Culture of Online Shaming out of Control

December 10th, 2008 was the day Jon Ronson joined twitter. Ever since then he wrote forty four thousand tweets, nearly twenty a day. Obviously a twitter user is going to experience and see some things that will surprise you. The new book by Ronson, “So You've Been Publicly Shamed,” looks into a mysterious participatory internet phenomenon. From time to time, it seems that every social media user stands up as one to condemn, shame and delete the obviously innocent survivor. Ronson experienced this the first few occasions, he became intrigued — even excited. “Once we implemented shame, we used a tremendously powerful tool,” he wrote of his initial reaction: “The silenced got a voice. It was like trying to democratize society.” His book has a different set of prominent, besmirched names in it. Justine Sacco (performed a joke on Twitter). Lindsey Stone (posted to Facebook for a joke photo). Mike Daisey (was making things up). Jim McGreevey (a really poor ­governor) from the age before Twitter. In this novel, public shaming is often described in terms of physical violence. According to Michael Moynihan, who unmasked Lehrer, tweeters are “a pitchfork mob;” according to Ronson, they are both “the hanging prosecutor” and “the men in the lithographs getting ribald at whippings.” Moynihan says it’s enough “stabbing” and that Lehrer is already “DEAD.” Users on Twitter have “taken lots of scalps,” writes Ronson. “We were warriors who made war on the shortcomings of others.” Jonah Lehrer is unscathed and not even dead. He’s even written another book about love and mistakes that had awaited publishing at the time. What goes somewhat unnoticed in events of online shaming is the fact that men still endure them just fine. Ronson points out that of the 69 people arrested in a Kennebunk, Maine, prostitution sting, it was the one female customer who had been ridiculed in town. Ronson came to believe two things. One is that, in the real world, people are much kinder than on the Internet. The other is that online, we are “creating a world where being bland is the cleverest way to survive.” The experience of females victimized by online shaming is that more than half the time they can never get out and that men have it better than them. Ronson believes that the men running all the multibillion dollar internet companies of today can’t think of anything to handle all the men who make death threats against women. This article makes a brief summary of online shaming through examples of the topic and discusses the population that receive bad judgement if they were to be victimized.

Shaming is generally defined as a “process through which people openly and self-consciously draw attention to an offender's bad arrangements or acts, as a way of punishing him or her for having such arrangements or taking certain actions.” This represents vigilantism in which people exercise social control when an established order is challenged by a transgression, possible transgression or imputed transgression toward institutionalized norms. In simpler terms, people on social media will publicly shame others to uphold their social norms. In response to this, it is found that victims of previous online shaming will change their behavior so as to reduce possible cases of more online shaming. Since the first day of the cyber world, shame has been used as a method of deterring deviant behaviors. Online shaming can be considered a kind of surveillance where people use the Internet to impose external restrictions. Those who perform shaming want to reinforce social norms and keep society running in an orderly fashion Nevertheless, online shaming of offenders has spurred improvements in systemic accountability, promoted national or local authorities’ prosecution of corruption and abuse of power, and led to political reform and democracy. Anonymity online that keeps people safe from being recognized and blamed for their aggressive actions also adds to the negative effect of online bullying. Anonymity also leads to deindividualization which may diminish the capacity of individuals to control their actions and lead them to abuse. Deindividuation can also cause people to react on the basis of their current emotional state and diminish their understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others. In this article, an experiment was performed where automated computers responded to hostile acts of ‘victims’ by shaming them. The results showed that the human participants in the study who looked at these computer responses were angry with the fake victims and more likely to repost, like, and make further updates on the online event. This article tells readers that it is by human psychology and cognition that we tend to team up against a victim and shame them.

Online bullying constitutes a form of public humiliation. Privacy has dealt with how to cope with shame and how to deal with it all. The point of interest with regard to online shaming and the anonymity it attains is that it is rarely ever bound by law and that its consequences become more severe for the victim if they were to respond. Caroline Criado-Perez describes her experience, “I remember sitting in my flat watching all these threats roll in, and it was terrifying, utterly disturbing and scary. I didn't know who those people were, and what they could do. It was relentless.” What didn’t scare Caroline was the 30,000 retweets that her ‘event’ received, but it was the graphic and descriptive comments that each tweet contained. Most victims, if not all of them, experience events like Caroline’s where they receive death threats and dehumanizing comments that impact them psychologically and morally. Cass Sunstein characterizes online shaming as a pile-on of “informational cascades,” meaning the mob won’t express their disapproval based on their own judgement but they will follow the lead of others in the majority of responders to a post. The author takes the account of David Luban’s opinion on human dignity and privacy. He says “Honoring someone’s human dignity means honoring their being, not merely their willing. Their being transcends the choices they make.” To put it in the context of online shaming, online shamers will show no mercy to a victim after acknowledging their mistake but they will proceed to tarnish a victim’s mere existence for their small/big mistake. All in all, this paper attempts to explain how online shaming highlights gaps in long discussions about modesty, the collective right to privacy, and the social aspect of private life.

The author believes we no longer need to rely on state approval for bullying with the Internet and other information communication technologies, or on state laws to suggest which act should be denounced. In the early days when television was first launched, James Carey already found that media events in the television era have become distinct ceremonies of humiliation and excommunication when the media industry “stigmatizes bodies, ruins reputations and expels people into a class of the accused”. In the Internet age, however, the size and sophistication of such a ‘ceremony’ was increased to a degree beyond comprehension, when each person would participate in inducing guilt and moral indignation and turn others into mere social objects, and invoke on behalf of the community the power of a public shamer to talk in the name of the ultimate moral values; In China, for example, the Internet is being used as a “human flesh search engine” to expose individuals who have violated social norms. These include revealing the identity of an unfaithful husband, a kitten torturer, and a college student considered a traitor for sympathizing with the autonomous Tibetan movement. The author reviews Christopher McCrudden’s account of dignity as a matter of rank, honor, and respect as wholly different from the notion of natural dignity inherent in any person, and therefore does not depend on any specific additional status or achievement. The former is bound to the integrity of an individual as measured according to the opinion of others and their place in society, defined by another scholar as “prosaic dignity.” In comparison, the latter applies to the individual human being’s inherent existential worth and value. We have, after all, infringed social norms in society, and led to their own degradation. Nevertheless, Denise Reaume would argue that, through unethical or illegal actions, no one needs to be ridiculed, insulted, humiliated or toyed with. To conclude, the author supports McCrudden’s point of view on dignity based on three parts: every human possesses their own value simply because they are human, this value should be respected by all others, and that this value only exists for the sake of that individual.

M.J. Lerner and D.T. Miller summarized the nature of the ‘Belief in a Just World’ hypothesis or theory: individuals need to assume that they live in a world where people usually get what they deserve. The assumption that the world is actually makes it possible for individuals to treat their physical and social environment as if they were safe and organized. Without such a conviction, it would be hard for the person to commit to achieving long-range objectives or even day-to-day socially controlled behavior. When people are convinced that the world is just such an essential adaptive mechanism for the person, they are very reluctant to give up this conviction and they are very reluctant to give up this conviction, and they may become confused if they find evidence that their life isn’t necessarily full of justice or order. Lerner claims that human beings care more about justice than they think they do or admit: it is an omnipresent force in the lives of most people. Nevertheless, the need for a stable environment is an inevitable consequence of that. There's plenty of evidence that people create a stable picture of their environment and imbue objects with meaning in that context. The BJW remains a fundamental misconception for Lerner: ‘fundamental’ in that it seems important to the sense of health and safety of most people, and ‘delusion’ in the sense that it is a factually false belief which is motivationally protected. Lerner is heavily influenced in his opinion by measuring BJW (belief in a just world) through experiment. The weighted average impact size was.12, meaning that males are somewhat more likely to believe in a just world than females. Since it was about one-tenth of one standard deviation in magnitude, however, there’s no guaranteeing it is different from zero. Lerner concludes that over the past decade, work has demonstrated a growing interest in the BJW both as a hypothesis and as a measure of individual distinction in two major ways: research of BJW can benefit scientists more by comparing multiple scales that use BJW and that it can be used to improve health instead of manifesting prejudice. In conclusion, the BJW hypothesis can be used in the future to measure motives for online shaming instead of emphasizing on beliefs and attitudes of online shamers.

Bibliography

1. Ronson, Jon. So You've Been Publicly Shamed. Picador, 2016, williamwolff.org
2. Hou, Yubo, et al. “Socioeconomic Status and Online Shaming: The Mediating Role of Belief in a Just World.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 76, Nov. 2017, pp. 19–25., doi:10.1016/j.chb.2017.07.003.
3. Laidlaw, Emily. “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy.” Laws, vol. 6, no. 1, Aug. 2017, p. 3. MDPI, doi:10.3390/laws6010003.
4. Cheung, Anne Sy. “Revisiting Privacy and Dignity: Online Shaming in the Global E-Village.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014. MDPI, doi:10.2139/ssrn.2010438.
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