so i've been publicly shamed

when the internet becomes the town square

graphic by tori h. more (via pinterest)

the first time (to my memory) i was publicly shamed, it happened on our most beloved indie sleaze site, tumblr. the details and circumstances around it are vague to me, but i recall refreshing a post—directed at 15-year-old me about something i was doing or not doing—and reading the notes. i was sick for days. i may have deserved it, i may have not. i just know that in that moment, i was standing center of a digital town square and feeling the voices of six people amplify into thousands. strangers, acquaintances, and friends alike were judges to my maybe transgressions.

the most recent public shaming happened on twitter—a friend of an ex-friend (who i had never spoken to) had tweeted something snarky about my sexual assault and my writing. i didn’t publish any of my own work for almost two years after the fact.

online shaming, deserved or not, is undeniably effective. it’s just not in the way that people think it does.

my friend nina kramer recommended so you’ve been publicly shamed by jon ronson to me on a walk two years ago. ronson was fascinated by how shame has evolved with social media and set out to interview people who have been in the eye of a collective outrage online. i have known people who have been shamed online and many more who do the shaming.

“the justice system in the west has a lot of problems,” poe said. "but there are at least rules. you have basic rights as the accused. you have your day in court. you don’t have any rights when you’re the accused on the internet. and the consequences are worse. it’s worldwide forever.” — jon ronson

through conversations with experts, people who have been shamed online, and psychologists, one of the major points that stuck out to me was the lack of goal in these public shamings.

when someone commits a crime, the punishment has a clear duration and reason. even as far back when public ridicule was legal (ie. whipping stocks), there was a determined time (5 hours, 6 days, etc) for when the accused would pay their penance. for some of the people who ronson spoke to—including two women who made a poor joke in the early aughts and has repeatedly apologized for it even after losing their jobs—they’re still in the trenches today. seo, as we know, is forever.

(to be clear, i am not solely talking about cancel culture; i am speaking to everyday mishaps of human error and judgment, not, say, someone abusing their power consistently for sexual, financial, or otherwise gain. this is not fox news.)

the united states abolished public humiliation before our lifetime. not because it wasn’t effective, but because people thought it was too inhumane. i think about this a lot now.

The phrase “misuse of privilege” was becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we chose to. It was becoming a devalued term, and was making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and far less serious transgressions. — Jon Ronson

i’ve spent a lot of time reporting on (and speaking on why we should abolish) our carceral system. for starters, it’s skewed towards low-income, people of color. likewise, when we pay attention to public shamings on the world wide web, the abuse towards people who have “done wrong” is disappropriately against women. ronson made it a specific point to note that when the internet wants to dehumanize a woman online, they resort to death and rape threats. when the internet wants to dehumanize a man, they insult their masculinity.

crime and punishment is a race, gender, and income issue, no matter where court is taking place.

online, the idea of rehabilitation rarely crosses the mind. in any equal society, the ideal of any crime being committed is to correct the behavior of the accused so there’s no repeat offense. but when we’re publicly shaming someone, we seek to exile and ridicule them. i’ve been trying to find a phrase for this for the longest time and i’ve boiled it to down to not only is public shaming cruel, there’s no real benefit to society.

this past week alone, i got annoyed about a handful of things i’ve seen online. people who tweeted stupid things. influencers who lied on tik tok. but the level of vitriol they received was not in proportion to the ‘harm’ they caused. someone making false claims about mascara should not be getting death threats. but there is no sense of scale online.

last year, the try guys made national headlines because one of them cheated on his wife. people online tore him to shreds: saying that he should be forbidden from seeing his kids, arguing that he should never work again, the likes. and while no one is condoning infidelity, looking at some of the vitriol, i did think: all he did was have an affair.

one of the horrors of the internet, as ronson will point out, is how there’s no distinction between a pedophile and someone who made a really poor joke without reading the room.

i went into the book with my mind mostly formed about these ideas of due justice online. but as someone who is, unfortunately, very online, i would highly recommend to anyone who find themselves standing on either sides of the town square. so you’ve been publicly shamed was published in 2015 and our reliance on social media as a moral barometer has only increased.

one of the points that ronson makes again and again is the mental affects that public shaming does to someone. even for privileged folks (see: white and rich), there is still a degree of psychological terrorism that we don’t want to admit to inflicting. to put it in a corny way: when we stop throwing the stones (ie. move onto the next outrage), there is someone we’ve left behind worse for wear.

through experience, i’ve found there’s not much persuasion behind telling people that there’s a real human being behind a screen (we’ve all heard this). but ronson takes a more leveled, sociological approach to the same argument: online public shaming just doesn’t have a net good.

if we want to rehabilitate mistakes and make society better, the internet is not the place for it.

maybe there are two types of people in the world: those who favor humans over ideology, and those who favor ideology over humans. i prefer humans to ideology, but right now the ideologies are winning, and they’re creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. — jon ronson

p.s. i wasn’t planning on offering paid subscriptions anytime soon, but i was really touched by the people who have pledged to support my writing. i will be putting out paid-only content in the next month, so it would truly mean so much if anyone wants to become a subscriber to gut feelings. it’s only $8/mo (the price of a latte in los angeles), but can offering a discount to anyone who needs it.

thanks again for reading and talk soon,

sara