Can social media be saved? We had better hope so.

Over the past week, we have seen a virtual lynch mob hunt a group of high schoolers ­almost exclusively on the basis of truncated viral footage — and there has actually been an ongoing argument about whether what has happened to them is fair.

The fact that there is even a discussion about this is a mark of how social media is corrupting our rational judgment.

What happened to the boys from Covington Catholic High School wasn’t, isn’t and would never be fair. They were sentenced to national contumely on the basis of a single minute of smartphone video taken in the midst of a two-hour series of verbal confrontations during the March for Life in Washington.

Their pro-Trump hats and a freeze-framed “smirk” were all the supporting evidence necessary to make the case that they were guilty of a monstrous ­offense against the Native American in the footage who was playing the drum.

Elementary fairness requires that people know the facts of a case before they pass judgment, and any minimal understanding of how things work in America today should ensure that people know there is no way to get the facts of the case in the five seconds it takes someone to read a tweet.

We are supposed to be sophisticated about media and its uses in 2019. And we are supposed to know how easily we can be misled, either by design or unconscious biases. This should be true particularly of the “opinion leaders” who elevated the story to mainstream interest.

Opinion leaders are supposed to know about the risks of selective editing. They should know that a freeze-framed “smirk” is an entirely evanescent expression, one of 24 frames in a second of conventional motion-picture stock — and that when you read meaning into it, you are revealing more about your own obsessions than you are interpreting a real-world phenomenon.

One leading journalist (who has since apologized soberly and whose name I am therefore not using) went on a Twitter rant about the “fetid smirking harassing” these boys supposedly engaged in. She is maybe the most important journalist in the world of tech. If she couldn’t restrain herself, given her immense knowledge of the manipulation of fact and history on the internet, how can we expect anyone else to show proper restraint?

We’re supposed to know about all this, but either we don’t or we just don’t care. The seduction of immediacy is just too great. So is the fear of remaining quiet in the face of something egregious.

That is why many conservatives who might have been ­expected to line up in defense of pro-life Catholics went the other way and joined those in condemnation as soon as they could — not only because their outrage was real but also because they didn’t want to be seen as ignoring what appeared to be an outrageous moment of social misbehavior with the potential of tarring all pro-life Catholics.

And, just to pile irony upon irony, after these conservatives apologized soulfully for their rush to judgment, others condemned them for having rushed to the side of the “libs.”

Mobs have formed since ­humans made societies. But there is something entirely new about a social media mob, and that is the fact that joining it happens at no cost whatsoever. You don’t have to get out of your house and go somewhere, pitchfork in hand.

You don’t have to put yourself at personal physical risk in your confrontation with someone else. You can do it on the subway while riding home if you have a signal, or you can do it in your underwear while watching one of 18 new documentaries about the Fyre Festival.

You can enjoy the tiny dopamine rush that comes not only from venting anger but from the performative aspect of that ­anger as it is expressed on social media — safe in the knowledge that you are far from any consequence the public expression of your anger might provoke.

I have been an active participant on social media for a ­decade and have developed a reputation for being “good” at Twitter. I’m fast, and I’m funny, and I’m emotional, all of which seem to stimulate others.

I love Twitter. But I also loved cigarettes. And the second-hand smoke social media produce is making our public life diseased. It also does damage to its users; it makes most of us meaner and uglier and more hostile, and is therefore clearly a bad thing spiritually.

I have no idea how Americans will find the restraint we need to limit the social media damage other than a revolution in manners that will encompass the whole society and not just the computer-networked part. But we have to. We have to.