The Return of Shaming (Draft #2)

The proliferation of mobile devices and Internet access has diffused power to police and punish from the state to the community. Internet users can identify wrongdoers and punish them through online shaming. My concern is with the vices of online shaming, particularly when used against individuals. The features of online shaming: the relative anonymity of activists; a lack of co-ordination; and a lack of real connection to the target can give rise to cruel and unnecessary humiliation.

The simplest method of online shaming is publication of incriminating evidence to allow other users condemn and circulate. The online community can work together to publicly identify a target of online shaming. In extreme cases a person’s name, address, family members, and place of employment will be published. This is referred to as “doxing” or in China as the “Human Flesh Search Engine”. Following publication further punishment can be inflicted on the target such as online harassment, phone calls, leaving threats at a person’s home, or demanding the person be fired from employment.

The ability to publicly shame can have significant benefits such as redistribution of political power, and closing of impunity gaps. For example Chinese Communist Party Officials have been identified and shamed for corruption. Police officers that use excessive force or inappropriate language are now liable to find video evidence of their conduct online accompanied with calls for investigations (see the Nation; and Washington Post.)

While online shaming is new, public shaming as punishment is not. Shame sanctions were integrated to criminal justice systems in Roman society and Puritan New systems (See Daniel Solove p. 91),and were central to some tribal justice systems (see National Institute of Justice; and report of the Aboriginal Justice Implementation Commission.)

The central element of shaming punishments, humiliation, is achieved through participation of a community familiar to the offender. Shaming sanctions therefore tend to be more effective in small communities. Modern societies have largely abolished shaming sanctions, partly because of objections that shaming was uncivilized, and less effective in urban societies. The relative anonymity of a densely populated urban environment, and the concomitant absence of a familiar community, makes public humiliation impractical (See also Daniel Solove p. 91 - 92).

The Internet enables public shaming to occur by piercing anonymity and allowing for assemblage of a crowd. An offender cannot disappear into a city to escape the opprobrium of an online crowd. The crowd need not be restricted to the target’s neighbors, peers, or relatives. It may include anyone with an Internet connection and an interest. Cole Stryker describes this as the “re-villaging” of the human community.

While people can behave like villagers online, we do not live as villagers. Online activists rarely live in close proximity to the targets of online shaming. As a result participants in online shaming do not know the target, her family, or her immediate community. This lack of reciprocal obligation makes humiliation by the community online inherently liable to being disproportionate.

The online community knows very little about, and has no social contact with the targets of an online campaign. This makes it difficult for online activists to put a persons aberrant behavior in context before engaging in online shaming. Take for example, racist rant videos posted online in the UK and Australia. Videos of individuals hurling racist abuse in public are quickly uploaded and circulated, allowing an offender to be identified and condemned. The shaming occurs before mitigating or contextual factors can be communicated. In circumstances where sympathetic circumstances exist – such as mental illness, drug abuse – to explain herself the offender must surrender more privacy and risk further humiliation.

Another example is Grace Wang, a Chinese student, who during a confrontation between “Free-Tibet” and “Pro-China” protesters at Duke University was photographed writing “Free Tibet” on a student protester’s t-shirt. Wang was not a supporter of Tibet but trying to mediate the dispute. She agreed to write on her fellow student's T-Shirt on the condition he talk to the Pro-China protesters. Wang was accused of being a traitor to China, her identity and personal details were published online. She received death threats and her parents in China were forced into hiding. The Human Search Flesh Engine pursued Wang without understanding her actual beliefs or the context of her behavior: an attempt to mediate a confrontation within her University.

Participants in online shaming lack the incentives, imperatives, or means to practice restraint. Participants owe no social obligations to their target. Grace Wang and the pro-China demonstrators at Duke University resolved their dispute. They had to move on and co-exist at College together. Online activists have no need to ever interact with a victim. They have no incentive to temper their conduct to allow the community to move forward.

Further, the online activists retain anonymity by operating under an alias, due to the sheer volume of participants or online campaigns. Participants are not accountable to a community, or a target’s family, for the extent of hurt and humiliation caused.

Even individual participants that feel a degree of obligation to treat the subject of shaming fairly are not in an ideal position to restrain themselves or the online crowd. The process of online shaming is not organized. Individual participants in the process do not know what actions others are engaged in. There is no person responsible, or established methods for evaluating, when someone has “had enough”. Moreover, as the online community has no proximity to the target it is unlikely individual activists could be aware of the actual effects of public humiliation on a target.

Online shaming is a communal activity, but practiced in the absence of traditional constraints imposed by an actual community it risks being unjust and disproportionate. The Chinese Government sought to regulate the Human Flesh Search Engine by prohibiting the publication of personal details and offensive materials. In my view laws seeking to limit online shaming are unlikely to be effective and are undesirable restriction on free speech. The problem with online shaming is not free speech, but the formation of uncontrollable and unaccountable online mobs. Rather, it is desirable for public dialogue to recognize the risks and ethical challenges of public shaming, in the hope of forming new norms that guide who is publicly shamed and place limits on the humiliation.