Shame Storm

This thoughtful essay was written by a moderate conservative writer who recounts her experiences and insights around public shame and humiliation and what it’s like to have your name and negative statements about you permanently accessible on the internet.

Towards the end of this piece, Helen Andrew offers sound moral advice to media editors and social media users:

EXCERPT: “The solution, then, is not to try to make shame storms well targeted, but to make it so they happen as infrequently as possible. Editors should refuse to run stories that have no value except humiliation, and readers should refuse to click on them. It is, after all, the moral equivalent of contributing your rock to a public stoning. We should all develop a robust sense of what is and is not any of our business. Shame can be useful—and even necessary—but it is toxic unless a relationship exists between two people first. A Twitter mob is no more a basis for salutary shaming than an actual mob is for reasoned discussion. That would be true even if the shaming’s relics were not preserved forever by Google, making any kind of rehabilitation impossible”.