Is it okay to publicly shame somebody online?

By WIll Colvin

At a talk about public shaming at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas late last year, Jon Ronson, who’s written a book on the subject, told the story of how the book itself had put him in the middle of a social media shitstorm.

Typically, people had misunderstood, twisted, taken out of context and apportioned blame even before the book was published.

For writing about public shaming, he’d been publicly shamed.

Ronson said something to the effect that he’d survived O.K, “but it’s different for civilians”. And that word – “civilians” – set me thinking about how quickly what we say on Twitter or Facebook can escalate into something quite like verbal warfare.

Having been in the middle of a Twitter shitstorm myself, I could see what he meant.

I survived fine, partly because I knew from the start that I had nothing to lose – and that I’d been deliberately provocative – but even so, there were moments I lost it a bit when people’s abuse turned vicious and personal.

Ronson’s right. If that’s what it’s like for the pros, what’s it like for “civilians”? Is social media shaming the modern equivalent of being tarred and feathered?

Let’s start with a simple proposition:

People aren’t good or bad, they’re just human.

For the most part, social media is human too, aside from the millions of automated bots floating out there in cyberspace.

It’s a human tool, and in some ways it’s a magnifying glass for our humanity. It’s hyper-human. Good and bad.

Jon Ronson talks about people like Justine Sacco, the woman who made an ironic joke on Twitter about AIDS just before she got on a flight:

Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!

Justine’s account had fewer than 200 followers, but when Sam Biddle of Gawker disapprovingly retweeted it to his audience of more than 15k, things spiralled out of control.

Over the next few hours, Twitter systematically dismantled Justine’s life.

And she didn’t even find out until she landed.

She later told Ronson that she assumed her followers would know the tweet wasn’t racist at all; it was intended to be an ironic joke acknowledging and disparaging her own white privilege.

Ronson compared it to Randy Newman. His songs, like “Short People”, for instance, were deliberately aimed at the whole question of prejudice against any group, but things spun out of control when people of restricted height couldn’t see the irony and protested furiously as if it were literal.

It was the same with Sacco.

Justine was fired from her job, abused by tens of thousands of people online, and couldn’t find work for another year. When Jon Ronson asked Sam Biddle if he felt bad at all about what had happened, he responded by saying that he was sure she would be fine.

“I think the young are creating a really stressful society for themselves,” said Ronson at his talk at the Opera House, “instead of encouraging curiosity and intrigue, they’re pushing towards cold, hard judgment.”

 

So does anyone deserve a public shaming?

On the first of July last year, an American dentist called Walter Palmer killed a 13-year-old lion called Cecil in a National Park in Zimbabwe.

 A photo of Walter posing with the lion’s corpse began circulating on the Internet, and Walter’s name was dragged through the mud.

Walter finally broke his silence – saying that if he’d known Cecil had a name, and that he was being studied by Oxford University, he wouldn’t have killed him, and that he was deeply sorry. It seems he’d missed the point – more than a little.

Almost unquestionably, someone needed to let Walter know that what he did was wrong. But did it have to be a mob?

And was his crime any greater than the dozens – maybe hundreds – of would-be heroes who pay every year to shoot big game in Africa? Big game that doesn’t happen to have been given a name by park rangers or tagged by a university research team?

And how does Walter’s shaming affect the rest of us?

The question is an important one the LGBTQI community should consider; there is a habit amongst some to shame people who use the wrong words, or who might innocently misgender somebody. Last month Heaps Gay’s editor spoke at a talk put on by Archer magazine and spoke to Jordan Raskopolous, who said that we sometimes might need to be a little forgiving of people when they innocently use the wrong words.

Perhaps using social media as a tool of justice is so compelling because of how simple it makes the world.

Big problems suddenly have easy solutions.

With a shaming, there’s no fact-finding to be done, no pesky judge, jury or legal process to get in the way, and a clear villain to persecute.

Why worry any further about the broader problem of exotic game hunting when we can destroy Walter Palmer’s life? His shaming will serve as a warning to all who would have followed in his footsteps.

And why is it O.K to shame Justine Sacco for a badly worded attempt at irony, when we turn in our droves to laugh at the far more tasteless and in-your-face ironic excesses of South Park and Family Guy?

What sophisticated, civilised people we think we are. But in London, they were still using the stocks – a device where your head and hands were stuck through a board and people could mock or even throw stuff at you – as recently as 140 years ago.

Maybe all that’s changed now that we can be pilloried in the social media version of the stocks is that there are no stones or rotten tomatoes being thrown.

But there are still real life consequences for the “civilians” who get shamed, and they can be horrible.

Jon Ronson says the usual result for someone who’s been the centre of a social media hurricane is abject misery, sometimes including suicide, and a period of depression that seems on average to last at least a year.

With all the rhetoric about mental health in Australia, maybe we should think about that.