The Pitfalls of the “Wikipedia Age” and the Dangers of Shaming in the Age of Coronavirus

In which I endanger my own standing on Medium as a platform by attacking another — for the sake of public good. Trust me.

Last week Gen, the politics and culture subblog of this very platform, Medium, published a story by Jennifer Jacquet titled The Public Shaming Has Only Just Begun. Intended as a message about why public shaming in the age of coronavirus is good and can save lives, I’m here to tell you why Jacquet’s advice is in fact extremely dangerous — and how American society in particular is on a trajectory to learn exactly the wrong lessons from the coronavirus pandemic. And why the worst pandemic of all is the free availability, dissemination and promotion of unchecked, unverified “facts.”

Fake News, if you will.

That’s not to say shaming doesn’t have its place or that good can’t come from shaming. But before that, a primer on Jacquet’s premise: how shaming, from social media exposure to the author shooting “dirty looks” to to people who don’t cover their coughs, “corrects” people to proper behavior. That’s it in a nutshell. Chances are you’ve seen the broad premise of her thesis in action, if not specific cases, such as the Colvin brothers (whom Jacquet only identified as a single individual), the infamous “hand sanitizer hoarders” being shamed into donating their entire hoard or social media posts about reckless Spring Breakers or so-called “Covidiots” in general.

And indeed, shaming does have its place and it is working in that place. Shaming has played a factor in people becoming more respectful of others’ actual physical sensitivity to the coronavirus and other infections and practicing safe guidelines; of being more resistant to “go back to work” calls too early; and greater awareness of ancillary issues such as universal health care and other gaping holes in the U.S. health care system and the bonkers, insane and yet culturally imbued common belief that the United States is or rather was protected from pandemics due to divine favoritism and the vague and clearly dangerous and outright deadly belief in the falsehood of American exceptionalism. But as Western and especially American culture has a tendency of doing to things in general (refer back to the previously listed examples of divine favoritism and American exceptionalism, or indeed the pitfalls of social media since a thing only aging geeks remember called USENET dominated online discourse), shaming can and has been taken to extremes. Dangerous, and even deadly extremes.

For starters, Jacquet herself lists an example where shaming backfired, when police in Derbyshire, England used drones to shame people into “social distancing” by catching them breaking guidelines in the act — except, the people they voyeuristically caught were following guidelines. Italian mayors made clear their desires for increased social distancing in what some might say is “a very Italian means of doing so” — screaming insults into their cameras like the mad men they very well might be succumbing into, as John Oliver infamously showed on an increasing series dedicated to coronavirus in Last Week Tonight. It’s a tactic that doesn’t seem to be working — or at least not as much as general awareness as consequences are settling in, better (and calmer) messages are being disseminated or, for that matter, actual testing which depending on interpretation of data is either necessary to show when social distancing can end and/or where it needs reinforcement, or the only true means of actually defeating coronavirus without completely surrendering to dooming everything else for virtual in-perpetuity as researchers continue to hope to fumble into a treatment or vaccine that could take years or even decades.

But the public good and pitfalls of social public shaming have always been an issue — it’s just been transformed by our current obsession with coronavirus, an obsession that’s been forced upon us and has immense ramifications depending on our ability to shake it off once it’s over (a subject for another time). The aforementioned John Oliver is no stranger to both the good and the bad of public shaming as indeed Last Week Tonight indulges in it as a major part of its informative and factual narrative — usually and overwhelmingly, for at least what this author believes is, for the public good. Last Week Tonight devoted an entire segment to the topic of public shaming itself, which Oliver rightly called “America’s favorite pastime,” and its effects on pubic good and negative outcomes complete with an in-depth interview with Monica Lewinsky — which in turn solicited a response from Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic concerning how Last Week Tonight is wrong about how “public shaming encourages public accountability” and “John Oliver’s Weak Case for Callout Culture.”

For starters, Friedersdorf argues that there can’t be any public good from shaming if it can’t pass a “shame test,” which it automatically fails if such a test can’t even be applied to begin with. To which he describes Oliver’s application of “shame tests” to be “inconsistent.” The only real active criteria Oliver has assigned to his apparent “shame test” is one of intensity and one of window of opportunity. The latter is itself ill-defined — what kind of window is appropriate for whom? Even in the case of the example John Oliver has particularly piled upon — social media star Olivia Jade, one of the daughters of TV star Lori Loughlin and one of the students caught up in the infamous schools admissions scandal, and at the time legitimately one of the most famous or at least recognizable people on the entire planet — Oliver admits it’s ambiguous, an echo Friedersdorf insists on magnifying. Olivia Jade is after all a public figure — again, she is, or was, legitimately one of the most famous or at least recognizable people on the planet — but the situation is compounded by questions about her complicity in the scandal (there seems to be some consensus that Olivia Jade and her sister were truly ignorant of the situation, and even her mom and chief scandal poster child Lori seem ignorant of all the complete goings-on that scandal orchestrator William “Rick” Singer had compiled to execute the scandal) as well as the fact that at the time Olivia Jade was a minor, or at least then (and still is, having just turned 20) at an age where most parents can identify with vulnerability. These factors, Oliver admits, compounds upon and conflicts with Olivia Jades’s “public figure” status in determining how long the “window of shame” should remain open, if at all. It’s quite telling that when the staged photos of Olivia Jade posing for a “fake” spot on a collegiate rowing team were recently released to the public — yes, the case is still very much ongoing in a coronavirus-addled world — her face was censored beyond recognition in accordance with customs concerning legal cases involving minors, despite 1.) Olivia Jade no longer being a minor (again, 20 years old — although she would’ve been 17 when the photo itself was taken) and 2.) the woman in the photograph clearly being identified as Olivia Jade elsewhere, including in the photo’s very captioning.

Another key criterion for Friedersdorf’s “shame test” is if the shaming even works at all, no matter how intense the shaming or how wide the window of opportunity presents itself (we’ll get back to Oliver’s own “shame test” criteria later). The second major target of Oliver’s segment is FOX News’ Tucker Carlson — a man who admittedly is perpetually a valid target of public shaming from a wide-open window of opportunity of his own making. However, the shaming of Tucker Carlson just doesn’t work — Friedersdorf has made an entire case study on that. Shaming may work on someone like, say, Olivia Jade (who makes her entire living and fame on public perception) or even Monica Lewinsky (keep in mind, shaming works both ways, good and bad) or the average citizen like you or me as long as said person is concerned about their public and personal standing and image.

But that doesn’t work on Tucker Carlson, or indeed the vast majority of pundits on FOX News and One America Network, and many of Trump’s closest cabinet members and advisers (Trump himself is a uniquely special, odd case that I’ll get into later) or other key leaders of the Republican Party — because they’re simply operating on a completely different plane of public perception, self-worth and value practically invulnerable to shaming.

All of these entities, Trump included, have one key thing in common that bestows upon them this public shame invulnerability — a very large base of the voting public unquestionably dedicated to them, apparently just over 49% from the last count that really mattered, just under four years ago. It’s not so much a “personality cult” as some have declared — although that does play a huge factor in both the reinvigorated Republican Party and, even more important and critically, the marriage of that Party to Trump — but really of an organizational or, if you will, “Party Cult.” The Republican Party itself remolded itself not just into what’s effectively a cult, but something akin to a personality cult specifically — but instead of actual personalities, its weak, vague slogans personified and surrounded with cultish devotion. Distinct from the strict edicts and beliefs of a traditional cult, it’s the mindless worshiping of “small government” or, more specifically, the demonization of “big government” and other Reaganesque policies that were vague and ill-defined to begin with and with no greater understand beyond “right wing = good, left wing = evil” along with whoever else tows the party line. The distinction between this and a “traditional” cult is that it attracts and encourages the incubation of personality cults from all directions — it’s not just the personality cult of Donald Trump, but of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, even of Senator Lindsay Graham who was once labeled (by Trump no less) as “weak-willed;” of Rudy Giuliani, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.; of Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingram, Ben Shapiro and all the other major right-wing pundits of FOX News, One America Network and radio. None of these people and entities care about the broader public perception of themselves because all they have to do is care about the perception of a very concentrated cult base that already looks up to them as nigh-infallible, making them practically invulnerable to shaming tactics. Trump does care about the broader public perception: it’s the whole entire reason why he ran for President in the first place, and his acquiescence to Dr. Fauci on the “national stand-down” is standing proof of that. But shaming can only go so far when Trump surrounds himself, by circumstance as much as by choice, by the most impenetrable and shame-proof defense of all, the entire Republican Right. The failure to understand the nuances of this is a major reason why, if not the driving factor, of how the personality cult of not a single person but an entire political movement has gone unchecked, and may still go unchecked in the face of coronavirus and post-coronavirus culture — if not become even worse.

But those nuances are left for another subject. What’s critical to understand in the context of shaming is this: when your personality cult is this big and influential, shame simply ceases to exist. From this, it’s now possible to understand the context of shame and the Republican Right, and why it’s been so abysmally ineffectual, or even outright backfires.

And why trying to use shame to “course correct” the Republican Right perpetually fails the “shame test.”

And there’s one more criterion where Oliver’s and Friedersdorf’s “shame tests” intersect, one that Jacquet seems to be woefully unaware of, or at least hesitant to mention in her own article. And it’s perhaps the one criterion that’s most relevant to coronavirus survival and culture, as it’s the most dangerous: danger, itself. And how people react to that danger.

Unless you’re, as I’ve just discussed, completely invulnerable to shame itself, there’s no true accurate way to judge just how individuals will react to being shamed. We’ve seen individuals shamed into healthier and more sociable behavior during the coronavirus pandemic (although, in the case of the Colvin “hand sanitizer hoarder” brothers, it’s not so much being shamed as it is Amazon directly intervening to spoil the bothers’ schemes, and that’s even before getting into the larger issue of whether sanitizer even works against coronavirus and how overusing sanitizer amidst coronavirus fears weakens their ability to fight other diseases). We’ve also seen individuals shamed while doing that very same healthy and sociable behavior (more on that later, too). Olivia Jade has simply gone into largely radio silence during her “window of shame opportunity” and beyond; whether or not that action is relevant to any real sin, if at all, she’s committed is very debatable. And we’ve seen shame force people to spiral completely out of control.

Some of you might be familiar with the name August Ames. To put it rather bluntly and factually, she was a rather famous porn star. In December 2017 she put out a random tweet warning another woman she didn’t even know the identity of who had replaced her in a shoot she’d declined over the male performer, who had done porn with both women and other men. The tweet read, “Whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews, you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say… Do agents really not care about who they’re representing?… I do my homework for my body”

The concern Ames was expressing is about the notion that men who perform in porn having sex with both women and other men represent a higher risk of sexual infections, specifically for both cis women and trans women — a risk that Ames clearly expressed was unacceptable. This was met with outrage from the LGBTQIA+ community, advocates and other porn stars — rage that is also understandable. Although I try as an individual to support causes related to sex workers, sex positivity and the LGBTQIA+ community, I am neither a sex worker or identify as actually LGBTQIA+ myself nor do I have much opportunity to actually practice sex positivity beyond general support as someone not currently engaged in a sexual relationship (perhaps too TMI there, but I’m trying to make a point), so I simply don’t know which side of the issue is more “objectively correct” or even at all. But what’s relevant is the application of where Oliver’s and Friedersdorf’s “shame tests” intersect — shame fails the public good where the shame becomes more destructive than useful. Or, as Oliver bluntly puts it, “if it’s death threats and vile comments, then of course not.”

A tweet by fellow porn star Jaxton Wheeler, a pansexual cis man who has performed having sex with both men and women in porn, in direct reply to Ames certainly fits under Oliver’s “death threats and vile comments” definition: “The world is awaiting your apology or for you to swallow a cyanide pill. Either or we’ll take it.[sic]”

The very same day of that tweet, December 5, 2017, August Ames was found dead in a public park, having hung herself.

August Ames wasn’t the first or only person to commit suicide over deafening public shaming, or even the only public figure to do so. Kesha reportedly attempted suicide after her music producer Dr. Luke went public with comments made to shame her — the very same Dr. Luke that Kesha has successfully sued over other forms of verbal and psychological abuse as well as physical abuse, sex assault and rape. In 2018, Demi Lovato was rescued from an overdose that had been brought on from a litany of very public battles, including public shaming and bullying. In 2015, a 13-year-old girl committed suicide after her own father attempted to shame her by cutting off her hair, filming the results and posting it on YouTube. That same year, a 47-year-old clerk for the government of Israel was publicly shamed for racist behavior; he consequently successfully ended his life by shooting himself. Harvard Medical School and JSTOR Daily, a university-level academic digest, each have case studies about the role public shaming has in suicide, especially for teen and young adult women. In other words, it just goes on and on.

And that’s when society is actually functioning normally. Add in a pandemic, confusing and often contradictory information on what’s “right” to do from all sides, and absolutely no real leadership whatsoever at all levels from city up through state and federal, and you have a surefire recipe for disaster.

We’ve already seen that in action, too — refer to the Derbyshire Police example cited both here and by Jacquet — and like everything else with the pandemic it will certainly almost get worse from here. Take for example the whole mask debacle (and yes, it is a debacle through-and-through). Confusing and contradictory information on who should wear what masks, what masks should be reserved for who, which masks should only medical professionals wear, how to wear masks, what materials should masks even be made out of, and most critical and damning of all, if it’s even good or bad to wear masks in the first place, have already sewn an irreparable amount of confusion and destruction. Even as the People’s Republic of China and The Czech Republic implored the rest of the world to adopt face masks as critical components for helping to stem their COVID-19 infections and swiftly and prematurely “flatten the curve” in “almost miracle time,” saving up to tens of thousands from death and millions more from extended quarantine misery, the CDC infamously delayed their decision and advice for weeks and the World Health Organization, as recently as a week prior to the publication of this article, still recommends healthy people to not wear face masks, in a move that may be more damning to the WHO in the court of public opinion than Trump’s posturing to cut off funding — and a move that may be justifying Trump’s anti-WHO posturing. Indeed, these recommendations are not without reason and logic — the whole reason why the CDC wavered on a decision and even told the masses not to wear masks was to help manage a mask shortage (one that has less to do with Trump’s doing and is more simply institutional) but only ended up backfiring with deadly consequences, damning the CDC as yet another cog in a machine seemingly eternally damned with ineffectual and shameful leadership that sacrificed lives in the process.

How will public shaming help in the face of such confusing, contradictory information, information that often takes fast one-eighties from day to day? Is it really helpful to shame someone you perceive as wearing a mask that you think should be reserved for medical personnel that you heard from somewhere, without understanding the full context? For wearing a mask at all?

Or, going back to the Derbyshire Police example, what actually constitutes “social distancing.” Strictly speaking, as defined by the CDC itself (as problematic as that institution has become, for reasons already covered), “social distancing” only means staying away from another person you don’t co-habit with by at least six feet (as an aside, this author recommends a minimum of twelve feet, preferably even twenty). That’s it. “Quarantine” and “isolation” only apply to people actually infected and people suspected of infection, for a two-week period. For the rest of us, it’s perfectly ok to go outside as long as you keep your distance and observe the social distancing guidelines — except the intellectually lazy (and easily manipulated) among us want to truncate this message to an extremely stringent and literal “stay at home” imposition (not just the intellectually lazy, but certain corporations that profit specifically on home entertainment and thus seek specifically during this time to profit heavily, from you — which is why you’re being bombarded by “stay at home” ads from these companies specifically lately).

And with the intellectually lazy and the easily manipulated, we get into the dangerous role public shaming plays into groupthink. Yes, groupthink is a warning often championed by the alt-right — but groupthink is a legitimate concern for social activists as well. After all, it’s groupthink that lead to the construction of a wall on the U.S. southern border and literal concentration camps for immigrants; it’s groupthink that lead to resisting reasonable firearms restrictions and contributes to the rise of mass shootings; it’s groupthink that villainizes universal health care as “socialist” or even the idea of socialism to begin with, but ok’s increasing national debt for the sake of ever-increasingly expensive weapons systems that serve no public good whatsoever other than to “break things and kill people;” and as I’ve already covered, it’s ultimately groupthink that lead to the rise of Donald Trump, the marriage of the Republican Party to him and this pandemic mess we’re in in the first place.

More on that in a bit, but back to individual consequences as this is not the time to be increasing the nation’s anxiety. But many of the “measures” put in place to stem the coronavirus or even the anxiety itself have done exactly that. As dire as the situation is, as important as flattening the curve and social distancing’s contribution to that is, our leadership, including our medical leadership, has been nearly completely tone-deaf to the real threat anxiety poses. In other words, Trump has a point about being concerned about mass-suicides from the pandemic, albeit his motivations are off-base. People suffering from anxiety and depression are at high-risk under normal circumstances, something I have more than a little personal understanding in. For these people especially, the CDC’s own recommendations of outside environmental interaction aren’t self-serving, but in fact potentially lifesaving. A pandemic naturally doesn’t make it any easier; but throw in constantly self-contradictory and vague information and simplified groupthink on “best practices” and it becomes nothing short of a living Hell.

Public shaming doesn’t need to add to that.

And there’s one sub-element to this real danger that neither Oliver nor Friedersdorf include in their “shame test” that might be the most dangerous of all and will determine not only when we get out of the pandemic, but what course this society will take from there — that deadly intersection of public shame, groupthink and reactionary response. Individuals, especially those with pre-existing conditions whether physical (such as repressed immune response — or no pre-existing conditions at all) or psychological (the aforementioned anxiety and depression) are hard to predict, especially when applied to public shaming. Large groups and classifications of people, on the other hand, tend to be at least somewhat easier to predict. And that’s not to say public shaming can’t accomplish public good when applied to proper effect. A random experiment conducted in real-time with how citizens perceive being identified with shameful acts and behaviors may in fact hold the key to permanently mending and binding Israeli-Palestinian and Arab relations, which in turn would be one of the greatest goods and overtures to lasting peace the modern world would have yet witnessed. But we’ve also been forced to witness a major symptom of the destruction mass-public shaming has wrought — the very pandemic ravaging this nation right now.

And we come to the final piece, the unintended consequences of mass-public shaming and “groupthink” and the “counter-groupthink” and “fake news” that has arisen as a reactionary response. And no, I assure you that is not a redundancy — as reactionist mentalities and policies have been the defining hallmark of the Republican and alt-right response to social activism and shaming. This response to mass-public shaming hasn’t been to course-correct their behavior for the better, but quite the opposite — double-down on their bad behavior and engage in open retaliation. This is the very platform Trump ran his Presidency bid on in the first place, and public shaming from the left is what gave that platform its very foundation. Attempts to shame the right concerning immigration on grounds of being “a bunch of racist rednecks” has spurred these “rednecks” to vote for a President who will build a wall and concentration camps, not so much out of jobs protection but out of revenge as of anything else. Attempts to shame the right concerning women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights has spurred the people “shamed” into voting for a President, himself a credibly accused serial rapist, who appointed blatantly misogynist and homophobic/transphobic Supreme Court justices, again as an act of revenge and retaliation more than anything else.

As much as public shaming can work, public shaming can also backfire spectacularly, and with dire and now literally deadly consequences. In fact, if the current trajectory of American politics is any indication, public shaming is more likely to enact severe backlash that threatens to entrench the status quo and even undo progress and set everything backwards — at best.

And that means learning exactly the wrong lessons from the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of being better prepared and better able to care for the sick and vulnerable, instead of realizing the value of universal health care as nearly every other nation on the planet has, we are currently looking to come out of the pandemic even more divided, more miserable, more willing to surrender to profit-searching corporate leadership and interests and more in conflict with our fellow Americans than ever before.

Which is why I offer in conclusion to beware of “Wikipedia Age” information, like off-hand “sources” on what constitutes “best practices” during the pandemic that aren’t directly sourced or at least cites another source of at least some authority (such as for example, having, you know, an infectious diseases expert advising on the issue), or whenever you see something being mindlessly chorused with little or no context whatsoever on a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter, or even on this very platform, Medium — whether it be Jacquet’s article on the “importance” of public shaming during the pandemic or, in all fairness, yes, this very article you’re reading now, being fully self-aware of my own personal byline, “My opinions are certified correct.” Practice safety out there — which, yes, includes social distancing guidelines and physically shielding yourself.

But don’t forget that the first rule of safety is to think rationally, and objectively evaluate all information coming in and what the consequences of that information might be. Because you know what they say about mindlessly following “herd mentality” right off a cliff.