In the age of cancel culture, shaming can be healthy for online communities

Pelican Press · April 16, 2024

In the age of cancel culture, shaming can be healthy for online communities

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

“Cancel culture” has a bad reputation. There is

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over this practice of publicly shaming people online for

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ranging from

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to controversial

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.

Online shaming can be a

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that

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of the shamed while offering them no good way to defend themselves. These consequences lead some critics to claim that online shaming creates a “

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” that destroys lives and reputations, leaves targets with “

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” and

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to publicly express yourself in a democracy. As a result, some scholars have declared that online shaming is a “

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.”

But is online public shaming necessarily negative? I’m a political scientist who studies the

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. In my research, I show how public shaming can be a

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. However, it is more likely to provide these positive effects within a clearly defined community whose members have many overlapping connections.

When shaming helps

Public shaming is a “

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, in which people hold one another responsible for violating social norms, rather than appealing to higher authorities to do so. This makes it especially useful in

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, as well as in cases where the shamers

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or

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that could hold the shamed accountable.

For example, public shaming can be an effective strategy for

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or maintaining journalistic norms in the face of

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. By

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, public shaming can both

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and

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by others.

But public shaming generally needs to occur in a specific social context to have these positive effects. First, everyone involved must

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and the shamer’s

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violations of them. Second, the shamed must

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. And third, the shaming must be accompanied by the possibility of

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, allowing the shamed to atone and be welcomed back into the fold.

This means that public shaming is more likely to deliver accountability in

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where members have many overlapping connections, such as

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.

In communal spaces where people frequently run into each other, like

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, it is more likely that they understand shared social norms and the obligations to follow them. In these environments, it is more likely that people

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of them, and that they

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when needed so that they can be reintegrated in the community.

Communities that connect

Most online shamings, however, do not take place in this kind of positive social context. On the social platform X, previously known as

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, which hosts many high-profile public shamings,

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with one another. There is no singular “X community” with universally shared norms, so it is difficult for users to collectively sanction norm violations on the platform.

Moreover, reintegration for targets of shamings on X is nearly impossible, since it is not clear to what community they should apologize, or how they should do so. It should not be surprising, then, that most highly publicized X shamings—like those of PR executive

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, who was shamed for a ******* tweet in 2013, and

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, the “Central Park Karen”—tend to degenerate into campaigns of

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.

But just because X shamings often turn pathological

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online shamings do. On

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, an online community and e-commerce site for artists and designers, users effectively use public shaming to police norms around intellectual property. Wikipedians’

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—reversals of edits to entries—has helped enforce the encylopedia’s standards even with anonymous contributors. Likewise,

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has long used the practice of public shaming as an effective mechanism of accountability.

What sets these cases apart is their community structure. Shamings in these contexts are more productive because they occur within clearly defined groups in which members have more shared connections.

Acknowledging these differences in social context helps clarify why, for example, when a

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user was

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for posting an inappropriate photo, he

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into the community. In contrast, those shamed on X often issue

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before disengaging entirely.

Crossing online borders

There are still

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of moving public shaming online. Unlike in most offline contexts, online shamings often play out on a

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that makes it more difficult for users to understand their connections with one another. Moreover, by creating opportunities to expand and overlap networks, the internet can

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in ways that complicate the practice of public shaming and make it more likely to turn pathological.

For example, although the

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user was reintegrated into his community, the shaming soon spread to other subreddits, as well as national news outlets, which ultimately led him to delete his

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account altogether.

This example suggests that online public shaming is not straightforward. While shaming on X is rarely productive, the practice on other platforms, and in offline spaces characterized by clearly defined communities such as college campuses, can provide important public benefits.

Shaming, like other practices of a healthy democracy, is a tool whose value depends on how it’s used.

Provided by
The Conversation

This article is republished from

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under a Creative Commons license. Read the

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.

Citation:
In the age of cancel culture, shaming can be healthy for online communities (2024, April 16)
retrieved 16 April 2024
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In the age of cancel culture, shaming can be healthy for online communities

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