So You Have Been Publicly Shamed
This book is my answer whenever somebody asks me about a book to read. I don’t think this is the best book that I’ve ever read, but I do believe this is THE book everyone should read—as in—it should be mandatory reading in early school curriculum.
The main learning?
Never boost any mob justice outrage, if the targeted person is not an already established celebrity. Don’t bully strangers.
The book tells several stories about people who did or said something stupid, and their lives got ruined because of it. The transgressions discussed are mundane, in the 90’s or 2000’s nobody would care. But in the age of social media they have become mortal sins.
A young journalist boarded a plane to go to Africa, before boarding she sent a joke tweet in poor taste and put her phone in airplane mode. Before she landed she became briefly the most hated person on Earth, got fired from her job and got shunned by her friends. All of this because some influencer with a million followers quote re-tweeted her.
During a developer conference a woman was presenting her work. One man told his friend a slightly sexual joke. The woman in front of them overheard it, turned around, took their picture and complained about it on Twitter. The two men got fired from their jobs. One of them told his story on Twitter too. The mob has turned against the woman who took the picture. She got fired too. After a year, she still was not able to find another job.
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This story repeats over and over. Somebody says something offensive (to some) but ultimately harmless, some influencer gets enraged, shares the story and then their followers just pile on. To be fair, before there was twitter, 4chan was also source of a couple of similar attacks1.
Celebrities mostly do stupid things as rage-bait and engaging just makes them more money, I’d recommend ignoring them too. Also public shaming rarely works on the most outrageous cases2.
A whole industry to combat this has cropped up. You can pay for a service which will do what they can to push the nasty stuff you are known about to the second or third page of Google results. It is costly though.
In this day and age, where we tend to character-assassinate people due to the smallest slight, I think the book is worth a re-reading.