It was bound to happen. Someone I knew and consider to be a nice person behaved badly, a bystander made a video, it went viral, this person lost their job and now must mentally wear the scarlet letters IPH (Internet Public Hanging). I don’t want to leave a clue to their identity by saying “he” or “she.” They’ve suffered enough. It’s easy to indulge in schadenfreude until it hits you or someone you know. And do you have any idea how much search engines make off these incidents? I’ll get to that.
Like many a mama has said, “Point a finger at someone and three are pointing back at yourself.” Yet we still do it.
Jon Ronson investigated this phenomenon in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Two things stood out. Of the long list of subjects who were victims of internet mob mentality and spoke candidly about the damage to their lives and careers (no surprise the men, in general, fared far better than the women), I had not heard of one of them—and I spend way too much time on the internet. Talking to Mr. Ronson may have made the subjects feel better by telling their side of the story, but did they not throw more gasoline on a fire that had died out by then?
The second observation was breathtaking: how much search engines profit from these episodes. Ronson brought in an expert to calculate what Google made off “X’s” bad judgment in a tweet. In that month, there were approximately 12.2 billion Google searches worth roughly 38 cents for each one. X was Googled 1.2 million times. Some search words are worth more than others, though. It was conservatively estimated that Google made at least “$120,000 for the destruction of [X].” That doesn’t include what other searches were sparked from that search, which made them more money. And that’s just Google. There are many search engines.
Ronson concludes: “Those of us who did the actual annihilating? We got nothing.”
Cost to the person shamed? Incalculable, though an industry has sprung up of people who claim they can make anything negative go away for a hefty fee. They coach clients to post as much inoffensive cutesy stuff as they can to push the bad stuff down in searches. That sounds like another form of torture to me, though come to think of it, most of what I post is pretty banal to avoid setting anyone off.
These efforts can never be 100% successful. Trolls often delight in re-igniting someone’s misfortune.
I felt guilty for having been lured by the click bait of bad behavior in the past and vowed to stop unless it was a public figure. It’s part of the Faustian bargain they’ve made. They want publicity. “Say anything you want about me as long as you spell my name right” has been used so many times by celebrities no one knows for sure who said it first.
Then the viral video was someone I knew. I watched. I do not know this person well, but we were Facebook friends. I wanted to message them to rise above it, it will blow over. They had disappeared. They had once opened a big door for me when I was promoting one of my books and been quite pleasant when we met for lunch. It was hard to believe it was the same person.
There are so many reasons why someone might snap, from coming down with the flu to menopause to medications to a divorce to an impossible boss to grief to chronic pain to adolescent hormones to low blood sugar to just an adrenalin rush clouding judgment. Then I think of videos taken of a policeman shooting an innocent victim and I’m on the other side of this barbed wire fence. Yes, post it. Incite public outrage.
The person who started my Facebook friend’s demise now regrets having done it, never thinking a job would be lost. Why do we post or re-post something that puts an ordinary citizen in a bad light? Perhaps it’s to make our own lives more interesting and clickable. Just remember who really benefits from the clicks.
At age 72 now, I am beyond grateful that there was no social media when I was a teenager, or when I was married to either of my former husbands.