What I learned about cyberbullying from Monica Lewinsky
If there is anyone who knows public shaming, it’s Monica Lewinsky.
A woman who has remained a household name for twenty years, today she calls herself “patient zero” for internet shaming. After more than a decade of silence, Lewinsky has now settled into a new life as an advocate for victims of cyberbullying and producer on a series of award-winning public service announcements on internet safety, created in partnership with creative agency BBDO.
Lewinsky cautions against a culture of monetising shame, such as exploiting nude picture leaks of Hollywood actresses for ad-funded clickbait, as well as the general lack of compassion caused by disinhibition when we operate in online spaces (which is another way of saying how we operate in real life is different to how we behave online).
I saw Lewinsky speak to a full house earlier this month at a talk titled ‘A Compassionate Internet’ as part of the UNSW Centre for Ideas series Unthinkable.
I suspect many of us were there to hear her side of one of the greatest political scandals of the 90s. Organisers asked for the event to be off the record, so this article contains none of Lewinsky’s words from the evening (other reporters have since published their accounts.)
Having followed Lewinsky on social media for some years, I was expecting a funny, intelligent conversation with host Leigh Sales. We got that. What I didn’t expect was for the audience to be moved to tears by Lewinsky’s advertising work.
The most recent PSA in the series was released last month. ‘The Epidemic’ follows the story of an average American teenager who shows the signs of a mysterious virus and ends up being rushed to hospital. At the end of the film, viewers are prompted to enter their phone number for an interactive re-watching of the film, which features bullying text messages appearing on both the video and the viewer’s own phone via the message function.
To make the experience more powerful, the bullying text messages are based on real messages bullying victims have received. The result is shocking but undeniably powerful. Shock treatment might be needed to create more empathy when it comes to online safety.
According to Australia’s e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, one in five children have experienced cyberbullying while one in 10 adults have experienced image-based abuse. In my own social moderation work with Quiip I see the hate directed online to women and ethnic minorities in particular.
Beyond what would traditionally count as bullying are the pile-ons which frequently occur on social media platforms like Twitter. For her final project with BBDO this year, Lewinksy and a creative team worked with Twitter to create a ‘Goodness Bot’ — a service driven by artificial intelligence which, when summoned via tagging @goodnessbot, rephrases negative comments and insults into positive statements.
This project builds on the work in a previous PSA titled ‘In Real Life’ on the importance of bystander intervention when bullying takes place. This video, which reduced both host and audience to tears on Saturday night, earned an Emmy nomination.
Many of us regret not speaking out for 22-year-old Monica in 1998, as she was betrayed by her best friend, abandoned by her lover, threatened by the FBI and pilloried by the media for years on end. In the days before #MeToo, we viewed these things differently. Today we know better. Lewinsky has bravely chosen to remain in the public eye to draw attention to causes like cyberbullying and find creative ways to tackle them. For that, we should all be grateful.
Amber Robinson is a freelance writer and Social Media Strategist at Quiip.
