“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white.” (@JustineSacco) This is the 12-word tweet that 30-year-old senior communications executive, Justine Sacco, sent to her 174 Twitter followers before boarding her flight to Cape Town, Africa in December, 2013. Shortly after sending it, she boarded the plane, shut off her phone, and relaxed on her long flight.
While Sacco was in the air, one of her Twitter followers, offended by the message, forwarded it to someone else—launching a chain-reaction of retweets, replies, and responses that swiftly spanned the globe.
When Sacco turned on her phone eleven hours later, she was met with thousands of furious, hateful responses and messages directed at her for her Twitter indiscretion. She would later explain that her now-infamous tweet was only meant as a joke, albeit a poor one (Ronson 73). The rest of the world, however, did not see it that way—to them, Sacco was a villain.
As the tweet spread, the anger toward Sacco intensified. She was verbally attacked, bullied, and ridiculed. She received threats of physical harm. Her employer, drawn into the online fray, issued a statement condemning Sacco’s comment. Once people discovered her identity, Sacco was targeted by wannabe paparazzi who had descended on Cape Town; photos of her were dispatched across the Internet.
The uproar surrounding Sacco’s tweet, for some, was a moral campaign against her apparent bigotry. For others, it was a form of entertainment—the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet vaulted to the number-one trending topic on Twitter. Trying to combat the frenzy, Sacco’s friend deleted Sacco’s Twitter account. But it was too late—as one Twitter user succinctly noted, “Sorry @JustineSacco your tweet lives on forever.” (@lsasour) And it did live on.
This massive online backlash not only destroyed Sacco’s reputation, but eventually cost Sacco her job as a senior director of corporate communications at InterActiveCorp (IAC)—which, coincidentally, is a leading media and Internet holding company. Moreover, the fallout made it almost impossible for her to find a new job. According to Sacco, it even impacted her physical and emotional health: “I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours,” Sacco explained during an interview with Jon Ronson for his book So You’ve Been Publically Shamed.
“It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are” (Ronson 79). Now, five years later, Sacco is still trying to rebuild her life and rehabilitate her character. She has a new job and lives in relative anonymity. Notwithstanding, she knows her infamous tweet—and the resulting social backlash—is only a Google search away.
Social shaming goes by many names, including “online shaming,” “cyber-harassment,” “cyber-bullying,” and “trolling.” Regardless of the title, the core aspect of the shaming phenomenon is the same. As explained by Australian professor John Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming theory, shaming is the “societal process of expressing social disapproval” (Braithwaite 100).
Results are regret by the “offender,” coupled with an expression of societal and disapproval (Harris & Maruna 453). Simply put, public shaming means divesting someone of their self-respect, such that “they can never re-enter ‘good society’ again.” In other words, there is often no public redemption from such punishment.
The online shaming of Justine Sacco illustrates the common disconnect between the severity of a social “crime” and the brutality of the punishment. In America, the phenomenon predates the discovery of electricity. It originated in the 17th Century, when the punishment of moral criminals incorporated elements of public shaming, such as scorning, stoning, or placement in the stockades. By 1837, social shaming as a criminal punishment was abolished by every state except Delaware, where it remained legalized until 1952.
Historically, societies often resorted to some form of vigilante justice to reinforce commonly recognized rules of social conduct that technically were not punishable crimes. Instead, the public turned to public humiliation, an organic and typically unregulated form of social control. It is hypothesized that the early use of social shaming ended as a form of punishment—not because people viewed it as cruel—but because as cities developed and populations became more transient, it simply stopped working.
Social shaming, in part, relies on an intense, focused communication of outrage upon the target. It was difficult to generate such an attack when the target could easily disappear into a crowd or escape to the next town (Stryker). Indeed, shaming “attacks” work best in closed quarters—i.e., small communities that share similar norms. Thus, as the New World opened and expanded, public humiliation lost much of its effectiveness as a means of norm-reinforcement (Stryker).
Now, nearly two centuries later, we are seeing its resurgence in the form of social media shaming. Keyboard crusaders, often cloaked in (and perhaps emboldened by) anonymity, have taken social justice into their own hands—operating as judge, jury, and social executioner of perceived wrongdoers. In this regard, it shares characteristics of traditional emotional bullying. But what makes it unique, and at times overly-vicious, is that the bullying can occur without the bully seeing the victim’s immediate reaction. Simply put, there are more opportunities for the cyberbully to maintain anonymity.
This, in turn, empowers the bully through the disinhibition of conventional expectations about acceptable social behavior and by not being in direct face-to-face contact with the victim. (Kyriacou). The anonymous responses—often laced with profanity, derogatory name-calling, and threats of bodily harm—are far worse than what was originally purported, yet many fail to recognize the hypocrisy or unfairness of this online mob justice.
Thus, with the rise of social media, we have returned to “villages,” where the permanence of our digital footprints arguably makes “escape” more difficult than it was in the 1800s. Once again, shaming acts as a deterrent, similar to those close-knit communities of centuries ago where wrongdoers couldn’t easily hide or escape ridicule. The Internet age has created one massive, global village inhabited by everyone with access to computer—an ideal and terrifyingly-efficient environment to reintroduce public shaming as a means to reinforce behavioral and moral norms.
Examining social media shaming as it relates to the past, it looks less like a means to punish the offender but, rather, to please the masses who want retribution. While many delight in watching “internet justice” operate to punish socially or morally repugnant behavior, questions regarding the attendant harm of this practice are as valid as they were centuries ago.
The resurgence of the social shaming phenomenon, coupled with the hyper-efficient digital-communication platform, raises the same question people were asking centuries ago: does social shaming motivate change or promote rehabilitation? Does it serve any legitimate, proper public purpose?
In 1787, Benjamin Rush, a renowned physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, argued against social shaming, asserting that the destruction of an offender’s reputation, livelihood, and social status thwarts rehabilitation: “Crimes should be punished in private or not punished at all. A man who has lost his character at a whipping post has nothing valuable left to lose.”
Meaning, if a person is ridiculed to the point where their dignity is stripped, reputation ruined, and community support lost. The disconnect could lead to a lack of motivation to rehabilitate—i.e., a “nothing-else-to-lose” attitude that encourages or promotes more destructive or repugnant behavior.
Before discussing whether social media shaming spurs change or rehabilitation, we should first recognize that public shaming, at its core, does serve several social functions. First, it communicates and reinforces group norms to the target and among society. Second, it punishes the violator by imposing punishment and lowering the status of the transgressor. Finally, it elevates the status of others as norm “conformers” (Woodyatt).
“Noisy public shaming is one way humans encourage normative group behavior,” says Lydia Woodyatt, a professor at Australia’s Flinders University and expert on online shaming. “We enjoy a story of a person who gets taken out when they deserve it. We can get a social and psychological payoff for sharing our passionate, and perhaps short-lived, outrage. The outrage we share might be more about us as humans, our motivation and our social identity, than it is about the target of our outrage” (Daly). Some argue social-media shaming is particularly effective for raising awareness about social causes. Take, for example, the case of Cecil the Lion.
In early July 2015, Walter Palmer, a Minnesota dentist visiting Africa, shot and killed “Cecil,” a famous, black-maned, 13-year-old lion living safely in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. Cecil was part of an Oxford University lion-tracking project and, according to park employees, a visitor favorite. Palmer reportedly paid $54,000 to legally hunt a lion. To accommodate Palmer, local guides lured Cecil from the protected park to Palmer, where he wounded Cecil with a bow, tracked him for 40 hours, and fatally shot him with a rifle. Cecil was then skinned and beheaded.
After the details of Cecil’s death surfaced a short time later, the online social media activists quickly descended upon Palmer. The dentist’s Yelp page was flooded with hateful reviews. He was the target of venomous comments and articles that appeared online and Facebook pages. Finally, he was the subject of death threats (as were his wife and daughter). There was a deluge of tweets on Twitter, many from celebrities, suggesting that Palmer suffer the same fate as Cecil—i.e., that he be skinned and beheaded.
Importantly, killing lions is not (and was not in 2015) illegal in Zimbabwe when a hunter secures the proper permits, which Palmer did. Moreover, some would argue that trophy hunting helps wildlife conservation by providing a sizeable amount of money from the secured permits to countries that don’t have the means to protect endangered animals. These, however, appear to be minority opinions.
David Macdonald, director of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (“WildCRU”), part of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford in England, explained the response to Cecil’s death: “I believe that the worldwide engagement with Cecil’s story transcends the tragic fate of one lion, and sends a signal that people care about the conservation and want it to be reflected in how humanity lives alongside nature in the 21st century” (WildCRU).
WildCRU, which had been tracking and monitoring Cecil before he was killed, received more than $780,000 in contributions in the days following his death. The worldwide reaction to Cecil’s demise also helped push the U.N. General Assembly to swiftly adopt a resolution aimed at combatting illegal wildlife trafficking and poaching, an initiative that had been languishing for years. Several commercial airlines, in turn, banned the transport of trophy-hunting kills. In short, Cecil’s tragic and untimely death, and the responsive condemnation of Palmer’s actions, spurred positive changes to wildlife conservation and big-game-hunting regulation. But what about dentist Walter Palmer?
Upon receiving death threats, the vilified dentist went into temporary hiding. With his reputation destroyed, his dental practice was disrupted, costing him, and his employees, thousands of dollars in lost salary. Nearly three years later, in April 2018, a book was released titled Lion Hearted: The Life and Death of Cecil and the Future of Africa’s Iconic Cats.
More details emerged about the killing, including how the safari guide baited Cecil away from the safety of the national park—a legal practice on private land in Zimbabwe. The New York Post reported that according to an insider “Palmer is now worried that animal activists will come after him again.” Even in this instance where social media sparked change, it was at the expense of an individual doing something that, while technically legal, was detested by many people.
While shaming can serve as positive function in terms of promoting positive and responsible social behavior, it can also easily be misused and cause lasting harm to those shamed. As Jennifer Jacquet, as assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, writes in her book Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool, “[t]he speed at which information can travel, the frequency of anonymous shaming, the size of the audience it can reach, and the permanence of the information separate digital shaming from shaming of the past” (Jacquet).
In other words, the punishment is swift, efficient, and destructive—financially, emotionally and physically. In some instances, the targets of online shaming have lost their livelihoods or in extreme cases, have taken their lives (Luxton, June & Fairall). And for those forced to live with their shame, the road to redemption is a long one.
The issue of digital permanence is a leading issue of online shaming today (Kyriacou). Unlike the days of the scarlet letter, online shaming—and the resulting ramifications to the victims—can live indefinitely. We are already seeing how easy it is for prospective employers, university admissions offices, neighbors, or even dating partners to discover a thoughtless remark or indiscretion made by a person through a simple Google search.
Social shaming victims with deep pockets can work with online-reputation management companies to have their digital footprint erased—or at the very least buried in Google’s search results. These companies use legitimate search engine optimization techniques to game Google’s search engine ranking algorithm by suppressing the negative information deep in Google’s search results. But the digital cleansing comes at a price.
A solid online reputation management campaign, which will typically last several months to a year, can cost up to $15,000 per month depending on the nature, extent, and scope of the online damage. The cost depends on: (1) how competitive an individual’s personal search results are; (2) how much information already exists about the person online; (3) how far-reaching the negative search results are; and (4) the level of customization needed to make a favorable impact (Keiser). But what about the people who cannot afford such a service? Or situations where the reputation damage is irreparable?
One partial solution may be “The Right to Be Forgotten,” a legal concept that recognizes individuals’ control over their online identities by demanding that Internet search engines remove certain damaging results (Carter). In 2014, the European Court of Justice, which is charged with interpreting E.U. law, determined that Europeans had a “right to delist,” meaning that individuals and entities could compel the removal of information from Google’s search results where the derogatory information is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive” or does not promote the public interest.
Since the European right-to-be-forgotten program began, Google has granted 43% of 2.4 million URL removal requests, according to its recent transparency report. The vast majority of those filing requests were from private individuals wanting to be removed from online directories, social media, news articles and government pages (Heilweil).
While 88% of Americans support this “right,” the prospects of similar legislation or court decision in the United States has not gained traction. While the New York State Assembly recently introduced a bill promoting some of the protections afforded to Europeans, some believe that such legislation would violate the First Amendment: “[T]he deeper problem with the [New York] bill is simply that it aims to censor what people say, under a broad, vague test based on what the government thinks the public should or shouldn’t be discussing,” opined American law professor Eugene Volokh in an article appearing in the Washington Post last year.
Continuing, Professor Volokh explained that “[t]here is no “right to be forgotten” in the abstract; no law can ensure that, and no law can be limited to that. Instead, the “right” this aims to protect is the power to suppress speech—the power to force people (on pain of financial ruin) to stop talking about other people, when some government body decides that they should stop.” Ultimately, if passed, the New York State Assembly bill would certainly inspire a slew of legal challenges. “It would affect Google.com, and then I suspect there would be some sort of battle over whether New York could have jurisdiction over a broader area,” says Simpson.
In conclusion, in this new Internet age, everyone is considered a public figure and anyone can be target of social shaming for a perceived or actual wrongdoing. While shaming used to be reserved for family, friends, and members of a community, it is now an available tool for anyone with a Wi-Fi connection. Today the permanence of uploaded information ensures that modern shaming can far-exceed the scope of the historical scarlet letter. Today, the modern system of punishment attempts to deal in proportionalities.
As Rita Koganzon states in her review of So You’ve Been Publically Shamed, “In a regime where both financial and social possibilities hinge on employment to be rendered not just temporarily unemployed, but unemployable is a fate not substantially better than imprisonment. Social media can punish those deemed offensive more severely than any formal sentence for a speech violation ever could in the United States. The best strategy that most reasonably risk-averse people will hit upon to deal with this ominous threat to their livelihood is to shut up” (Konganzon).
In conclusion, when it comes to our justice system, we often insist that “the punishment fit the crime” (Stryker). But when it comes to online shaming, the punishment arguably does not. While it may feel like what we want in the moment—the satisfaction of having someone who hurts someone retreat in remorse—the lasting and destructive effects of online shaming as a punishment likely exceed the justice it provides in the digital age (Mohammed).
