Now everyone is already famous for 15 minutes, in the future we’ll all be humiliated for an hour as well. I get to be publicly derided most weeks, and along with the compliments comes the bile: the criticism, the outrage and the trolls.
I’ve no sympathy for people in the public eye who complain about this stuff (myself included). No one admits it, but the attention can be quite fun: people are talking about you! Even if they’re saying you’re a ****. It’s like overhearing a roomful of people gossiping about you: awful, yet compelling.
Besides, as we know, all publicity is good publicity. Social-media condemnation made household names of Katie Hopkins and Samantha Brick; the viral flogging that feminists gave Protein World’s Beach Body campaign only ended up boosting the product’s sales. But viral attacks are altogether different, and crueller, when aimed at private individuals.
Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed explores the growing trend of “twitchfork” attacks: victims virtually flogged for minor transgressions. New Yorker Justine Sacco — for the crime of tweeting one joke in bad taste on her way to South Africa. Hank (not his real name) — humiliated, then fired, when a woman tweeted a picture of him at a conference, complaining she’d overheard him make a sexist quip. Lindsey Stone — vilified for one picture at a cemetery that her friend posted on Facebook.
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Twitter-shaming disturbs me. I worry we’re creating a culture so censorious that nobody dares test an opinion. Kids are so nervous, they risk becoming boring
It’s horrific to see people so tarred and feathered by bloodthirsty viral mobs. As disgusted as people are by the dentist who killed Cecil the lion, I’m just as appalled by the death threats he got. Online social-justice warriors now use social media to police behaviour: a virtual panopticon. They censor other’s actions — even jokes — then attack them in a way that goes far beyond reasonable debate and valid criticism; shredding reputations on the basis of one comment, with no apparent purpose other than to humiliate the victim.
Debate on social media is exciting. Twitter appeals to me as a brilliant tool to readdress power imbalances, giving individuals a platform (particularly en masse) against huge corporations and authority figures. But the paradox is that, as Twitter becomes an aggressive space for shaming, it shuts down the free speech it once initiated. Social media was something that gave people a voice. Now it feels as if it is silencing us. As Twitter mobs enforce black-and-white rulings in 140-character kangaroo courts, we lose nuanced debate.
Meanwhile, a new hierarchy is being established, this time based on aggression and fear: Survival of the Brashest. He who shouts loudest and rudest gets heard — which rather suits me sometimes — but still, the most threatening voices aren’t always right.
Fear of hostility stops some of us from speaking. I regularly hear people complain they have opinions they’re too nervous to share online. In 2014, the Pew Research Center confirmed this: in a study of 1,800 Americans, they found that of those willing to discuss a political issue “in real life”, less than half would post about it on social media.
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Twitter-shaming disturbs me. I worry we’re creating a culture so censorious that nobody dares test an opinion or make a joke for fear of attack. Kids are so nervous, they risk becoming boring (a recent study by the Office for National Statistics showed young people already drink less, for fear of cyber-shaming). As Ronson says, Twitter mobs humiliating people online risk creating “a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland”. The thought of that is mortifying.
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