from Hacker News

Shame Storm

by joebeetee on 12/14/18, 4:56 PM with 234 comments

• by jerf on 12/14/18, 6:41 PM

  As I've mentioned before, one of the interesting things I like to study in a casual way is the effect of social community structures on behavior. At this point it is not terribly controversial that modern social media systems encourage shame storms, via things like easy "viral" sharing, the existence of moderation systems that can be used to nuke any attempt to defend oneself out of existence, and the way modern social media encourages cheap virtue signalling by its nature (if nothing else, because there isn't really a way to demonstrate an expensive commitment to anything, everything is cheap words).

  So, as an interesting constructive exercise rather than just bemoaning the situation, how could a social system be engineered in a way that it might address the staggering ease with which this sort of shame storm arises, feeds itself, and flings itself against individuals? You can either start from an existing system and try to tame it, or start from scratch.

  It's worth thinking about both because it's fun, and because the people who may actually someday fix it may well be here.

• by tlb on 12/14/18, 5:58 PM

  Public shaming can either become less common or more common over time. If it becomes more common, it might eventually become less damaging. Right now, because only 1000s of people have been targets, it's feasible for employers to search online and not hire people who've been shamed.

  A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet. It used to be a big no-no, because when only a few people did it, you really did put yourself at additional risk from stalkers. But now enough people have personal information posted that you're just one in a large crowd.

  When Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, people thought they'd be celebrated for 15 minutes. But perhaps it'll be the opposite: everyone will be publicly shamed for 15 minutes.

• by alehul on 12/14/18, 5:49 PM

  Really interesting read-- this reminds me a ton of the New Criterion, which is constantly publishing articles of a similar style [1]. It's composed in this verbose, sometimes satirical New Yorker-style of writing, and offers such a stark contrast to what's normally cited as a "politically right" source, like Fox News, which I find pretty abhorrent in quality.

  Thanks for linking to this; it's immensely important to learn >1 side to an issue, but with the quantity of shallow writing out there, it can often be a challenge.

  [1] https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/12/offense-archaeol...

• by zozbot123 on 12/14/18, 6:01 PM

  The rule for how to deal with this sort of "shaming" is quite simple: no matter what you may have been 'accused' of, always double down and never issue anything that might even loosely resemble an apology or an admission of weakness, no matter what the costs might be. Then simply wait until the mob gets bored and moves on to the next easy target. There are very high profile examples of this working quite well, but mentioning them here would cause undue controversy, so it is best to abstain.

• by busterarm on 12/14/18, 5:59 PM

  I think one of the biggest misconceptions that highly educated people have is to think that they are immune to the effects of an angry/unruly mob. As participant or as victim.

• by xbryanx on 12/14/18, 5:47 PM

  Jon Ronson's book on this topic, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, is another insightful look at the wild world internet-fueled shaming.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You%27ve_Been_Publicly_Sham...

• by sethrin on 12/14/18, 6:34 PM

  I think that the actual issue is the collective desire for punishment, and our inability to forgive others. From what I can see, forgiveness is something that we should strive to achieve as soon as possible after an offense. It's far too easy to hold people in public contempt, or prison, far longer than their just deserts.

• by motohagiography on 12/14/18, 6:02 PM

  "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." -- Cardinal Richelieu

• by ballenf on 12/14/18, 8:11 PM

  I'd recommend people having kids give them very common names and consider giving them modifications of the last name if it's rare. It's depressing advice and a bit like paying a lifetime of insurance premiums that's likely never to be needed.

  Unless the concept of a search changes in the next couple decades, getting lost in a sea of similar names is the only defense against unfounded accusations. (Changing one's name after the fact doesn't work as you're required to give prior names for many jobs.)

• by agentultra on 12/14/18, 7:09 PM

  So the author of this piece appears on a panel to defend a book by an author who had published another book called, Liberal Fascism [0]. This piece is supposed to make me feel sorry for her?

  Well I don't fully understand the entire context of this person's story but I do know something about being publicly shamed. When I was a kid in high school I had to suffer being called a fgot every day. By every one. I had been hospitalized in an altercation and had been involved in several more. My car had been vandalized on more than one occasion. People would openly point, yell the word, and laugh until the whole crowd had joined in. It was an exercise in torture.

  No side eye on the train. No wondering what people were shaming me for. The police couldn't do anything about it.

  I used to think public shaming was a bad practice given my poor experience with it. When I heard the first stories of people using social media to shame serial offenders of the social norms of public life I thought... who are these people to judge and decide? What if that person had a reason? Do we really want to lower ourselves to this vigilante justice?

  However this is 2018. This world has books like, Liberal Fascism. It has platforms for people with radical opinions to gain an audience from the comfort of their living room. Instead of limiting the spread of anti-LGBTQ sentiments it has fostered them and allowed them to spread. Instead of reducing racially-charged crimes and hate speech, social media and the Internet has enabled it. On a whole new level.

  I think you should count yourself lucky that the people hurt by your conservative views have made you feel ashamed. You felt the discomfort of someone who doesn't fit in. Welcome to the club. How will you change now?

  [0] https://www.amazon.ca/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Pol...

• by colinprince on 12/14/18, 11:41 PM

  For a more gracious treatment of the subject of public shame, try listening to Monica Lewinsky [0]

  "[I was required to] listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself"

  [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame

• by BryantD on 12/14/18, 6:35 PM

  I have a pretty simple algorithm for articles about the dangers of public shaming. If they fail to catalog GamerGate and the online shaming of Zoe Quinn as an example of the problem, they are probably not a balanced look at the phenomenon. I find Justine Sacco's case is a reasonable metric for the other half of the equation.

• by monkeydreams on 12/14/18, 11:16 PM

  This article, if written by someone else, might be more impactful for me. This is the story of a woman who fled half-way across the world from a Twitter-storm, but who, when confronted by a refugee who had been shot and tortured in his home country, that his suffering did not mean he had the right to seek asylum. This is a woman who admires Marine Le Pen and Trump, but is happy to seek her own asylum when a minor shit-storm goes down.

  But to address the articles concern - the reason we all seek mob justice is because a) it works, and it hurts, and it can ruin the lives of even the richest of us and b) we have no other buttons left. We mash the twitter/facebook/HN button because it is the last place we have any agency. Corporate interests have taken over out politics, rendering even the power of the ballot box moot since most parties appear to be in someone's pockets, the power of our consumption is dulled by decades of moribund growth, our ability to protest curtailed by an ever-present state of surveillance. This is what we have and, by god, we will keep mashing those buttons until things change.

• by phs318u on 12/15/18, 5:29 AM

  A few thoughts just bubbled up while reading this.

  1. Everyone is potentially a journalist. Smartphone & social media = capture & comment.

  2. Everyone is potentially a celebrity. Virality = celebrity.

  3. Everyone is potentially a publisher. Share, post, retweet = publish.

  4. Almost no one is (cares to be) an editor.

  It seems to me that though the obvious impact of these is exactly what you'd expect (a permanent social shit-stain), the times they are-a-changing. Belief is no longer a matter of truthiness but almost a lifestyle/fashion choice. People are learning to tune-out whatever it is they consider fake-news. I suspect that the amplified impact of modern "shame storms" will be discounted by the levels of latent disbelief held by people.

  i.e. people could (soon) care less.

  Maybe?

  EDITED: fixed line-break formatting. Why do I keep falling for the same thing?

• by api on 12/14/18, 5:46 PM

  I had the thought the other day that what we're seeing here in the West is like an informal version of China's social credit system, and perhaps that something like China's social credit system is almost unavoidable when everything is hyper-connected like this. This is what humans do, and when you connect them all at scale they do it at scale.

  The specific mores and taboos don't matter. People get hung up on this being a "liberal" thing, but go to a very conservative part of the Borg hive mind and you get the same behavior. Criticize Donald Trump on Reddit's conservative forums and you are instantly brigaded, shamed, or banned.

• by emerged on 12/15/18, 5:17 AM

  It's becoming increasingly clear that a fully connected graph is not the ideal form for productive human social organization.

• by staunch on 12/14/18, 6:24 PM

  One of the funny and snarky things Jordan Peterson has said is that he "figured out a way to monetize social justice warriors".

  Which is true in some sense. He's become well funded through donations and book sales even as groups of people direct a ton of hate at him. He can afford to almost totally ignore them, because for every hater there are ten fans.

  Which leads to a crazy thought: If the social media mobs knew that they were going to make their victims rich, might they moderate themselves somewhat?

  Would they tell each other to "stop talking about X, you're just making them more money!"

  I think some kind of meme like this might be a strong antidote in some cases. Maybe some benevolent person or organization could give a $100k patreon seed to each victim of the mob.

  Maybe one solution to hateful internet mobs spewing bile is loving internet "mobs" sending donations.

• by ohiovr on 12/14/18, 6:55 PM

  This is a great essay on reviling. Revilers are mentionable in the last book of the christian bible.

• by yters on 12/14/18, 11:49 PM

  Also known as mob rule, one of the main reasons philosophers like Plato and Aristotle didn't like complete democracies.

• by viburnum on 12/15/18, 2:13 AM

  Buruma deserved to get fired because he had no idea what he was doing or what his magazine's audience was.

• by maconic on 12/15/18, 8:27 AM

  I don't know if there is a good fix for it, but labels are a very potent weapon. In the U.S. a few decades ago, calling someone a communist sympathizer was a dangerous label. In China in the 1950s being called a rightist was a dangerous label. Today being called a racist, a pedophile, a Nazi, etc. are still dangerous labels. In this article cited the author was labeled a sociopath by an ex-boyfriend and also of being cruel ("cruelty-based view of the world"). These labels are difficult to undo because they are so easy to remember. If you live in a small village and, let's say, get labeled a derogatory term like a "slut" ... that quickly propagates until every villager accepts it as common wisdom that you are. So I do like the discussion about how to engineer a better social system, but it would require censoring label accusations until they had been proven, and this goes up against another part of the social system of supporting free speech. So I think you'd have to ban negative labels in the way that we don't legally allow hate speech (in the U.S.) despite the First Amendment because of the way it causes disproportionate and long-term harm to the victim. I don't see any other realistic solution to a problem that has existed ever since humans formed social groups and speak languages... being ostracized, exiled, or worse has been the outcome of shaming for the last 100k years. I don't see a great way to avoid it other than to just walk on eggshells and always be really nice to everybody or develop the reputation of a maverick... tough but honest and fair (like Sen. John McCain was known for). Regardless, you have to fit yourself into some admirable persona that society values to avoid shaming. If there are other people that get shamed because they don't fit into one of the socially admirable personas, perhaps the best way to address it is to expand the list of socially admirable personas.

• by beasteurope on 12/14/18, 7:24 PM

  https://www.wired.com/story/viral-call-out-culture/amp

  It's not going to stop because it works.

• by yosefzeev on 12/14/18, 6:32 PM

  An opinion that is politically fueled should not allow this form of "shaming" unless we want to throw free speech out the window. Our small church was "Targeted" because I gave some advice to a gay woman who asked for it about her kids. She then tried to wreck our lives over the asked for advice. You can read the account here: https://www.scribd.com/document/389212460/Antisemitism-in-We...

  Others got on the "Band wagon" at different intervals. Whatever the justification is for such behavior, ultimately there is no justification.

• by jeremysalwen on 12/14/18, 6:23 PM

  Don't really think the Kavanaugh example really fits in with the rest. Sorry, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, yes, you should should be held to a much higher standard. Yelling about "revenge on behalf of the Clintons" does indeed count as "partisan bitterness".

• by blattimwind on 12/14/18, 6:31 PM

  Why is this dated January 2019?

• by warp_factor on 12/14/18, 6:30 PM

  The issue is also that people got more and more sensitive over ybrast decades. Political correctness seems to be at a all time high.

  Try to say openly in the bay area that you support Trump and you will be shamed like never before.

  Shaming is now always in our mind and I find myself thinking more and more about redacting what I say to make it "unshameful" in order to avoid any possibility of shaming.