Public Shaming

[coloradoatheist]

One of the new trends, and one that could help the Coachella groping issue is that of public shaming. With all the cameras and videos its easy to capture behavior that isn't illegal per se, but either on the line or socially unacceptable. But it's not just the initial video that becomes the issue. It's the follow up with people getting ahold of information and either sending hate mail, death threats, hounding employers.

1) Is there a potential for going to far for trying to rid bad behavior?
2) Will governments need to address where the line is for some posting public shaming or doing something like providing personal information?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

It's an interesting question. A general rule of the internet age is that you shouldn't put anything online that you wouldn't want an employer or anyone else you care about to see. If you're doing body shots off a naked fourteen year old who's passed out in the back room of a frat party or if you're waving a tiki torch around yelling death to the Jews at a Nazi rally, you're going to want to avoid putting that onto Facebook.

A direct corollary of that is that you shouldn't want anyone else to be putting it online for you either. If you join in on a Nazi rally and there are people on the street filming you, there isn't a significant difference between that and you posting it yourself. If you don't think it would be a good idea to put up an Instagram post of you grabbing some girl's ass in a crowd, it's a similarly bad idea to be grabbing the asses of girls when you're in a crowd where every single person is carry a high definition camera with them.

You don't have any right to privacy for actions you take in public. If somebody films you robbing a bank, grabbing an ass or anything else noteworthy, they are free to take your public action and put it online to expand the members of the public whom you are doing it in front of. Then if someone in the crowd you did it in or on the forum it was posted on says "Hey, that's Frank", that's your own damn fault for doing it in public.

Now, if they're wrong about your identity and they slander you by saying that this criminal / creep is you when it wasn't then that's another issue. If they're right about the identity, however, then the solution was to not engage in anti-social behaviour in public, not to complain about people calling you out for your anti-social behaviour.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Yes you are right that if your behavior is in public it will be recorded. But what happened in our town yesterday was the lady went ballistic at a worker at Dairy Queen. Somebody recorded it and then what happened with the shaming was that her information was given out and people started harassing and even death threats against that behavior. The original behavior was bad, but the resultant behavior was bad too.

 

[Elixir]

Yes you are right that if your behavior is in public it will be recorded. But what happened in our town yesterday was the lady went ballistic at a worker at Dairy Queen. Somebody recorded it and then what happened with the shaming was that her information was given out and people started harassing and even death threats against that behavior. The original behavior was bad, but the resultant behavior was bad too.

We need to take our cues from our Leader. You don't see any videos of Trump grabbing pussies, do you? That's because he only does it when he is fairly sure he'll get away with it or be able to hush it up with an appropriate allocation of funds. If you don't have his kind of funds, then best restrict your reprehensible behaviors to non-public - or at least, not-likely-to-be-filmed - venues.

 

[rousseau]

Having been a member of Twitter for a while I really don't like the idea of public shaming. The main problem with it, in my view, is that there is rarely any subtlety involved, and people forget the fact that we're all human and make mistakes.

Some well meaning person can feasibly say a really bad, wrong thing which could easily be rectified by a polite and private conversation. But then it goes viral and their life ends up getting ruined.

To me the internet's only really amplified mob justice, rather than provided any sense of fairness.

 

[J842P]

Having been a member of Twitter for a while I really don't like the idea of public shaming. The main problem with it, in my view, is that there is rarely any subtlety involved, and people forget the fact that we're all human and make mistakes.

Some well meaning person can feasibly say a really bad, wrong thing which could easily be rectified by a polite and private conversation. But then it goes viral and their life ends up getting ruined.

To me the internet's only really amplified mob justice, rather than provided any sense of fairness.

I pretty much agree. While certainly social censure and shaming can play an important role in regulating social behavior, the internet seems to make it veer too much in the direction of mob justice and witch hunts.

 

[WAB]

People have it easy nowadays, even the worst offenders, comparatively speaking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillory

Being terribly claustrophobic, I shudder to think of what it would be like to be put in the stocks. I'd most likely die of shock, brought on by absolute, unmitigated panic. Or at least I would hope!

 

[Underseer]

One of the new trends, and one that could help the Coachella groping issue is that of public shaming. With all the cameras and videos its easy to capture behavior that isn't illegal per se, but either on the line or socially unacceptable. But it's not just the initial video that becomes the issue. It's the follow up with people getting ahold of information and either sending hate mail, death threats, hounding employers.

1) Is there a potential for going to far for trying to rid bad behavior?
2) Will governments need to address where the line is for some posting public shaming or doing something like providing personal information?

Oh no!

People are being subjected to "public shaming" just for a little innocent sexual assault? That's so unfair to men! This is obviously a case of the feminazis persecuting innocent men! This is #metoo all over again! [/conservolibertarian]

 

[southernhybrid]

Yes you are right that if your behavior is in public it will be recorded. But what happened in our town yesterday was the lady went ballistic at a worker at Dairy Queen. Somebody recorded it and then what happened with the shaming was that her information was given out and people started harassing and even death threats against that behavior. The original behavior was bad, but the resultant behavior was bad too.

Yes. That's going too far, but we already have laws that allow the police to arrest people who make death threats at another person. And, an individual can sue for defamation of character. Is that good enough, or do you want the government to go further?

 

[braces_for_impact]

I worry about the backlash. I think it can be argued that today's Trumpist "movement" is a backlash to public shaming. It used to be shameful to publicly display racist attitudes, for instance, now these idiots wear it like a badge of honor.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Yes you are right that if your behavior is in public it will be recorded. But what happened in our town yesterday was the lady went ballistic at a worker at Dairy Queen. Somebody recorded it and then what happened with the shaming was that her information was given out and people started harassing and even death threats against that behavior. The original behavior was bad, but the resultant behavior was bad too.

Yes. That's going too far, but we already have laws that allow the police to arrest people who make death threats at another person. And, an individual can sue for defamation of character. Is that good enough, or do you want the government to go further?

Except there is a fine line too, we'll see how things go in the future and see.

- - - Updated - - -

One of the new trends, and one that could help the Coachella groping issue is that of public shaming. With all the cameras and videos its easy to capture behavior that isn't illegal per se, but either on the line or socially unacceptable. But it's not just the initial video that becomes the issue. It's the follow up with people getting ahold of information and either sending hate mail, death threats, hounding employers.

1) Is there a potential for going to far for trying to rid bad behavior?
2) Will governments need to address where the line is for some posting public shaming or doing something like providing personal information?

Oh no!

People are being subjected to "public shaming" just for a little innocent sexual assault? That's so unfair to men! This is obviously a case of the feminazis persecuting innocent men! This is #metoo all over again! [/conservolibertarian]

Actually I haven't seen any for sexual behavior. More for driving, handling customer situations, kids doing stuff, etc.

 

[coloradoatheist]

And just to add the extra addition, it's not always the person who made the comments that get hurt. In the case I referred to the kids of the mom are also being shunned even though they had nothing to do with the incident and one even apologized afterward.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Having been a member of Twitter for a while I really don't like the idea of public shaming. The main problem with it, in my view, is that there is rarely any subtlety involved, and people forget the fact that we're all human and make mistakes.

Some well meaning person can feasibly say a really bad, wrong thing which could easily be rectified by a polite and private conversation. But then it goes viral and their life ends up getting ruined.

To me the internet's only really amplified mob justice, rather than provided any sense of fairness.

I pretty much agree. While certainly social censure and shaming can play an important role in regulating social behavior, the internet seems to make it veer too much in the direction of mob justice and witch hunts.

I think it all has to do with anonymity. The freak out you do in an ice cream store can be a lot worse than the freak out you do at the ice cream store run by your brother, because there isn't the expectation of long term social consequences to you for being the pissed off freak. The amount of groping you do at a concert packed with strangers can be a lot more than the amount of groping you do at your grandmother's church social because there isn't the worry of being known as the guy who goes around groping women.

The same holds true with the responses. If you're the anonymous guy online or at the end of a phone call to someone you'll never actually meet, there's not the same restraint necessary in your reactions which you'd need to have when dealing with people whom you'd interact with again in the future and be known as the guy who threatened to kill that lady because of her freak out.

 

[ronburgundy]

Having been a member of Twitter for a while I really don't like the idea of public shaming. The main problem with it, in my view, is that there is rarely any subtlety involved, and people forget the fact that we're all human and make mistakes.

Some well meaning person can feasibly say a really bad, wrong thing which could easily be rectified by a polite and private conversation. But then it goes viral and their life ends up getting ruined.

To me the internet's only really amplified mob justice, rather than provided any sense of fairness.

I pretty much agree. While certainly social censure and shaming can play an important role in regulating social behavior, the internet seems to make it veer too much in the direction of mob justice and witch hunts.

I think it all has to do with anonymity. The freak out you do in an ice cream store can be a lot worse than the freak out you do at the ice cream store run by your brother, because there isn't the expectation of long term social consequences to you for being the pissed off freak. The amount of groping you do at a concert packed with strangers can be a lot more than the amount of groping you do at your grandmother's church social because there isn't the worry of being known as the guy who goes around groping women.

The same holds true with the responses. If you're the anonymous guy online or at the end of a phone call to someone you'll never actually meet, there's not the same restraint necessary in your reactions which you'd need to have when dealing with people whom you'd interact with again in the future and be known as the guy who threatened to kill that lady because of her freak out.

Totally agree. On the one hand, modernism has led to moral progress by making it impossible for bad authorities and ideologies to go unchallenged and by increasing secular ethics rooted more in empathy and fairness than the authoritarian ethics of religion.

OTOH, modernism has increased exchanges among strangers with no real long term community ties to each other or shared social circles, thus removing a major constraint to being a selfish asshole to other people.

This has long been revealing itself in major population centers, and evident into the increasing inhumanity of larger corporations to their employees and customers whom are just numbers on a spreadsheet who the decision makers have no real social/community contact with. The internet has worsened this exponentially and made it a more pervasive phenomena that not only shapes online interactions, but then resets the norms for in person interactions as well.

And it's not just about a lack of civility, but a lack of intellectual honesty in the discourse. This board is better than most sources of online exchange, yet even here, there are many arguments that the poster would be too embarrassed to make in public for fear others they know might overhear it.

However, the flipside of that coin is that there are valid ideas and arguments that should be allowed everywhere, yet only get made online because of fear of reprisals where others will seek to destroy that person's life, not for any actual wrongdoing, but just for voicing a view the other's disagree with.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Derail posts moved to mega thread

https://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?6778-Derec-s-BLM-derail-posts