The Spectre of Online Shaming: Don't forgive the criminal, and don't let him forget

Brock Allen Turner, a 20-year old Stanford student, has been convicted of rape in the United States. As I write this, hundreds of tweets are hurtling down by the minute, telling him to “fuck off and die”, “burn in hell”, “be locked up for eternity”. Some feature his photo, saying “this is what a rapist looks like”. Still others target his father, labelling his letter pleading lenience for his son a manual on “how to raise a rapist.” Even his mother hasn't been spared. She's being hounded for being "the bitch that keeps quiet".

Welcome to the world of online shaming.

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“Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

For most of us, the above quote conjures up images of the high and mighty - the business magnates, the politicians, the power brokers. After all, they control all resources and call the shots, as opposed to the voiceless, powerless common man who goes about his daily life with ignominy.

But, replace the very distinguishable face of the common man with the collective mask of social media, and he turns into a judge, a lawmaker, a law-keeper, an activist, a vigilante, all at the same time. Social media finally provided the hitherto power-starved common man a stick to beat the privileged with. By indulging in mass online shaming, the common man could punish the politician who went astray, the banker who violated norms, the business man who paid bribes, and the film star who made a racist comment.

As put by the British journalist Jon Ronson – he has published a book on the issue of online shaming - in one of his TED talks, shaming via social media has enabled “democratization of justice”. In other words, online shaming is like universal adult franchise, only this time the vote goes to not electing, but to dethroning the privileged.

We – the common people – finally had power. We were going to set the record straight and destroy the culture of privilege. But as is the wont of power, it corrupted us.

On December 21, 2013, Justine Sacco, a little known NY-based PR executive with 170 Twitter followers tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just Kidding. I am white!” Soon after, she got on to a long flight from London to Cape Town, unaware that this one tweet was going to destroy her life. While on the flight, one of her followers tweeted this to a journalist with 15,000 followers. Soon, she became the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter. During the TED talk, Jon Ronson gives a hair-raising account of how the Twitter responses went from shock to outrage, and eventually to outright profanity and humiliation, without anyone bothering to know the real intention behind the tweet. Excluding the unprintable, she was termed a racist, a white supremacist, and a rich American bitch. Soon came the shower of disturbing tweets, one of them reading “Somebody HIV-positive should rape this bitch and then we’ll find out if her skin colour protects her from AIDS.” This gentleman got a free pass, but not the few tweets which tried to speak up for Justine. As if providing cover fire to an advancing army, a dedicated bunch of Tweeters chased away the sane voices, all while Justine was blissfully unaware.

Champions of equality took it upon themselves to get the racist Justine fired, and soon #Gettingfired was trending worldwide. Jon tells us how “anger turned to excitement” as her employers declared she was in trouble.

There were innocent bystanders, who never directly attacked Justine but only derived pleasure from the sadistic orgy. One tweet said “Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It’s global and she’s apparently *still on the plane*.”

Corporations jumped in to make profits off her ruin. An airline urged people to take their flight the next time they planned to “tweet something stupid before take-off.” @JustineSacco was duly tagged. A lot of other corporations made big money from Justine’s misfortune. Jon Ronson tells us that between this day and the last day of December, Justine was googled 1.22 million times, and Google might have made up to $468,000 from it. While Google became rich, the ones actually doing the shaming got nothing. In Jon’s acerbic words that bring out the irony, he terms these people as Google’s “unpaid shaming interns”.

As if the privilege of being white and American wasn’t punishable enough, she was soon dubbed as the daughter of Desmond Sacco, a South African billionaire. Of course, this helped dehumanise the victim, and shielded the attackers from guilt. No one really bothered to find out that Justine’s father was actually a carpet seller.

Someone traced Justine’s flight and set an online tracker for landing. #HasJustineLandedYet emerged as the countdown to the physical manifestation of Goliath, to be finally slain by David. 

Upon being enquired by Jon about how it felt destroying Justine, the journalist who sparked the wildfire said, “It felt delicious”, and quickly added, “I am sure she’s fine”. Except that she wasn’t. Getting fired was the least of Justine’s woes. She complains of anxiety, depression, and living under a constant fear of being ‘recognised’.

In a chat Jon had with her later, Justine told him that her tweet was in the tradition of black humour, mocking the ignorance of Americans to a disease such as AIDS, but since she wasn’t a popular character from South Park, she was ripped to shreds.

Justine is not alone, of course. Monica Lewinsky, Matt Taylor, Lindsey Stone and Jonah Lehrer are some other names that come to mind. If they were not already privileged, the same was quickly ascribed to them by the anti-privilege army, and they were ruined for allegedly misusing it.

Nearly two decades later, Lewinsky still faces the disturbingly named practice of ‘slut-shaming’. Matt Taylor, the man who helped put earthly instruments on far-off heavenly bodies, was ravaged for wearing a shirt with bikini-clad girls printed on it. Stone had a Facebook page created with several thousand likes, successfully demanding her sacking because she was photographed making inappropriate, though innocuous, gestures at a cemetery in US. Jonah Lehrer, the now-sacked staff writer at the New Yorker, committed the heresy of apologizing before a live Twitter feed, after he was caught plagiarising. His gaze was swarmed with comments like “Jonah Lehrer’s speech should be titled ‘Recognising self-deluded assholes and how to avoid them in the future’” and “Rantings of a Delusional, Unrepentant Narcissist.”

Jon says online shaming and cyberbullying leaves its victims “mangled”. They suffer extreme depression, insomnia and suicidal thoughts, and many even go through with them. Others stay home for months, even years.

Closer home, two additions to the long list of shame victims are Sarvjeet Singh and Jasleen Kaur. In August 2015, after Sarvjeet was accused by Jasleen of harassment and obscenity at a traffic signal in Delhi, the online vigilante army went after his privilege of being male, and made sure he ended up in jail. In a sagacious counterattack, Sarvjeet pointed to Jasmeet’s misuse of her privilege as an AAP activist. Soon, the tables were turned, and now Jasmeet is at the receiving end of the online bloodlust. It won’t be surprising to one day see corporations exploit the duo’s humiliation. Maybe something on the lines of “before you say something stupid at a traffic signal...” would do the trick. At the least, online companies are already milking the duo for profits. In the shaming industry, Dollars come by the click.

The problem lies not just in the immediate damage inflicted. Online shaming follows the principle: ‘once shamed, always shamed’. Google Lindsey Stone, and the first result displays the inappropriate photo. To add to Justine’s woes, she rues not being able to date because Google has a permanent account of her infamous past. Unlike the cardinal principle of criminal justice, online justice doesn’t allow reform and redemption, every criminal's right and the society's duty, no matter what the crime. This is true for Justine, Matt, Lewinsky, and now Turner. Now, businesses such as Reputation.com, that allow people to choose what information they want about themselves online have sprung up. In terms of allowing second chances, the European Court of Justice’s landmark ruling on the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ might go a long way.

By Dick Costola’s own admission, Twitter’s handling of online rage has been shameful during his tenure as its CEO. The portal conforms to the American free speech ideal, where democracy lords over civility.

However, even though empowering the common man sounds like the cornerstone of democracy, online discussions, and especially online shaming, is, in Jon’s words, nothing but a “mutual approval machine”, where similar opinions are regurgitated and differing ones are either ignored or bullied into silence. There is scientific research to show that social media curtails diversity of information and opinion. Moreover, in case of online shaming, it is a case of one versus way too many, and sometimes even that one is asleep on a plane. This is anti-democratic as it gets.

Jon adds that the phrase “misuse of privilege” is becoming a free pass for anyone on social media to dismantle the life of anyone else, whether or not actually privileged. The temptation and power to deliver justice without accountability is turning us into “hanging judges”. Such a free pass has killed our ability to empathise with fellow beings and to give them a second chance.

A worthy complement to the quote at the beginning of the article is: “with great power comes great responsibility.” Social media is a great power, we must learn to use it responsibly, or risk being irredeemably corrupted.