Journalist and author Jon Ronson first became interested in the modern resurgence of public shaming after someone used his name and photo to create a Twitter spambot. Ronson was ashamed of what the bot tweeted—it didn’t accurately represent his identity—and started a public shaming campaign to get the bot taken down. It worked.
Intrigued by the process, Ronson researched public shaming, interviewed its victims, and sought out shame-avoidance and recovery strategies.
First, we’ll look at some basics of shame. Then, we’ll look at some strategies for managing the fallout when you become a victim of a public shaming.
According to psychiatrist James Gilligan, shame isn’t a feeling, it’s an absence of feeling. Initially, shame might feel like pain, but long-term, it becomes more like numbness or deadness.
In modern times, the things people are most ashamed of tend to be personal secrets that aren’t objectively very scandalous or that would seem unimportant to others. For example, Melissa’s salary is $550,000 a year and she’s ashamed that she makes so much, and Jim is ashamed that he smokes an ounce of marijuana every three weeks. When they both revealed these secrets at an honesty workshop, none of the other participants cared.
However, there are some things that society generally labels as shameful. For men, this includes exercising white privilege, committing a professional faux pas like plagiarism, or losing their jobs and being unemployed. Women are shamed for the same things as men and additionally for sex scandals. (Sex scandals used to be shameful for men back in the 1800s and 1900s, but these days, people consider other transgressions worse.)
Because shame is so uncomfortable, it’s been used as a punishment and control mechanism throughout history and is making a comeback today.
Historical public humiliation consisted of whippings in the town square, locking people in the stocks for hours, public executions, and so on. Humiliation was used to punish criminals in the UK and the US until the 1830s when it was deemed too brutal. US founding father Benjamin Rush wrote that public shaming was worse than death, and people who were sentenced to public humiliation such as whippings found the shaming worse than the physical pain. Public shaming was so damaging because it destroyed people’s self-respect to the point that they felt they could never reform.
Today’s public humiliation tends to take place on social media. Social media shamings differ from older forms of public punishment because they’re democratic, anonymous, and lawless. Anyone can choose a target, and unlike a formal justice system where the accused has rights, online, no one has any rights. People can be punished without evidence and there’s no time limit on the punishment.
Some people argue that online shaming is just commentary because it can’t hand down “real” punishment, but as we’ve learned, making people feel ashamed is one of the worst punishments out there.
The use of shame as a control method, unlike as punishment, was never outlawed, and people still use shame to control and manipulate people:
We’ve established that shame is brutal and dehumanizing—but does it work? In some cases, yes.
Public shaming can be a force for a good—the public can call out previously inaccessible people and companies for objectively despicable behavior. Shaming can force change that would be time-consuming or impossible to win through the justice system. It can also be a successful motivator for reform when used within the justice system.
Public shaming can also destroy people. First, shaming is very painful, and people who are shamed online can lose their reputations, jobs, friends, and family, potentially forever.
Second, most violence isn’t motivated by revenge or self-defense—it’s motivated by shame. Violence is an effective way to gain instant self-esteem—threatening someone with a gun tends to make them treat you with respect—and this self-esteem and respect help fill the void caused by shame.
Finally, even just the threat of public shaming negatively affects people—some people are so scared of being shamed that they worry about being surveilled and tone down their personalities to create a bland online presence. Because public shamings over misunderstandings can be just as brutal as shamings resulting from actual wrongdoing, it’s safest to be mild.
Due to these negative effects, Ronson recommends reflecting before shaming anyone. He no longer shames people unless they’ve victimized someone.
If public shaming has such potentially dire consequences, why do people participate in it? Scientists and observers have some ideas, but they don’t really know.
One of the most popular theories to explain public shamings is that people lose their minds when part of a crowd and therefore engage in illogical, potentially destructive behaviors (such as shaming). (This is known as contagion, group madness, or deindividuation.) However, the theory has little scientific merit:
Whatever does motivate public shamings, it’s probably more complicated than crowd theory. Crowd psychologist Steve Reicher notes that there are always patterns associated with crowd formation and most people in crowds tend to share an ideology. Public shamers, on the other hand, come from a variety of backgrounds.
Ronson discovered a few factors that might contribute to shamings:
So you’ve been publicly shamed—what next? Ronson discovered that there are six approaches to recovering from a public shaming. (None of the approaches restore the victim’s life to what it was like before the shaming, and many of the solutions are fragile.)
Withdrawing includes shutting down social media accounts, refusing to give interviews, avoiding public places, and lying low until things blow over. This is a popular approach, though it doesn’t work particularly well—sometimes the shaming reincarnates when the shamee tries to return, and the shamee has to endure feelings of isolation.
For example, bestselling author Jonah Lehrer chose to withdraw when the news broke that he’d made up some of the Bob Dylan quotes that appeared in his most recent book, Imagine. He resigned from his job, refused interviews, and stayed home. The strategy didn’t work very well for him—after seven months, Lehrer tried to publicly apologize, but Twitter piled on again. When he tried to publish a new book, people mocked him. (Shortform note: Lehrer’s new book was eventually published to mixed reviews.)
Before a public shaming, the victim has a life story. During the shaming, the public reduces the victim’s identity to revolve entirely around their transgression. Instead of holding on to the original narrative, approach #2 is to create a private third life narrative that explains the reasoning behind the transgression to reduce personal feelings of shame.
For example, like Jonah Lehrer, monologue writer and performer Mike Daisey committed literary fraud: He invented details in a non-fiction monologue about horrible working conditions at Apple factories that he performed on the podcast This American Life, among other venues. However, instead of withdrawing, he chose to create a new narrative.
Daisey told Ronson that he’d known in advance that if he went on the podcast someone would uncover his lies, but he decided to do it anyway because sacrificing his career was worth getting the story out. He cast himself as a hero to deal with his feelings of shame. He also defended himself online and responded to his shamers.
Becoming emotionally invulnerable to shame involves refusing to let shame affect you. To learn more about this approach, Ronson spoke to porn stars, who have to learn to manage shame because their industry is associated with it. Ronson interviewed Princess Donna Dolore, who said that if she publicly shared the things that embarrassed her, they were no longer embarrassing. One of her models, Jody Taylor, feels the same—she thinks that fiction, by nature, can’t be frightening or humiliating, so instead, the porn scenarios she performs are “awesome.”
Dolore’s goal is to make people feel less ashamed of what they want, and her work to demystify strange sex is probably part of the reason that fewer men are shamed for sex scandals these days.
For example, Max Mosley chose to be invulnerable to shame when the news broke that he’d been involved in “sick” Nazi-themed orgies. He interviewed with BBC Radio 4 and agreed his sex life was strange, but he said people shouldn’t think badly of him for it. Mosley brought his actual personality closer to his public persona, unlike Lehrer, who was almost two entirely different people and was shamed for being two-faced.
Mosley also sued News of the World, the paper that had broken the story, because they’d written that the orgy was Nazi-themed, which, in reality, it wasn’t. It was only German-themed. Mosley won the case and as a result, most people see him as someone who was wronged.
Mosley’s decision to refuse to be ashamed certainly played a part in his outcome, but he probably also escaped shame because he was also a man in a consensual sex scandal.
Psychotherapist Brad Blanton believes shame thrives in secret—if you’re constantly worrying about what other people think or you’re worried about being exposed, you feel shame. Therefore, you can get rid of shame by being radically honest and telling everyone exactly what you’re thinking at all times. For example, if you want to sleep with your wife’s sister, you should tell both your wife and her sister this. You can learn how to break news like this, or spill any of your secrets, by attending a Radical Honesty workshop.
To Ronson, the Radical Honesty method seemed to be mainly people yelling at each other, and sometimes this went quite badly. For example, after the workshop Ronson attended, one man tried to be honest with his wife and she tried to physically push him away. He responded by saying that he was going to get an ax and defend himself by killing her. Unsurprisingly, she called the police.
In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that if an online text about someone was “inadequate, irrelevant...or excessive,” people could request that Google deindex the article or blog from its European sites. This means that, in theory, you could ask Google to remove shameful information about you from its search indexes.
While this ruling did result in a lot of material being deindexed—within three months, 70,000 people made requests—it also brought some of the things that people wanted buried back into the spotlight. As Google met requests, it sent automatic notices to media outlets letting them know their articles had been deindexed, which created resistance to the ruling. People started bringing up old stories again so they couldn’t be forgotten.
Reputation management companies aim to hide shameful or damaging information about people by creating new online content that knocks undesirable content onto the second or third page of online search results. According to Google, 53% of people don’t look past the first two search results and almost 90% of people don’t ever click past the first page.
For example, after a photo of Lindsay Stone screaming beside a cemetery sign that read “Silence and Respect” went viral, she connected with a reputation management company called Reputation.com. The photo was Stone’s entire internet presence, and also the entire presence of anyone else with the same name. She couldn’t get a job or date because anyone who googled her would instantly find the photo and conclude that she was a bad person.
Reputation.com knocked the photo lower in the search results by making Stone new social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr automatically show up high in the results because Google’s algorithm thinks these sites are popular). They wrote blog posts about travel, cats, top 40 music, and Stone’s other interests in her name.
It took four months of reputation management for the photo to start fading. When Stone googled herself, the photo showed up three or four times, but there were also lots of photos of Stone doing regular things, and photos of other Lindsey Stones. The reputation management process is ongoing, though, and Reputation.com calls Stone every week so she can approve Reputation.com’s latest content.
Journalist and author Jon Ronson first became interested in the modern resurgence of public shaming after someone used his name and photo to create a Twitter spambot. Ronson was ashamed of what the bot tweeted—it didn’t accurately represent his identity—and started a public shaming campaign to get the bot taken down.
Now intrigued by the topic of shame from both the perspective of the victim and the shamer, Ronson decided to write a book about it. He spent the next three years researching public shaming, interviewing its victims, and seeking out shame-avoidance and recovery strategies.
In Part 1 of this summary, we’ll look at some basics of shame as an emotion and form of public punishment. In Part 2, we’ll look at some strategies for managing the fallout when public shaming does happen.
(Shortform note: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was originally written in fifteen chapters. We’ve reorganized the information for clarity and concision.)
According to psychiatrist James Gilligan, shame isn’t a feeling, it’s an absence of feeling. Initially, shame might feel like pain, but long-term, it becomes more like numbness or deadness.
In this chapter, we’ll look at what causes shame and one of its consequences: violence.
In modern times, the things people are most ashamed of tend to be personal secrets that aren’t objectively very scandalous or that would seem unimportant to others. For example, Melissa’s salary is $550,000 a year and she’s ashamed that she makes so much, and Jim is ashamed that he smokes an ounce of marijuana every three weeks. When they both revealed these secrets at an honesty workshop, none of the other participants cared.
However, there are some things that society generally labels as shameful. For men, this includes exercising white privilege, committing a professional faux pas like plagiarism, or losing their jobs and being unemployed. For women, this additionally includes sex scandals. (Sex scandals used to be shameful for men back in the 1800s and 1900s, but these days, people consider other transgressions worse.)
Most violence isn’t motivated by revenge or self-defense—it’s motivated by shame. Violence is an effective way to gain instant self-esteem—threatening someone with a gun tends to make them treat you with respect. This self-esteem and respect help to fill the void caused by shame.
The work of two scientists demonstrates the connection between shame and violence:
In the 1970s, prisons and mental hospitals in Massachusetts were experiencing a period of violence that included frequent suicides, murders, and other dangerous activities like riots and fire-setting. The Department of Corrections was ordered to bring in investigative psychiatrists to sort things out and James Gilligan was invited to take charge of the project. He originally wasn’t very enthusiastic—he expected that the most violent people would be unredeemable psychopaths.
However, that wasn’t what he found at all. In fact, Gilligan discovered that all of the violent inmates had experienced severe shaming during their lives, such as being thrown out of windows, raped, or set on fire. This extreme shame drove them to shut down emotionally. This numbness was so painful that they tried hurting themselves or others to trigger feelings, whether physical or emotional.
Being in prison only added to their shame—officers and guards treated the inmates badly and humiliated them. For example, sometimes officers lied to prisoners about them having a visitor. Prisoners would get excited by this news because visitors were rare and then be disappointed when they found out it was just a joke. The officers thought this kind of behavior would ensure obedience, but it just made people more prone to violence.
Once Gilligan realized what the real cause of the violence was, he tried to improve the situation. In the 1980s, he experimented with therapeutic communities. In these communities, everyone had to treat the prisoners with respect and give them a shame-free place to talk about themselves and what they wanted. After some time, some of the prison workers became jealous of these sessions, and Gilligan got them some psychiatric treatment too. This helped them behave more civilly to the prisoners, and violence decreased.
In 1991, Gilligan tried to additionally use education to deshame inmates and asked Harvard lecturers to teach free classes at prisons. When William Weld was elected as governor, however, he shut the program down because he thought that people who couldn’t afford college would start committing crimes to get free education.
A few of Gilligan’s therapeutic communities still exist today and are still effective at deshaming inmates and reducing violence. For example, Raquel, like the prisoners in Gilligan’s original study, experienced shame as a child—growing up, she was sexually abused. This made her hard on her own children and her son eventually accused her of child abuse. Eventually, she was charged with attempted murder because she threw a knife at her son.
The community’s head understood that shame played a huge role in Raquel’s case and convinced the prosecutors that Raquel was part of an “abuse cycle.” Raquel wasn’t allowed to contact her children for five years, but her sentence was four months instead of twenty years. She was also offered a job at her halfway house, which further boosted her self-esteem.
Evolutionary psychology professor David Buss also discovered that shame is a powerful motivator for violence during an experiment about people’s murder fantasies in the early 2000s. Buss asked 5,000 people if they’d ever thought about killing someone and the numbers blew him away—84% of men and 91% of women had experienced at least one vivid fantasy of murdering someone. For example, one man imagined hiring someone to tamper with his boss’s brakes, and a boy visualized breaking a bully’s legs and dripping acid on him.
Almost all of the fantasy victims had shamed the fantasizers. For example, the person who imagined killing his boss had been humiliated by the boss and made to feel like a loser. The boy who fantasized about breaking legs and dripping acid had been laughed at by the bully and his friends after the bully dropped books on him.
Most people who fantasize about hurting people don’t actually go out and do it, but Buss’s work shows that shame and violence are linked and this affects everyone, regardless of their self-control levels.
Most people are most ashamed of personal things that the average person wouldn’t find that scandalous.
Think back to a time you felt shame. What caused it?
What was your reaction to the humiliation? (For example, did you feel numb or angry, or did you imagine revenge?)
If the same thing happened to your friend, would you find it shameful and humiliating? Why or why not?
In the previous chapter, we learned that shame is a powerful, painful absence of emotion that people want to avoid—which makes it a potential technique for punishing or controlling people. In this chapter, we’ll look at how shame has been used to these ends over the last 200 years.
Public humiliation—whippings in the town square, locking people in the stocks for hours, public executions, and so on—was used to punish criminals in the UK and the US until the 1830s.
People were terrified of the shaming element of the punishment. For example, in 1742, a woman was caught cheating on her husband and both the woman and her lover were to be publicly whipped. The woman asked the judge if her whipping could be private so that it wouldn’t embarrass her children—she thought the shaming was the worst part of the punishment, not the physical pain of the whipping.
Many people agreed that public shaming was too brutal and in 1787, US founding father Benjamin Rush added his voice to the growing opposition to public shaming. Rush wrote that public shaming was worse than death and suggested that instead of shaming people, it would be more appropriate to privately administer the gentler punishment of “bodily harm.”
Within fifty years, public punishment was abolished in all states except Delaware. In 1867, an editorial writer tried to explain to Delaware why public shaming was so terrible: it destroyed people’s self-respect to the point that they felt they could never reform. If they couldn’t recover, there was no point trying to become a good citizen. The shamee would be abandoned and criminal forever. (Delaware eventually abolished public punishment in 1952.)
Public shaming was popular during Germany in the Second World War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution—events most people agree were brutal.
According to some people, shame is dying out. For example, in 2008, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre lamented the lack of shame around sex scandals in a speech to the Society of Editors. While writing the book, Ronson encountered plenty of people who held the same ideas—that the younger generation doesn’t feel shame anymore and that this is a bad thing.
In fact, public shaming is experiencing a renaissance on social media. Social media shamings differ from older forms of public punishment because they’re democratic, anonymous, and lawless. Anyone can choose a target, and unlike a formal justice system where the accused has rights, online, no one has any rights. People can be punished without evidence and there’s no time limit on the punishment.
Some people argue that online shaming is just commentary because it can’t hand down “real” punishment, but as we’ve learned, making people feel ashamed is one of the worst punishments out there.
Public shaming on social media can be a force for a good—the public can call out previously inaccessible people and companies for objectively despicable behavior. Shaming can force change that would be time-consuming or impossible to win through the justice system.
Shame is such an effective way of getting to people that lawyers use humiliation to take down expert witnesses. For example, death row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith comes up with an obscure question that an expert can’t possibly know the answer to. Experts can’t admit they don’t know, because being an expert by nature requires them to be respected and knowledgeable. So they try to address the question, and eventually end up looking stupid and feeling ashamed. This discourages people from challenging him and helps his clients.
Ronson went to a “courtroom familiarization” course to learn more about the use of shame in this context. The instructor, John, started the course by explaining that if an expert was in the way of the lawyer’s goal, the lawyer would try to make the expert look incompetent and lose control.
To induce shame, a lawyer might:
To help avoid falling victims to shame, John taught the experts the following techniques:
According to judge Ted Poe, who’s famous for assigning embarrassing punishments, plenty of people find being publicly shamed so embarrassing that they change their ways so they never have to experience humiliation again. Poe doesn’t think that criminals have low self-esteem—he thinks they have too much and that they need to feel bad.
Example #1: Poe sentenced a young thief to parade in front of a store he’d stolen from for a week with a sign that outlined his crime and warned others not to do the same. The thief was so embarrassed that he turned his life around. He went on to get a bachelor’s degree and owns a business. The public liked the punishment, though according to Poe, not necessarily in a mean-spirited way. One woman wanted to take him to church and save him.
Example #2: Poe sentenced Mike Hubacek, who’d killed two people while driving drunk, to a variety of shame-inducing punishments, some public and some private, including:
While doing all of his punishments, Hubacek found a sense of purpose—he could warn others not to drive drunk. He now speaks at schools and owns a halfway house. He’s very grateful to Poe. Like the thief, the public response to his crime wasn’t overwhelmingly negative. Hubacek said that nine out of ten people he encountered were kind or told him things would turn out all right.
Law enforcement also makes use of shame—it can be an effective way to control people and spaces. For example, being stopped and frisked by police is shameful, even when you’re innocent (and most people are innocent—of the 684,330 stops in New York one year, almost 90% of the people stopped were innocent.) The stop is humiliating because everyone else on the street who witnesses the police talking to you assumes you’ve done something wrong. Additionally, stopping and frisking people makes them feel violated and scared. All this makes people avoid spaces with high police presence.
Stopping and frisking may be one of the drivers of online activism and public shaming. As the police take over public spaces, there’s nowhere for people to loiter and hang out in real life, so they’re pushed online. The internet is a public space that interests the police too, but unlike on the streets, the average person has power online and can protest the intrusion. According to one young internet whiz, law enforcement is so bad at technology that the only way they can stop it is to lock up hackers and internet geniuses.
We’ve established that public punishment is brutal, dehumanizing, and can get things done—but does it always work, and are there side effects?
Some people respond very poorly to shame-inducing punishment. For example, Kevin Tunell, like Hubacek, killed someone while driving drunk. The girl’s parents offered to reduce his $1.5 million fine if he would pay them $936 up front and mail them a $1 check in the girl’s name once a week for eighteen years. Tunell accepted the offer, but every time he had to write the girl’s name, he was overwrought with guilt and psychologically tortured, and he eventually stopped sending payments because he couldn’t bear to write the check. When her parents took him to court, he broke down.
Social media shaming can also destroy people. Shaming is very painful, and people who are shamed online can lose their reputation, jobs, friends, and family, potentially forever.
Additionally, even just the threat of public shaming negatively affects people—some people are so scared of being shamed that they worry about being surveilled and tone down their personalities to create a bland online presence. Because public shamings over misunderstandings can be just as brutal as shamings resulting from actual wrongdoing, it’s safest to be mild.
Due to these negative effects, Ronson recommends reflecting before shaming anyone online. He no longer shames people unless they’ve victimized someone.
If public shaming is so terrible, why do people participate in it? Scientists and observers have some ideas, but they don’t really know. They do know that one of the most popular theories—that people lose their minds when part of a crowd (known as contagion, group madness, or deindividuation)—has little scientific merit.
First, we’ll look at why group madness probably isn’t the explanation. Then, we’ll look at some other thoughts on what motivates public shaming.
Group madness is the idea that when in a crowd, people lose their individuality and do things they never would have considered on their own, such as destroy property. It’s not a very robust theory because the inventor made it up to serve his own ends, the most famous experiment proving its existence used questionable methodology, and there’s plenty of evidence that conflicts with the theory, such as the events of recent riots.
Group madness was invented in the nineteenth century by Frenchman Gustave LeBon. Crowds were of particular interest in France at the time because the elite was worried about uprisings against them. (Napoleon III even tried to use urban planning to control crowds by replacing medieval streets with wide boulevards.)
LeBon lived through the uprising in 1871 and came up with the idea that people lose their free will, reasoning power, and restraint when in a crowd—everyone goes mad all at once; there’s no ideological motivation or justification involved.
LeBon tried to scientifically prove this idea. He was enamored with the elites of Paris society and thought that they might welcome him into their circles if he could give them a way to manage the madness.
LeBon’s science involved looking at skulls held by the Anthropological Society of Paris and measuring their volume as a proxy for brain size. He concluded that businessmen and aristocrats had the biggest brains and were therefore less susceptible to madness. He decided the brains of Black people and women were lighter to explain why people with the same-sized heads wouldn’t have the same-sized brains. He wrote a paper about his theories in 1879 that went over very badly. The Anthropological Society of Paris was highly suspicious of LeBon’s conclusions because his scientific methods were so sloppy and he was so misogynistic.
LeBon went to Arabia to study Arabians’ racial characteristics and over the next years and wrote and self-published several books. These books weren’t based on any experimentation— he just wrote down what he thought. In 1895, he published The Crowd, which explained his group madness theory. It contained two tantalizing ideas:
The Crowd was very popular and was translated into 26 languages. Mussolini and Goebbels both endorsed the book. LeBon earned himself a place in the Parisian society but acted very strangely—during lunches he hosted, if someone said something he didn’t like, he’d ring a bell until the speaker went quiet.
Even though group theory was made up and endorsed by people generally considered immoral, and everyone thought LeBon was socially awkward, it still persisted.
In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo tried to prove the existence of crowd theory, also called deindividuation, which is a version of group madness. He turned a Stanford basement into a mock prison and recruited participants for an experiment. Nine would be guards, nine would be prisoners, and six would be on call. He acted as the superintendent.
Zimbardo ended the experiment after less than a week because the guards became too sadistic and treated the prisoners like animals. One guard, Dave Eshelman, screamed at the prisoners to “fuck the floor” and humiliated them by making them pretend to be in love with Mrs. Frankenstein. Zimbardo appeared to have proven that when people are put into an evil place (the basement included small cells, solitary confinement, and the prisoners wore chains) and surrounded by evil influences (himself and the other guards), they act in evil ways.
In fact, this wasn’t the case. Dave Eshelman was the only guard who appeared to suffer from madness, group madness or otherwise. When speaking to Ronson, Eshelman admitted that he’d been faking his loss of control because the experiment was going nowhere in the early days and Eshelman was concerned that Zimbardo wasn’t going to get good results. He acted evil—channeling the sadistic prison warden in Cool Hand Luke—to get the experiment started.
The fact that Eshelman was acting doesn’t invalidate what happened—Eshelman chose to act in the way that he did for some psychological reason, and the prisoners still experienced brutality regardless of its sincerity. However, the fact that Eshelman was motivated by wanting to help Zimbardo is the opposite of group madness—Eshelman wasn’t corrupted by an environment; he was trying to do “something good.”
Additionally, there’s a lot of research that suggests that participants in studies are motivated to do whatever they think the researchers want. Psychologist Peter Gray notes that in the Stanford prison experiment, since Zimbardo acted as the superintendent and was present for the experiment, the participants would have felt even more pressure to do what they thought he wanted.
In 2011, some people in the UK rioted and looted for five days after the police shot a man named Mark Duggan. Scientists attributed their behavior to contagious group thinking that made people more violent than they would be alone. However, there were some clear problems with the contagion theory:
Crowd psychologist Steve Reicher notes that there are always patterns associated with crowd formation. While crowds often don’t have a leader and don’t form via a plan, the group tends to share an ideology. Public shamers, on the other hand, don’t always share ideologies. For example, when Justine Sacco (see Chapter 4) wrote an insensitive joke about AIDS, she was shamed by both humanitarian organizations and misogynists, two groups that rarely see eye to eye.
Online public shaming, while it does involve a digital “crowd,” may have a more complicated explanation than whatever scientists ultimately discover about crowd behavior.
Another scientific principle that might have a hand in shamings that get out of control is feedback loops—responses to your behavior that inspire you to change it. For example, Your Speed signs are a feedback loop because they tell you how fast you’re going, which gives you an opportunity to make a change—for instance, slow down if you’re breaking the speed limit. If you do make that change, you get immediate feedback again—the next “Your Speed” sign will show you’re driving at the right speed, and some signs will even congratulate you for this.
Online shaming is a form of feedback loop—if you shame someone and are congratulated, that positively reinforces your behavior and you’ll probably keep on shaming. As the shaming grows, you’ll just keep seeing posts from people who agree with you and your social media feeds will become an echo chamber.
Additionally, while writing the book, Ronson discovered two factors that many public shamers have in common:
Many people who participate in public shamings, like Eshelman, thought they were doing something good. Public shaming is a way of getting justice in a broken system.
For example, Mercedes Haefer has participated in many shamings and online attacks because the internet is where she has power. When a boy on YouTube posted videos of himself abusing his cat, Haefer and other members of an online community called 4chan tracked him down. They told his entire town that he was a sociopath, which got the cat sent to a new home.
Ronson also discovered plenty of people who were unaware of the effects of shaming. Some people who had participated in online shamings had never thought about how their comments affected the shamee, or if they had, they assumed the shamee would be fine over time. Ronson himself couldn’t even remember all the names of people he’d shamed.
Additionally, some people see shaming as not only harmless but as a popular leisure activity. These days, on Twitter especially, users actively look for misspeaking or poorly chosen jokes to shame people over.
Many people aren’t aware of the consequences of public shaming.
Describe a time you shamed someone, either on social media, in real life, or through another medium.
What motivated you to shame the person?
What consequences do you think your shaming produced? (For example, did they cease their undesirable behavior or get in trouble?)
How do you think the person felt as a result of your shaming?
In Part 1, we learned how shame works and how it’s used for punishment. In Part 2, we’ll look at how to respond and recover from public shamings. (None of the approaches restore the victim’s life to what it was like before the shaming, and many of the solutions are fragile.)
Withdrawing includes shutting down social media accounts, refusing to give interviews, avoiding public places, and lying low until things blow over. This is a popular approach, though it doesn’t work particularly well—sometimes the shaming reincarnates when the shamee tries to return, and the shamee has to endure feelings of isolation while they’re withdrawing from public life.
On July 30, 2012, journalist Michael C. Moynihan broke the news that bestselling author Jonah Lehrer had made up some of the Bob Dylan quotes that appeared in his most recent book, Imagine. In response, Lehrer was publicly shamed.
Ronson interviewed Moynihan and Lehrer to find out how the events affected both of them. Initially, Ronson thought this case would set a positive precedent for future public shamings—powerful, fraudulent people who did bad things could actually be exposed and held accountable by the average person. As Ronson dug deeper into the story, however, he realized that the consequences of public shaming could be permanent, and the experience was terrible for everyone involved.
In July 2012, Michael C. Moynihan was working a ten-day blogging gig for The Washington Post. He was considering blogging about the differing opinions on self-plagiarism (reusing your own material) between the British and Americans—Americans considered self-plagiarism to be more of a crime. Writer Jonah Lehrer had been in the news about this at the time because he’d reused material from his columns for The Wall Street Journal in columns for The New Yorker.
Lehrer was a hotshot academic, writer, and speaker. He had won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and wrote his first book while he was still a graduate student. He made tens of thousands of dollars in speaker fees for inspirational keynotes at important conferences and was compared to Malcolm Gladwell. When Lehrer started a new job at The New Yorker, it made the news.
Moynihan was curious about Lehrer and checked out his most recent book, Imagine, which is about creativity. The first chapter is about Bob Dylan. Moynihan knew a lot about Dylan and was suspicious of one of the quotes Lehrer attributed to him because usually, Dylan was rude to interviewers, but this particular quote sounded like a self-help book. Moynihan was doubtful of a few other quotes as well.
Moynihan wrote Lehrer to ask him about the quotes. Lehrer responded that he was on vacation but would get back to him in eleven days once he had access to his notes again. (Moynihan thought this timing was suspiciously convenient because Moynihan had said his deadline was in ten days.) Lehrer did write, though, that he’d gotten access to some unreleased interview transcripts from one of Dylan’s managers, and that one of the transcripted interviews was in an expensive, multivolume anthology called The Fiddler Now Upspoke.
What Lehrer didn’t tell Moynihan was that he hadn’t fact-checked his book. He hadn’t completely made up the quotes, just embellished them—he’d changed the odd word or added a phrase—and he’d used them in part of his book proposal and never gone back to verify them. He was “too lazy” (fact-checking is a long, arduous process that sometimes makes the book less colorful) and “too stupid.”
Moynihan found one of the relevant Dylan interviews in The Fiddler Now Upspoke and discovered that Dylan had never said the quote Lehrer had attributed to him. He also tracked down Dylan’s only manager, Jeff Rosen, who said he’d never spoken to Lehrer. Moynihan brought this up with Lehrer, who panicked. Moynihan started to get uncomfortable at this point too—the detective work had been fun, but watching Lehrer panic was painful.
Moynihan spoke with Lehrer’s literary agent, who told Moynihan that if he (Moynihan) published what he’d found out, Lehrer’s life would be ruined.
Moynihan sold the scoop on Lehrer’s false quotes to Tablet, a small online magazine, for $2,200. The night the story was due, Lehrer phoned him over and over again. Moynihan seriously considered not publishing because though Lehrer was completely in the wrong and Moynihan in the right, Moynihan knew the story really would ruin Lehrer’s life. By this point, however, Moynihan’s own career was at stake—one of his colleagues had found out he was writing about Lehrer, and both Moynihan’s editors and Lehrer’s literary agent knew about the story as well. If Moynihan didn’t publish, everyone would think the literary agent had bullied him into a cover-up, and he’d never be able to get another writing gig. Moynihan hit send.
Just before the story went live, Moynihan and Lehrer had one final phone call. Moynihan told Lehrer that he felt terrible, and Lehrer was unsympathetic, unapologetic, and icy. After hanging up, Moynihan replayed the conversation and wondered if, at heart, Lehrer was devious and had just been trying to emotionally manipulate Moynihan this whole time. (Ronson wonders if Moynihan thought of Lehrer this way to make himself feel less bad.) Lehrer’s life was going to get ugly, but the experience was traumatic for Moynihan too—finding the story was an accident that could have destroyed his career, the stress was brutal, and he hardly even made much money.
The day Moynihan’s story was published, Lehrer resigned from his job. His publisher offered refunds to everyone who had bought Imagine and destroyed all unsold copies. Comments on the scandal popped up all over the internet, both about Lehrer’s making up of the quotes and about Lehrer’s stonewalling of and lying to Moynihan.
The public shaming didn’t stop at internet comments, however. Wired magazine, where Lehrer had previously worked, asked a journalism professor to look over Lehrer’s columns for journalistic misdeeds. He found some—Lehrer had plagiarized himself and others. (Moynihan was relieved to hear this—Lehrer really was sketchy.)
Lehrer disappeared. He refused to give interviews but did agree to talk to Ronson, though he refused to talk about shame because it was so painful. He also didn’t think he was a good candidate for inclusion in this book for three reasons:
Ronson didn’t quite know what to make of all this. He thought Lehrer would be able to get past the scandal—the public wasn’t monstrous. Ronson also didn’t expect that Lehrer could tank Ronson’s career, though he was a bit frightened that Lehrer believed this so strongly.
After seven months, Lehrer decided to publicly apologize for all his misdeeds during a keynote speech he was giving for an event with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The speech was broadcasted live and a live Twitter feed was projected onto a giant screen right behind the speakers’ heads. The speech and public response started well—Lehrer started by saying he’d committed plagiarism and lied to cover it up. He noted that he’d disappointed his readers and wasted their money. A tweet showed up behind him that commended his directness. Ronson felt hopeful—people understood that seven months of shame was appropriate and now they’d lay off.
In the next part of the speech, Lehrer spoke about neuroscience to try to explain how he’d made his mistakes. He took this approach because he’s a rational, scientific thinker and because a more emotional approach would have been too painful. This came off as defensive and irrelevant and the live tweets accused him of being boring.
It got worse when Lehrer brought up a quote from a behavioral economist about the human brain being a “confabulation machine.” The live tweets accused him of passing the buck, using bad science, and being a sociopath. Twitter users wrote that they would never forgive him and he could never redeem himself. When they learned that Lehrer had been paid $20,000 for the speech, they were even more brutal. Lehrer experienced a moment of emotional shut-down, one of the stronger phases of shame.
Moynihan didn’t think much of the apology either. He thought Lehrer had been robotic and insincere, and used his word choice to be as slippery as possible. Lehrer had said he lied to a journalist “called” Michael Moynihan, not “to journalist Moynihan,” which Moynihan found insulting.
Four months after Lehrer apologized, he and his agent started pitching a new book about love. The book proposal (which was immediately leaked) included a scene of Lehrer’s panic after his quote invention was found out. It described him so panicked that he puked into a recycling bin.
Instead of realizing that Lehrer was suffering, people made fun of the excerpt, calling for witnesses to verify that the puking really did occur. Daniel Engber, who works for Slate, analyzed the proposal for plagiarism and found similarities between one of the chapters and an essay by one of Lehrer’s old colleagues at The New Yorker. Engber wasn’t sure if the similarities counted as plagiarism, but was convinced that even if Lehrer hadn’t actually plagiarised in this case, he’d do it again.
Ronson didn’t think people had given any thought to Lehrer’s well-being. The collective power of shaming isn’t obvious to individuals, especially when the shaming is digital. Ronson also thinks that people experienced cognitive dissonance—it’s uncomfortable to have contradictory ideas, so people justify their behavior by editing one of the ideas. In Lehrer’s case, they coded Lehrer’s emotional brokenness as robotic shamelessness, which made it okay to keep attacking him.
(Shortform note: Lehrer’s new book was eventually published to mixed reviews.)
Moynihan also experienced consequences as a result of the shaming. Other journalists were now frightened of him and someone he barely knew had confessed that he might have inadvertently plagiarized a biography. Moynihan described himself as being cast as “head of a pitchfork mob” and was baffled and angry about it. He didn’t know why people were acting so cold and didn’t want anything to do with them.
On December 20, 2013, PR manager Justine Sacco posted the following tweet before getting on an eleven-hour flight to Africa: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
The tweet was supposed to be a comment on white privilege: white people have an easier time feeling like they’re immune to certain issues. However, people misunderstood it and thought Sacco was racist. She experienced a massive public shaming that lasted for months.
In December 2013, Sacco was traveling for the holidays. She tweeted caustic, clueless jokes about people on her flight and the cities she laid over in. Half an hour before getting on her flight to Africa, she posted her tweet about Africa. She didn’t get any responses before she got on the flight and was offline for the eleven hours she was in the air.
One of Sacco’s 170 twitter followers sent the tweet to Gawker journalist Sam Biddle. Biddle thought the tweet was gold—usually, powerful people can get away with things that regular people can’t, but here was a PR chief being publicly and openly racist, and the internet had the opportunity to hold her accountable. Biddle and others retweeted Justine’s tweet, and it tore around the internet, inspiring massive shaming.
People assumed Sacco was a privileged, racist, spoiled brat because she shared a surname with Desmond Sacco, an African mining tycoon. In fact, she wasn’t related to Desmond and wasn’t rich or very privileged. However, she seemed close enough, so people rewrote her identity. Likely, many of the people who joined in the shaming thought that by calling her out, they were doing good.
According to BuzzFeed, a hundred thousand tweets appeared in response to Sacco’s post. Some called Sacco racist, a bitch, or a cunt. (Many people find it most effective to shame people by calling for the worst things that could possibly happen to them, which for women tends to be sexaul assault because it’s massively degrading.) Her employer, IAC, tweeted that her comment was offensive and other employees tweeted about how they didn’t want to work with her. Many people tweeted about how she was going to feel when she turned on her phone and realized what was going on. Someone invented the hashtag #HasSaccoLandedYet.
Biddle hadn’t expected such a response but he thought it was justified because Sacco was racist. He also expected everyone would get over it eventually.
Ronson also encountered the tweet while Sacco was in the air and his first reaction was a little bit of glee that someone was “fucked.” Shortly after, though, he wondered if Twitter was suffering from some sort of crowd theory because though the tweet wasn’t a very good joke and was badly worded, it wasn’t actually racist.
Sacco didn’t find out what was happening until she landed and her phone exploded. Some of the messages she received were sympathetic: Someone she’d known in high school texted her that they were sorry for what she was going through, and her best friend Hannah explained that she was the number-one trend worldwide. However, mainly, the messages were shaming. One Twitter user even went to the airport to take a photo of her and tweeted it with a message about how she was wearing sunglasses to hide.
Sacco issued an apology statement. It didn’t stop the shaming. She had to leave Africa early—her South African aunt told her she’d almost tarnished the family name and people who worked at hotels Sacco had reservations at threatened to go on strike. Her safety was in danger.
When Sacco got back to New York, the New York Post followed her to the gym and other papers went through her Twitter feed to try to dig up more offensive posts.
Reporting about the tweet was cautious. Writers acknowledged that lots of people write stupid things on Twitter that have the potential to be misinterpreted and blow up, but also made sure to not defend what Sacco had said.
Google made money off Sacco’s ruin—Jonathan Hersh, an economics researcher, conservatively estimates $120,000. According to Google Adwords, in the two months before the tweet, Sacco was googled thirty times a month. Between December 20th and 31st 2013, she was googled over a million times, and Google makes money in ad revenue every time anyone searches for anything. (Even if no advertisers linked their product to Sacco’s name, it’s likely that people who wouldn’t have otherwise been using Google at the time searched for her and then rabbitholed to a site that did use Google’s advertising.)
In the wake of the shaming, Sacco was fired. She had loved her job and felt like she’d lost her identity and purpose. Her personal life was affected too—she couldn’t date or meet new people because if anyone were to google her, they’d find evidence of the shaming and cut contact. She cried often and struggled to sleep.
Like Lehrer, Sacco didn’t want to talk to journalists—the experience was so harrowing that she didn’t want to relive it. She also didn’t really want to be in Ronson’s book because this might open her to new criticism. However, she thought it was important that people see what had happened to her and how “crazy” her situation became, so she interviewed with him three weeks after the tweet went viral.
Sacco thought her situation was crazy because she thought it was obvious that she wasn’t being literal with her tweet. She didn’t understand how anyone could believe that anyone else actually thought that white people didn’t get AIDS. She was trying to make fun of the bubble white Americans live in and the fact that they aren't aware of serious situations elsewhere.
Ronson thought the tweet was badly written, and because Sacco’s whole feed was acerbic, it wasn’t surprising that people had thought she was racist. On the other hand, he thought that people must have realized what she was trying to say and had chosen to misunderstand her. Ronson thinks that we use social media for drama since our regular lives tend to be plodding. On social media, everyone’s a flatter, less complicated version of themselves and can be easily slotted into hero or villain categories for our entertainment.
Sacco hoped that over time her situation would turn out differently from Lehrer’s because he had lied and comprised his integrity, but she had just done something stupid.
Almost immediately after the shaming, Sacco was offered a new job with a yachting company in Florida, which she thought was odd as she had no experience with yachts. She was worried the company employed people who actually thought white people couldn’t get AIDS and didn’t take the job.
After rejecting the job offer, Sacco went to Ethiopia for a month to volunteer with an NGO that worked towards lowering maternal mortality rates. She enjoyed the experience, but it wasn’t her calling, and she returned to New York. She got some temporary work in PR, but her career hadn’t recovered.
(Shortform note: In 2018, Sacco got a new job with the company that had fired her for the tweet.)
Hank (pseudonym) and Adria Richards both suffered the consequences of public shaming as a result of the same incident—on March 18, 2013, Hank and his friend Alex made off-color jokes at a tech conference and Richards called them out on Twitter. Hank was fired. Then, Richards was attacked for getting him fired.
In March 2013, Hank and his friend Alex were at the PyCon tech conference. During a presentation about initiatives to get more women into tech, a joke about a piece of hardware with a massive “dongle” popped into Hank’s head and he whispered it to Alex. Then Alex returned with another technological innuendo about “forking someone’s repo.”
Adria Richards was sitting in front of them and was offended by the jokes, especially given the speaker’s topic. She took a photo of Hank and Alex and posted it to Twitter, explaining that the two men in the photo were making inappropriate comments. She also tweeted her location for her safety—Hank and Alex were part of a crowd of mostly white males—and she was scared she might be hurt.
Ten minutes later, a conference organizer collected Hank and Alex and told them someone had complained about their sexual comments. Hank apologized and explained the joke, saying that they hadn’t meant for it to be sexual and were sorry for offending anyone who had overheard. He and Alex were upset by the confrontation and left the conference early.
On their way home, they wondered how the conference organizers had heard about the joke, as the woman who’d taken the picture had been sitting in front of them the whole time. Hank checked Twitter and found the tweet, but he was reassured by the fact that there were only a few comments on the photos, and one of Richards’s previous tweets was a stupid penis joke.
The next day, Richards put up a blog post about the event. She wrote that Hank and Alex had felt protected by the anonymity of the crowd and were experiencing deindividuation (another example of the persistence of crowd theories).
Before Richards’s new blog post even went up, Hank was fired. He has a wife and three kids and was terrified. He was also upset because he liked his job. He posted an apology on Hacker News, a discussion board, writing that he didn’t mean to offend anyone or hurt Richards and that she had every right to report him.
In response to his post, Hank got messages from men’s rights bloggers, some offering support, some telling him he was weak for apologizing. Hank didn’t respond to any of them.
Hank was able to quickly find a new job and is more careful around female developers now, which isn’t too difficult as his new workplace doesn’t have any female developers.
Richards had never called for Hank to be fired (though she wasn’t sorry that he had been), but it was her tweet and photo that got him in trouble, so people blamed her.
4chan, a discussion board that’s popular with trolls, started shaming Richards, calling for her to be killed or raped. Then, one person wrote that death and rape threats were feeding her cause—feminism—so it would be better to do something productive. That something productive was attacking her employer’s website and servers and promising to stop the attack if Richards was fired.
The attack worked—Richards was fired only hours later. The official reason was that her job was to unite communities, and instead, she was dividing them.
Richards never completely recovered. She kept receiving threats even after she was fired and she had to drop off the face of the earth for half a year. She slept on people’s couches, cried, journaled, and watched Netflix. When Ronson interviewed her for the book, she still didn’t have a new job. (Shortform note: The most recent information we could find about Richards is that she’s working as a freelance DevOps consultant and engineer.)
Hank doesn’t think she deserved any of these negative consequences.
The second approach you can take when suffering a shaming is to manipulate narratives. Before a public shaming, the victim has a rich and complex life story. During the shaming, the public reduces the victim’s identity to revolve entirely around their transgression. Instead of holding on to your life story, create a private third narrative that explains the reasoning behind the transgression to reduce personal feelings of shame.
Like Jonah Lehrer, monologue writer and performer Mike Daisey committed literary fraud. He invented details in a non-fiction monologue about working conditions in Apple factories that he performed on the podcast This American Life, among other venues.
Also like Lehrer, he was exposed by a journalist and publicly shamed, but instead of withdrawing, he created a new narrative.
In 2010, Daisey wrote a monologue about Apple factory workers he’d met in Shenzhen, China, and their terrible working conditions. In the monologue, Daisey spoke about n-hexane, an iPhone screen cleaner that evaporates faster than alcohol but is toxic. People he met who were exposed to n-hexane had such shaky hands that they couldn’t pick up glasses. He also spoke about a man whose hand had been crushed in a press and a worker who was only thirteen.
In 2011, Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, saw Daisey’s show and asked him if he’d like to tell the story on Glass’s podcast. The podcast employees tried to fact check Daisey’s narrative, but Daisey told them his translator’s phone number didn’t work anymore. Since some of his other facts had been verified, they trusted him.
Daisey’s performance inspired change:
Rob Schmitz, Marketplace’s Shanghai correspondent, was suspicious of parts of Daisey’s story. Daisey said that he’d interviewed workers in Starbucks, which Schmitz thought was unlikely because Starbucks is very expensive and most workers couldn’t have afforded it.
Schmitz tracked down Daisey’s translator and discovered that many of the events described in the monologue were inaccurate or completely untrue. Daisey had only visited three plants, not ten as he’d claimed. Some of the stories he’d described were true, but he hadn’t actually talked to the people involved—n-hexane did make workers sick, but that had happened in a different town than the one Daisey had visited. Finally, some of the people he’d described didn’t exist, such as the man with the crushed hand.
On March 16, 2012, Glass invited Daisey back onto the podcast and asked him to explain. Daisey said that in a theatrical context, the truth means something different. He ended the conversation by saying “I’m sorry” in a broken voice.
The interview was taped a week before it went live and that week was the most difficult for Daisey because the anticipation was terrifying. He thought and talked about killing himself, never performing again, and getting a divorce from his wife.
Unlike Lehrer, Daisey didn’t withdraw. Just a few minutes after the interview went live, before the criticism had gotten momentum, Daisey apologized on his website. The next day he was active on Twitter and responding to his would-be shamers, calling them hypocrites. Initially, his responses made them even angrier, but after some time, they realized he wasn’t going to back down and lost interest.
Daisey didn’t experience the same professional consequences as Lehrer. Shortly after the shaming, he went on a theatrical tour that sold out. However, he did still experience feelings of shame. He felt the public wanted him to go down so they could use his story as entertainment or a cautionary tale, and he found that being treated like an object was worse than being hated.
In response, Daisey created a new narrative—that he’d known in advance that if he went on the show someone would uncover his lies, but he decided to do it anyway because sacrificing his career was worth getting the story about the mistreatment of workers out.
When Ronson asked whether he had worried that the lies would have downplayed the events in China, Daisy initially said he “would have” worried about that and then said he did worry about that. This correction suggests that he was continually editing his story.
This approach was likely idiosyncratic—Daisey has a storytelling background, so creating new narratives comes naturally to him.
The third approach you can take when suffering a shaming is to become emotionally invulnerable to shame: In other words, refuse to let shame affect you. Ronson spoke to porn stars about how to become invulnerable to shame—naked photos and videos of porn stars in all sorts of compromising positions are all over the internet, which most people would find mortifying.
To find out how porn stars manage shame, Ronson interviewed Princess Donna Dolore of Kink.com studios. Dolore felt a lot of shame when she was growing up. At one point, she realized that if she shared the things that embarrassed her, they were no longer embarrassing or shameful. This is actually how she comes up with her porn scenarios—she brainstorms humiliating scenarios alone and then acts them out with others to rob the scenarios of their shaming power.
Dolore helps other people get over their sexual shame in a similar way. For example, she organized a public disgrace scene in a porn video for actor Jody Taylor. In the taped scene, Dolore unexpectedly dragged Taylor into a bar, stripped her, and attached live electrodes to her genitals. The bar patrons humiliated Taylor by groping her (if they washed their hands and clipped their nails first), shouting at her, pouring drinks on her, or spitting at her, among other things. Taylor said that if something like this happened to her in real life, it would be awful, but she thinks that fiction, by nature, can’t be frightening or humiliating, so instead, filming “shaming” scenes is “awesome.”
Dolore’s goal is to make people feel less ashamed of what they want and her work to demystify strange sex is probably part of the reason that fewer men are shamed for sex scandals these days.
However, Dolore isn’t immune to shame in all contexts—when she read an article about herself on TMZ that mentioned she was good with her fist, she realized that people saw her as an idiot and this humiliated her. Within her own circles, where people were educated about sex, she felt comfortable, but seeing an outside perspective was completely different.
In 2008, News of the World published a story about Max Mosley’s involvement in “sick” Nazi-themed orgies. This story should have caused massive public shaming—Mosley was a powerful public figure as the head of Formula One racing’s governing body. Additionally, his parents were well-known Hitler supporters—Hitler had been at their wedding, which was held at Joseph Goebbels’s house.
However, Mosley survived the scandal just fine and is actually more popular now than before. Some people think he leads by example when it comes to feeling unashamed.
When Mosley was in his mid-twenties, he started going to S&M clubs. He found them comfortable and relaxing. They were shame-free places where he could be authentic. He was careful, though—he’d started working in the auto industry, which regularly dug up shameful dirt on people to blackmail them.
In spring 2008, the News of the World photographed Mosley with hidden cameras while in the middle of a Nazi-themed sex orgy and released the photos and story.
Mosley didn’t withdraw or apologize when the story broke. He showed his wife the story and interviewed with BBC Radio 4. In the interview, he said that in the context of sex, people do strange things. He agreed his sex life was strange, but people shouldn’t think badly of him for it. Mosley brought his actual personality closer to his public persona, unlike Lehrer, who was almost two entirely different people and was shamed for being two-faced.
Mosley also sued the News of the World because they’d written that the orgy was Nazi-themed, which, in reality, it wasn’t:
Mosley won the case and as a result, most people see him as someone who was wronged. (The News of the World already had a villainous reputation—it had previously publicly shamed two people so badly that they committed suicide.)
Mosley had two guesses for why he’d escaped a shaming:
While Mosley was good at managing his emotions, both he and Ronson eventually concluded that Mosley escaped shame because he was a man in a consensual sex scandal. In modern times, sex scandals aren’t that shameful for men.
The next approach to coping with shame is to be radically honest and tell everyone exactly what you’re thinking at all times. For example, if you want to sleep with your wife’s sister, you should tell both your wife and her sister this. You can learn how to break news like this, or spill any of your secrets, by attending a Radical Honesty workshop. Psychotherapist Brad Blanton, who runs such workshops, believes shame thrives in secret—if you’re constantly worrying about what other people or you’re worried about being exposed, that’s when you feel shame.
Ronson attended one of Blanton’s workshops, which starts with everyone in the room being asked to tell the group something they don’t want to share. Often, the group’s reaction is disappointment—many of the secrets aren’t that scandalous or shameful, especially when considered within the context of all the secrets. For example, after a man confessed to murdering someone, the woman who next said that her secrets were boring—all she did was have sex with her cat.
The workshop also includes roleplaying. One participant sits in the Hot Seat and says (or shouts) whatever they’re really thinking and feeling, imagining that whoever’s making them feel shame is in the room. Blanton believes that people get over conflicts by being honest and then sticking with each other until their resentment fades.
To Ronson, the Radical Honesty method seemed to be mainly people yelling at each other, and sometimes this went quite badly. For example, after the workshop, one man tried to be honest with his wife and she tried to physically push him away. He responded by saying that he was going to get an ax and defend himself by killing her. Unsurprisingly, she called the police, which endangered his job.
The final approach to being publicly shamed is to remove evidence of the shaming from the internet so that it doesn’t reappear when applying for new jobs or meeting new people. Ronson covers two ways to do this:
In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that if an online text about someone was “inadequate, irrelevant...or excessive,” people could request that Google deindex the article or blog from its European sites. This means that, in theory, you could ask Google to remove shameful information about you from its search indexes.
While this ruling did result in a lot of material being deindexed—within three months, 70,000 people made requests—it also brought some of the things that people wanted buried back into the spotlight. As Google met requests, it sent automatic notices to media outlets letting them know their articles had been deindexed, which created resistance to the ruling. People started bringing up old stories again so they couldn’t be forgotten.
Reputation management companies aim to hide shameful or damaging information about people by creating new online content that knocks undesirable content onto the second or third page of online search results. According to Google, 53% of people don’t look past the first two search results and almost 90% of people don’t ever click past the first page.
Reputation management companies tend to be discreet and mysterious, and few people who sign up have their identities exposed, unlike the applicants for the Right to Be Forgotten. Their clients aren’t only people who have been publicly shamed—one unnamed company was started by a felony rapist who wanted to hide his crimes, and other common clients include pedophiles and neo-Nazis.
It’s hard to influence Google’s search result rankings because the algorithms are always changing. For example, in the mid-1990s, search engines ranked results based on how often a keyword appeared on a page. If you wanted to bury something about yourself, you could have just created a page with your name written over and over.
Keyword frequency wasn’t a very good way to get relevant search results, and two Stanford students came up with a new algorithm, PageRank, which would order search results by popularity instead. PageRank assesses links—the more pages that link to a page, the more the algorithm assumes that the page is endorsed, authentic, and respected. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr automatically have a high PageRank because Google’s algorithm thinks these sites are popular.
At the time of writing, Google’s algorithm seemed to prioritize either brand new content, or content that was older than about twelve weeks and is thus considered authoritative. This algorithmic element is another difficulty for reputation management companies—the content they initially put up about someone doesn’t stay at the top of the search results for long, and after time, the results revert to the older things that people want hidden.
Reversion isn’t necessarily a bad thing—it shows that Google’s algorithm is unsure of what information is most important. This is the company’s chance to make the new information take over for good by flooding the internet with even more non-shaming content. However, the uploading has to be timed carefully and appear natural, otherwise Google’s algorithm will notice the deluge and realize it's being manipulated.
The reputation management company Reputation.com was created by Michael Fertik, who came up with the idea of online reputation management in the mid-2000s when revenge porn and cyberbullying were starting to appear.
Fertik adheres to a code of conduct. He won’t take on clients who are under investigation for or who have committed certain crimes—violent, fraud, sexual, or crimes against children—and he won’t put up any content that isn’t true (many companies invent accolades as part of their content creation). Fertik’s clients tend to be people who have been publicly shamed, revenge porn victims, people who were falsely accused of crimes, or politicians who had said something awkward that hasn’t yet gone viral.
Fertik is often criticized for his work because according to some people, reputation management manipulates the truth and attacks free speech. He thinks his work is justified—public shaming can destroy people’s lives, and its prevalence makes everyone scared it will happen to them next.
In October 2012, Lindsey Stone posed for a photo by pretending to scream and giving the middle finger beside a sign at Arlington National Cemetery that read “Silence and Respect.”
The internet found the photo disrespectful and her public shaming lasted for over a year.
Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie had a habit of taking stupid photos of themselves. For example, they’d mimic the poses of statues or smoke in front of no smoking signs. When Lindsey and Jamie encountered the Arlington sign on a trip with the residents to Washington, D.C., Lindsey posed in front of the sign, doing exactly the opposite of what it advised. Jamie posted the photo on Facebook and tagged Lindsey with her permission.
A few of their Facebook friends commented that the photo was tasteless or offensive. Stone responded to say that they were just goofing off like they did in their other photos and that they didn’t mean any disrespect. Jamie asked Stone about taking the photo down, but Stone thought it would be fine to leave it up.
Jamie’s Facebook settings weren’t private. A month after the photo was posted, someone found it and passed it around the internet. Stone never found out who started it, but suspected it might have been someone from work who didn’t like her or Jamie.
Shamers accused Stone of hating the military, made fun of her appearance, and sent her rape and death threats. A few people commented that the photo was just a joke and Stone’s life shouldn’t be ruined, but they were quickly shut down.
Stone apologized for the photo. However, someone created a Facebook page calling for her to be fired from her job with LIFE (Living Independently Forever), a residence for people with learning disabilities. 12,000 people liked the page and many people also emailed her employer directly. Lindsey was fired.
The media showed up at Stone’s house. Her father spoke to them and noticed that the cameras focused on his cigarette and dog, which had followed him out of the house when he’d opened the door. This focus made it seem like the media was trying to cast Lindsey's family as smoking hillbillies with guard dogs.
Other Lindsey Stones got shamed as well—sixty other people with the same name lived in the US.
The photo became Stone’s entire internet presence and an iconic symbol of the enemy for military supporters, antifeminists, and right-wingers. One man even photoshopped it and turned it into wallpaper.
Stone became depressed and an insomniac, and isolated herself for almost a year. When she was ready to look for work again, no one responded to her applications. Eventually, someone offered her a caregiver job. She was terrified the new company would google her and debated telling them in advance of the interview who she was. She ultimately didn’t because once people get to know her, they aren’t angry about the photograph because they realize she’s a lot more than what the internet thinks of her.
Stone googled herself on Veterans Day in 2013. The photo had still dominated Google Image results and some ex-army people were writing about tracking her down and restarting the shaming.
16 Months Post-Shaming
Four months after Stone got her new job, she still hadn’t told anyone at work about the photo. She thought one of her coworkers might know because he made a comment about putting things up on the internet, but it was too vague for her to be sure. She lived with constant anxiety and stress because if anyone at work googled her name, the photo would come up, and she might get shamed all over again. Stone adored her new job and the children she worked with and didn’t want to lose it. Stone’s personal life was affected too—like Sacco, she hadn’t tried to date.
Ronson connected Stone with Reputation.com, who agreed to take on her case pro bono (it would normally cost several hundred thousand dollars) so that Ronson could observe the process as research for the book. Stone knew that she’d also have to appear in Ronson’s book, but her situation at the time was so uncomfortable that she thought removing the photo from the internet would be an improvement nonetheless.
Stone worked with Farukh Rashid to create a new internet presence. Initially Stone found the process entertaining, but it became existential—she had to ask herself who she really was and how to brand herself. When she described her five years working at Walmart as “soul-sucking,” Rashid asked her if she wanted to use that word. At first, she laughed, because she didn’t think that it could possibly offend anyone because it was true, but then she hesitated. The process ultimately involved presenting a watered-down version of herself—someone who liked Top 40 music and cats and travel but wasn’t as outspoken or playful.
20 Months Post-Shaming
By October 2014, the photo no longer dominated Google’s search results. It still appeared, but so did blog posts about traveling, new social media accounts, photos of Stone doing regular things, and photos of other Lindsey Stones. The reputation management process is an ongoing process, though, and Rashid calls Stone every week so she can approve Reputation.com’s latest content.
There are five approaches to responding to being publicly shamed.
Imagine someone found one of your old social media posts, misinterpreted it, shared it widely, and you’re now the victim of a public shaming campaign. What’s your immediate response? (For example, do you apologize, withdraw, or go online and defend yourself?)
How might this shaming affect your life in the long term? (For example, you might get fired, followed by the media, and so on.)
Which of the approaches would you take to manage these long-term consequences? Why?