Public shaming is something that happens all the time online. Someone will do or say something insensitive and it gathers steam until more and more people tweet about it and the person being shamed can’t hide anymore.
In some cases, this works out for the best. When the accusations of sexual harassment and rape came out against Jian Ghomeshi, he was fired and has more or less disappeared from the public eye, except for his court appearances. After more and more women started coming forward with accusations of rape against Bill Cosby, he was shamed on Twitter and fired from his potential NBC show.
However, once the public shaming train gets going, it’s difficult to stop. A lot of the time, the punishment becomes disproportionate to the crime. A few tweets can turn people into a mob and large groups of people on the Internet can become extremely powerful.
A couple years ago, then 22-year-old Alicia Ann Lynch came up with her Halloween costume idea: a Boston bombing victim. She went to work dressed in running clothes with blood smeared on them. Of course, the photo was posted to Facebook and it was then tweeted out and commented on by outraged people. After the controversy, she was fired from her job, received death and rape threats, and had to repeatedly tweet asking people to stop calling her parents because they had nothing to do with her decision.
On a trip to South Africa, PR person Justine Sacco tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The tweet was picked up as she flew across the ocean and when she had landed she found that it had gone viral, and not in a good way. Her family scolded her. Workers threatened to strike hotels she was staying at. She was also fired. Later she maintained that she was making a joke about the insulated bubble Americans live in, but it had come across as flaunting her privilege and making light of the AIDS epidemic.
Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie had a running joke of taking pictures of them disobeying signs, such as smoking in front of No Smoking signs. Jamie posted a picture of Stone yelling and flipping the bird beside a sign at Arlington National Cemetery that said “Silence and respect.” Of course, people took it as Stone mocking the dead. Once that picture took off, she received death and rape threats and was fired after a Facebook page called “Fire Lindsey Stone” was created. After her firing, she became depressed and got insomnia and barely left her house for a year.
Here’s the thing: all these women did very stupid things. For Lynch, her costume was tasteless and very obviously too soon. In addition, she had posted a picture of her driver’s license, which made it very easy to find out her personal information. Sacco made a joke that didn’t translate to people who didn’t know her. As for Stone, she didn’t realize that the picture looked very bad out of the context of her running joke.
But errors in judgment shouldn’t affect these people for the rest of their lives. There’s a difference between someone like Jian Ghomeshi being publicly shamed versus someone who very clearly just made a mistake that hurt no one. In these cases, education is always going to work better than threatening to kill someone. Anonymous commenters online are obsessed with justice, but a mob doesn’t stop at making someone realize they messed up. They want to go overboard and get the person fired and make them fear for their life. The punishment is disproportionate.
There are real people behind the pictures and tweets and we can never get the full context of something. So if you see someone being publicly shamed for what could just be a stupid victimless mistake, think twice before piling on the hate.
