time to write the council after that, on the assumption that more people were willing to spend time writing in to excoriate decisions of which they did not approve than to commend steps in the right direction, but a provocative counterpoint was also put forward by Popehat, a nifty-looking legal blog about speech issues that I found while researching The Oatmeal Incident:

"""
The original statement is the honest expression of the attitude of the people who work for the Council, and for government everywhere, issued before a higher-up stepped in and judged that power must yield to prudence in this instance. The Council's initial statement demonstrates a sick entitlement by government to be free of criticism, a belief that they may impose their concept of "fairness" upon citizen speech, a sense that government actors ought to be protected from the uninformed opinions of the great unwashed, lest their fee-fees be hurt and good order disrupted. That, again, is the lesson here. These people are not your friends. But there's a more hopeful lesson as well: by publicizing government misbehavior, we can occasionally shame them into respecting the rights of citizens.
"""

I'm not *quite* cynical enough to echo PopeHat's take on the council's statement as a universal principle, but I know it's probably true more often than not. 

And yet, there's a flipside to this. The growing trend of fighting unaccountable centralized power with even less accountable distributed power has implications that bother me a lot (though on the flip-flipside, probably not as much as the implications of a situation in which the latter couldn't exist).

Two of the most prominently accepted statements about The Internet seem to be:

• LOL, the Internet is full of one-sided opinions and misinformation, and...
• LOL, you pissed off the Internet, now we're comin' for you!!1

How do you reason with The Interenet? And what about when The Internet is wrong? Feel free to substitute your horizontal collective of choice for "The Internet" in the preceding. 

The more I think about this, the more it kinda freaks me out. And I've been thinking about it a lot lately.