The Consequences of Public Shaming
Public shaming occurs for different reasons ranging from exposing bigotry to enforcing social norms. It is starkly clear that online public shaming has very real damaging consequences for those it is targeted at. Where is the line we should not cross?
China has screens that broadcast the social ills of people identified using a combination of facial recognition cameras and programming algorithms. Many of the country's police officers are now equipped with facial recognition spectacles. Call it what you will, ensuring public safety, mass surveillance, or Big Brother. The intended result is to ensure an orderly society by shaming its citizens into submission when they embark on abhorrent behaviour.
“Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.”
China's enhanced surveillance methods also make it easier to capture those who commit crimes. In recent months, district courts in Anhui province in China have taken to displaying faces of debtors on advertisement boards, bus stops, and even railway stations. In addition to their names and faces, other identifying information and their debt amounts are included. The displays intentionally coincided with a public holiday.
State sanctioned shaming and surveillance blurs the line between public and private. Enforcing social norms tends to enhance the cultural mores of the dominant social group and can mean the careless neglect of minorities. Government critics might be monitored more closely. After all, public shaming is an act of discrediting someone or something.
“More ominous, though, are the likely punishments that will be inflicted on people who associate with dissidents or critics, who circulate a petition or hold up a protest sign, or who simply wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Many Chinese citizens believe public shaming is nothing to worry about as long as you don't step out of line. For the average citizen in a country of over 1.4 billion, this indifference may be suitable. 10 million people and counting have been publicly shamed by the government, and over 160 residents have been blacklisted from travelling via air or high speed railway. Their crimes include attempting to carry a lighter through airport security, smoking on a train, and tax evasion.
In the United States, with diminished trust in law enforcement and the connectivity of the Internet, people are resorting to social media and the Internet to identify real life aggressors and post pictures and videos of their alleged crimes. This has led to serious ramifications. People wrongly identified as bigots or criminals have lost their jobs and faced death threats. Those correctly identified have lost their jobs and faced death threats.
When the Boston Marathon bombing happened in 2013, social media sleuths were in a frenzy to identify the perpetrators. Sunil Tripathi, a missing Brown University student, was wrongly identified as one of the bombers by Redditors. His family suffered additional unwarranted anguish in the days following the bombing. Salah Barhoum, a local high school student, had his picture splashed across The New York Post as being wanted by the FBI for questioning.
Headline on The Boston Globe regarding the lawsuit
In both instances, the two were innocent, their families harassed by journalists and the public both on and offline. The New York Post was sued for defamation and settled out of court. The other social media investigators, broadcasters, and journalists who spread misleading and downright false information about them faced no charges and saw no consequences by and large. On the other hand, the rush by the media to be the first to deliver "breaking news" came at a high cost to those they misidentified.
In the case of the 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist rally, an attendee was incorrectly identified as university professor Kyle Quinn. Quinn was vilified on social media, with people targeting his Twitter account and sending him hateful messages. He and his wife were forced into hiding after their home address was published online. Thankfully, his university assisted in getting the images naming him as the attendee off the Internet and had campus security watch over his lab on campus.
One of the posts on Twitter misidentifying Kyle Quinn as a white supremecist
Even when you publicly expose people conducting questionable behaviour, be careful the backlash doesn't turn on you. When Adria Richards posted a picture of two men making inappropriate comments at PyCon on Twitter, the consequences were horrifying. They weren't horrifying for the men she exposed. They were horrifying for her. She was blasted with derogatory racial epithets, threats of sexual and physical violence, and more. Her employer was subjected to a DDoS attack and given the ultimatum of firing her. They did.
SendGrid's public dismissal of their employee Adria Richards on Twitter
The instinctive response to someone being a bigot might very well be to take your indignation online and spread it as far and wide as virality allows. In person confrontation is unpleasant, uncomfortable, and possibly unsafe. But when a potentially small incident occurs and is posted on the Internet, this can blow things vastly out of proportion. The Internet acts as the judge, jury, and executioner. And the Internet never forgets.
It's not all doom and gloom. There are actionable ways to reach out to people in your social circle who you disagree with. Create room for dialogue and listen. Reach out to people well before they are a stage where their transgressions escalate to threats or even violence. It is much harder to change the mind of someone who has acted out in hateful violence and isolated, judged by hordes of anonymous strangers.
There are also a number of initiatives aimed at encouraging dialogue between people who have different life experiences and belief systems. The Skin Deep is one of them. The { } And video series by them is excellent at conveying the nuances of individual stories and relationships.
The Skin Deep's YouTube channel
Jubilee is another project worth checking out. Their Middle Ground videos bring attention to various perspectives on different issues like religion, gun policies, and other hotly debated issues.
Jubilee's YouTube channel
Those affected by past instances of public shaming are learning from the outcry they experienced. PyCon updated their code of conduct in the wake of the disproportionate consequences of the tweet. They have also continued to increase transparency regarding reported incidents, their outcomes, and guidelines for attendees. Tripathi's family worked to have a documentary made about his struggle with mental illness and the consequences of the public naming him as a terrorist. Adria Richards is determined to move past the immense shame she was subjected to.
Is privacy in the technological age an illusion? Should state-sanctioned public shaming be enforced? These are tough questions with a complex range of answers. What about crowd sourcing the identities of bigots or criminals? If you ask Salah Barhoum or Kyle Quinn, they would much rather we leave the identification of suspects to the experts.