It’s unbelievable — but, sadly, not surprising in today’s oppressive media landscape.

Social justice warriors attacked Kyler Murray, this year’s Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback from the University of Oklahoma, following the announcement on Saturday of his coveted award after USA Today published a story highlighting the “homophobic” tweets Murray wrote as a young teen years ago.

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As a result, in his moment of glory — after winning an award he had worked for years to achieve — Murray was forced to apologize and bow down to the powers that be on social media.

“I apologize for the tweets that have come to light tonight from when I was 14 and 15. I used a poor choice of word that doesn’t reflect who I am or what I believe,” he wrote on Sunday. “I did not intend to single out any individual or group.”

Though he’d deleted the handful of tweets by Sunday morning and apologized for them via tweet, the damage was already done.

Multiple media outlets, hungry for “likes” and “shares” at almost any cost, piled on, cruelly shaming the 21-year-old college student for innocent mistakes of his youth, such as using the word “queer” in a questionable manner on social media.

Those outlets included MSN, Yahoo News, and The Daily Mail, according to Reason magazine.

Reason decried the hit pieces, calling for “an end to the practice of mining people’s past social media comments for fireable offenses. This holds especially true for comments made by minors.”

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“This so-called reporter, Scott Gleeson for USA Today, was not practicing journalism,” said conservative commentator Michelle Malkin on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Monday night. “He was lying in wait for the moment to ‘resurface’ these tweets that clearly he had been sitting on … It’s not journalism. It’s vigilantism.”

“It really does call into question what exactly is news,” Malkin added, noting there is nothing newsworthy about teenagers doing or saying stupid things.

“That’s not reporting. He’s not a journalist. That’s just tabloid … smear,” said San Diego civil rights attorney Brian Watkins, who was also on the program, characterizing the USA Today hit piece as “despicable.”

Malkin, Watkins, and host Laura Ingraham concurred that prospective public figures might do themselves a favor by staying off social media altogether.

“Liberals are becoming the anti-fun group or party,” said Ingraham. “No one can make a mistake. No one can say something intemperate.”

“It’s a killjoy moment in the country. No one can breathe without fear of offending someone else,” Ingraham added. “The Left is coming precariously close to the line of irrelevant in the culture when this is the kind of stuff they focus on.”

But Watkins challenged Ingraham’s assertion that the issue lies solely on the Left. Instead, he argued, it is society in general that has ramped up the heat on overheated reactions to minor infractions. That led to a spirited back-and-forth among the group.

Award-winning journalist and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald also weighed in on the topic.

“If we signal to people that your every word will be forever scrutinized for propriety, even in adolescence, the purpose of which is to rebel and test limits, we’re either going to destroy the internet or breed a really conformist society where everyone’s petrified of every sounding an off-key note and both of those are equally terrible,” he said.

“Do we want to judge everybody by the worst possible moments that we can find about them and then hold [a] trial by the internet?” said Greenwald, noting the inherently “toxic” nature of such an approach.

Apology tweets that media mobs end up forcing people to make have become all too common.

Comedian Kevin Hart recently stepped down from a hosting gig for the upcoming Oscars in February 2019 after social media mobs demanded an apology, again, for off-color remarks about gay people that he made in years-old tweets and during his act.

Related: Exposed: Homphobic Tweets from Amy Schumer, Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman

Though he initially pushed back, saying that acquiescing would only contribute to “feeding the internet trolls,” he eventually relented, apologizing via tweet.

Hart’s 2009 and 2011 tweeted remarks were jokes he made about hoping to prevent his son from becoming gay.

Hart’s departure may lead to a host-less Oscars in February, Variety reported.

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Michele Blood is a Flemington, New Jersey-based freelance writer and regular contributor to LifeZette.