So, as an interesting constructive exercise rather than just bemoaning the situation, how could a social system be engineered in a way that it might address the staggering ease with which this sort of shame storm arises, feeds itself, and flings itself against individuals? You can either start from an existing system and try to tame it, or start from scratch.
It's worth thinking about both because it's fun, and because the people who may actually someday fix it may well be here.
We've explored so little of the design space.
If I had to hazard in extrapolating from only a few data points, it seems that shame-storming behaviour correlates with (a) how easily you can reshare without thinking and (b) how easily you can reshare without context.
It would be fun to brainstorm all the possibilities for how we could be communicating online differently. Here are a few stupid ideas I've thought of; I'm sure there are millions more and I'd love to hear yours:
* You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.
* Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.
* You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.
* Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.
* You have to correctly answer a simple question about the article before posting a comment on it. A Norwegian newspaper tried this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14883842).
* After you've gone back and forth a couple of times with the same person, the only option presented to you is to make a voice call directly to that person. You can't just type text at them any more.
* Variant: after a thread gets long enough, you can't type text any more. You must record yourself speaking.
* Every comment must be approved by its parent. (If you never approve replies, then your threads aren't interesting to read, and maybe you get a reputation for never approving, so no one will bother to reply to you.)
I also think that visual design cues matter much more than people think. Simply having large text fields to type in and clean design where large posts are readable really changes the tone of dicussions. I've seen this on many websites.
Another, newer, idea I have is that there should be some cost to finding/reading new content. It's probably not what you imagined right now. Here is an example. Let's say you have a popular YouTube video when someone plays Overwatch. Instead of the garbled toxic mess we have right now, comments could be split into different tabs/topic. There could be one tab where people discuss the strategy of the player, while in another tab people could discuss balance of the game as a whole. The "cost" of reading comments would be reading the titles of all tabs and clicking on one. It's not much, but I am 99% sure it would do miracles for decreasing toxicity.
People behave much better when they feel they are interacting in a social "space" with a defined (if open) group of other people. Information overflow destroys this feeling in an instant, no matter what other social features you add.
The design space that we are willing to explore is limited by the fundamental evolutionary drive of social media platforms to hold your attention as long as possible by feeding you little hits of dopamine for minimal effort. Social media platforms thrive on size and activity and neither can be established by raising the bar, only by lowering it to new depths.
Sometimes the only way to get an insight to the thought processes of the busy & insightful people of the world is through something like twitter, because they don't have time for anything else. Certain subcultures of twitter can be fairly positive despite the lack of moderation tools because the community is small and not a current political hot potato.
That is something I wouldn't want to lose.
I think there should be more and longer delays:
* a one minute delay before you can enter text into the reply box.
* a half-hour (or longer) delay before any comment/post/reply goes online. During that time you're free to edit or delete (but there must be at least a 5 minute delay after your last edit).
The idea is try to let any initial impulse of outrage pass before anything can be said, to force people to put more time into what they say, and lower velocity to keep things from snowballing out of control.
One of these suggestions, though:
> Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.
...is interesting because the most prominent example of that workflow is Tumblr, which is widely expected to be near death. I like the idea in principle, but I notice that when I share an image or post from Tumblr with someone I am very likely to do it by sharing a screenshot, precisely to avoid having the bit I'm calling attention to overshadowed by its context...
Design twist: every comment must be approved by the commenter's parent -- father or mother.
I am for this one in particular, if for no other reason than to see more Shakespearean insults due to people being forced to get creative.
4chan tried this based on a script called Robot9000 (by Randall Munroe). Not to imply causation (since there are a ton of cultural factors as well), but that board is now known as the breeding ground of the incel and redpill movements.
I do think the R9K script itself is a good idea though.
Of the ones I've used I like Reddit the most. It allows long posts, uses Markdown, and is threaded.
> We've explored so little of the design space.
I've recently started writing a federated blogging platform which will use the ActivityPub protocol. One nice advantage of federated platforms, is they can share each others' messages meaning it's easier for them to get lots of users (you can piggyback on the rest of the federation), so there can be more experiments on doing things different ways.
> You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.
Or the message isn't sent until a cooling down period.
> Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.
Sometimes a post can be short because a short post is all that is needed. E.g someone might ask me a question that the answer might simply be "yes". I would find it annoying to have to artificially pad the length.
But longer posts should always be possible and the user interface shouldn't discourage them.
> You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.
That's an interesting one. The way I'm going is posts will be edited in Markdown and will then appear as marked-up text.
> Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.
What I call the "context" of a post is the post its a reply to and that post's context. This could all be stored in a data-structure (such as JSON) when the post is transferred across the network, so the context would always be there. Also the id of a post could be a hash of its contents, making it tamper-evident.
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/youtube-adds-read-comment-alo...
Many parts of the Internet actually do meet these conditions, but they tend to be small niche hobby sites that are either overlooked or private, not the massive media/FB/Reddit/4chan/Twitterverse where shame storms propagate.
Failing that, the best alternative is sharp boundaries between you and the public sphere of discourse. This is how cities work - you have dense groups of people with diverse opinions and many casual interactions, but most people learn to mind their own business, so it really functions as a group of small interlocking communities rather than one mass of people. It's also how to stay mentally healthy on the Internet - when everybody hates you, unplug.
No one probably gives a damn about the sexist wielder or the extreme right/leftist garbage collector because no one wants those jobs and are just happy someone is willing to do it.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_...
I don't think there's anything wrong with social media. It's just pointless and irrelevant. The only thing that's wrong is that we rely on it to do something it could never do. As experience on HN showed me and others years ago, with a big enough crowd? You can't say anything. People misunderstand. People disagree with points you never made. A term you use in one way can be construed another way. You're foced either to write 10K word essays on supercillious topics like "I like ice cream" or accpeting the feedback as not worth responding to.
I think there are two things that are required for useful social forums: curated participation and a creed (not a set of standards). You need to have a group of 3-30ish people that you've curated that all subscribe to a small set of beliefs. (Beliefs might be something like "the primary reason for our existence on this planet is to care for and help others", or "Building a strong AI is more important than anything else we can do")
Both the number of members and the number of items in the creed have to be manageable. They both have to be visible at all times.
At that point -- I think -- you can start sharing content and opinions, speculating on interesting and complex social topics.
Just not with the world at large. Big groups don't work that way. Big groups where everybody tries to be kind to one another, and isn't that the point, norm downward to the weakest member. We can't both emotionally-reassure a mentally-challenged victim of gang rape while simultaneously discussing something like sexual harassment legislation. This is stuff we all know innately if we're in a room with a thousand people but somehow completely forget when we're typing stuff into a little box on a screen. Important conversations about tough topics don't happen like that. There's nothing wrong with Twitter, it's just not the tool for having any kind of interesting/difficult conversations.
Of course I’m willing to be proved wrong about that if anyone has an example of people collectively being good and self-moderating.
That isn’t to say you couldn’t have a storm response policy. But then how would you keep the storm from happening first?
While systems can amplify or dampen certain behaviors, they cannot, without brutal authoritarianism, enforce behavior.
That is the topic I'm opening, yes. We're clearly amplifying it right now. How can that be changed?
"Social" media managed to amplify detrimental behaviours by unquantifiable factors. The idea being that maybe you can also built it in a way that doesn't happen or perhaps even in a way that amplifies positive behaviours and dampens detrimental behaviours? Neither is the case currently; with social media being a marked negative influence across the board (except for shareholders).
In fact, that may be why such private setups are on the rise. Being private means only your friends/allies/community can hear your thoughts, and it limits your posts' exposure to people who might otherwise try and stir up a mob/cause a media frenzy. I suspect a lot of ex Reddit users joined for that (after seeing how the media likes to dig into subreddits and find controversial posts to mock/mention in articles).
Having all of these people on Twitter and cable news draw on each other at high-noon...
A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet. It used to be a big no-no, because when only a few people did it, you really did put yourself at additional risk from stalkers. But now enough people have personal information posted that you're just one in a large crowd.
When Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, people thought they'd be celebrated for 15 minutes. But perhaps it'll be the opposite: everyone will be publicly shamed for 15 minutes.
I mean that's like saying if a huge percentage of Americans have been arrested then it might eventually become less damaging; that happened, and it has become less damaging, but at the end of the day it's still extremely damaging.
No, it's not like saying that. It's saying that public shaming might eventually become less damaging. If you want an analogy that expressed the point of the commenter, one was provided:
> A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet.
This, also, is not like being arrested.
Your public photos that are now just one in a large crowd are also subject to having your image deepfaked into revenge porn, used as a spam photo for bot account sign ups, scraped for facial recognition, found instantly by a background check seen by your employer, used to attach demographic info to your name in those shitty phone number / address aggregator sites.
These are just things we know about today. Wait till your public photo is used to trick a self-driving car or biometric scanner. Or hundreds of other things that will be invented between now and forever (since your digital photos are instantly preserved and forever available).
Hope no one analyzes your photo and charges you higher insurance premiums because you were holding a cigarette.
it'll be the opposite
Thanks for linking to this; it's immensely important to learn >1 side to an issue, but with the quantity of shallow writing out there, it can often be a challenge.
[1] https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/12/offense-archaeol...
I like it a lot. It challenges me to be a more intelligent art consumer. It's not pumping stuff. It just wants to challenge me. I'm glad I tried it.
The example that comes to mind is James Damore and he "doubled down" in the sense that he stood by his original statements (which made sense because his original memo was clearly and explicitly not endorsing the things he was accused of endorsing). It "worked out quite well" in that he _only_ lost his job and endured a lot of harassment, abuse, and slander (although who knows what kinds of psychological scars this treatment could have left him with), but probably didn't have a hard time finding another job and the mob did eventually (mostly) move on.
So either the Damore example satisfies your definition of "working quite well" but not mine (or probably most people) or this example illustrates that your prescription doesn't always work. Perhaps it is exceptional, in that most mobs aren't marshalled by major publications nor do they conspire with the CEO of one of the most prominent companies in the world.
He's in a tough spot given who he's up against. In an oligopolistic industry like ours it's risky to be hated by anyone.
But I do think it would work in the sense that he'd have a larger group of people cheering for him. And this is solely about clarity. If you're too nuanced in what you're broadcasting to the world people don't know how to react. Nobody wants to waste time trying to figure you out. Doubling down is exactly about taking out any nuance for a stronger message.
That's arguably one reason certain games companies have gotten away with horrible, rather anti consumer behaviour for years (like EA), because they realised early on that boycotts and internet complaints do not matter. For them, it's like 'who cares if the angry mob is calling for our heads over on Reddit, because Madden/FIFA/whatever will still sell millions of copies'
At the end of the day, most drama queens and controversy fanatics don't make companies money, and those that do will give up their boycott in time. So the answer is to do nothing and just watch everything fizzle out.
My advice to anyone would be don't make even the slightest effort to please people who hate you.
There is much hand-wringing over the handful of people wrongly shunned, but many of the wringers give no thought at all to the victims who are forced out of their careers, families, and communities every day because the people around them refuse to consider the possibility that there is a wolf in their midst.
Nieces absent from Thanksgiving while their uncle sits at the table. Talented women leaving tech while their spiteful coworkers are promoted.
Should we allow abusers to hold power because there’s a shadow of a doubt that they might be innocent, thereby sending their victims to start over in a new city?
Outside of the court system, shouldn’t we try to hit a 1:1 ratio of wrongful excommunications to failures to excommunicate?
Or should it be 1:1,000,000 like the courts do? A million unpunished rapes for every wrongful conviction? A million women pushed out of their rightful career path for everyone one man who was wrongfully fired?
When the information doesn’t exist to make perfect decisions, how do we decide who takes up the burden of our mistakes?
And I say all that as someone who saw the Surrogate Court system abused to steal away all of the lifetime wealth honestly earned by my mother.
You're conflating "shaming" and "mobbing". Mobbing includes shaming, but it also includes violence, threats, harassment, or the facilitation thereof. We should oppose mobbing, but shaming serves a useful social function and you can be "anti-mob" and "pro-shaming"; however, the anti-mob group probably does oppose the new trend in slandering overtly innocent people and then mobbing (including shaming) them on the basis of the slander.
For every valid offence some other completely innocent person should also be punished to ensure that no one ever escapes justice?
What could ever go wrong with that...
It's also impossible to have the full context of a story from the information available in a shame storm (often the other half of the story from the shame-ey is missing or not believed). The severity of the "punishment" that is doled out based on extremely thin "facts" is terrifying and not something a just society should encourage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You%27ve_Been_Publicly_Sham...
The problem of forgiveness is forgiving atrocity. Yeshua bar Youssif suggested that one should "turn the other cheek," that is, not just to immediately forgive the offense, but to immediately give the perpetrator the opportunity to commit the same offense again. The application of this precept to persons such as Robert Bowers is a sickening thought -- clearly we must not condone atrocity in the name of forgiveness. Yet we must come in time to forgive, and indeed, sooner than our wont. The matter is a frequent and weighty concern for me; I don't have any answers.
Unless the concept of a search changes in the next couple decades, getting lost in a sea of similar names is the only defense against unfounded accusations. (Changing one's name after the fact doesn't work as you're required to give prior names for many jobs.)
Definitely recommend it. The first ten pages of Google results for my first + last show like at least 50 other people that aren't me.
Only issue is that it can be difficult to use your name as an email handle - fortunately my parents were tech savvy enough to grab concat(firstName, middleInitial, lastName) as a gmail address and domain name for me.
Combine that with a generic name like John Smith, and you've got someone who's basically impossible to dox.
Well I don't fully understand the entire context of this person's story but I do know something about being publicly shamed. When I was a kid in high school I had to suffer being called a fgot every day. By every one. I had been hospitalized in an altercation and had been involved in several more. My car had been vandalized on more than one occasion. People would openly point, yell the word, and laugh until the whole crowd had joined in. It was an exercise in torture.
No side eye on the train. No wondering what people were shaming me for. The police couldn't do anything about it.
I used to think public shaming was a bad practice given my poor experience with it. When I heard the first stories of people using social media to shame serial offenders of the social norms of public life I thought... who are these people to judge and decide? What if that person had a reason? Do we really want to lower ourselves to this vigilante justice?
However this is 2018. This world has books like, Liberal Fascism. It has platforms for people with radical opinions to gain an audience from the comfort of their living room. Instead of limiting the spread of anti-LGBTQ sentiments it has fostered them and allowed them to spread. Instead of reducing racially-charged crimes and hate speech, social media and the Internet has enabled it. On a whole new level.
I think you should count yourself lucky that the people hurt by your conservative views have made you feel ashamed. You felt the discomfort of someone who doesn't fit in. Welcome to the club. How will you change now?
[0] https://www.amazon.ca/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Pol...
TL;DR, if you (like me) really want to push back against dangerous ideologies like racism, fascism, white-supremacy, etc, then you should oppose groups who try to combat moderate ideas by conflating them with the aforementioned dangerous ideologies.
NOTE: The author of "Liberal Fascism" is a moderate conservative, by the way, and trying to associate him with extreme right-wing views is exactly the problem (and we can acknowledge as much without endorsing his ideas).
I'm sure Jonah would like me to believe he is a moderate conservative. The history lesson in Liberal Fascism is laughably inaccurate and built on a poorly thought-out premise. It was an argument made that had never existed before. In a word, I don't have any reason to believe he is any kind of moderate person.
I think what we're seeing with public shaming are dis-empowered people calling a spade a spade.
What I'm curious to see is whether people who have felt this kind of shame will change. Will they re-examine their behavior? Or will they, like the Jonah's of the world, dig in and continue to bloviate about leftist-shame-mongering hordes abusing their free speech? And in the process what happens to the rest of us? Will my kids be shamed and called a f-g when they get to school and end up in a hospital with a fractured skull? Will we ever change?
"[I was required to] listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself"
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame
One word: /v/
So yes, the online shaming of Zoe Quinn is a crystal-clear example of the problem we're dealing with here! And this fact alone (though a seldom-acknowledged fact) actually explains much of how a lot of the "censorship" that fed the GG controversy originally came about.
The reaction from the gaming media organizations being accused of serious (if video games can be serious) lapses of journalistic integrity, complete with multiple examples of it just poured fuel onto the fire. After that, I stopped following it, but it does seem that more gaming media organizations put effort into disclosing conflicts, so perhaps some good came out of it in the end.
But that's not really the point. Let's say that Sacco's life really was destroyed... isn't that an even better reason to compare and contrast the two cases? Instead, the article we're talking about implies that the right never shames people. I sort of feel like that's a bad approach to the question.
But to address the articles concern - the reason we all seek mob justice is because a) it works, and it hurts, and it can ruin the lives of even the richest of us and b) we have no other buttons left. We mash the twitter/facebook/HN button because it is the last place we have any agency. Corporate interests have taken over out politics, rendering even the power of the ballot box moot since most parties appear to be in someone's pockets, the power of our consumption is dulled by decades of moribund growth, our ability to protest curtailed by an ever-present state of surveillance. This is what we have and, by god, we will keep mashing those buttons until things change.
1. Everyone is potentially a journalist. Smartphone & social media = capture & comment.
2. Everyone is potentially a celebrity. Virality = celebrity.
3. Everyone is potentially a publisher. Share, post, retweet = publish.
4. Almost no one is (cares to be) an editor.
It seems to me that though the obvious impact of these is exactly what you'd expect (a permanent social shit-stain), the times they are-a-changing. Belief is no longer a matter of truthiness but almost a lifestyle/fashion choice. People are learning to tune-out whatever it is they consider fake-news. I suspect that the amplified impact of modern "shame storms" will be discounted by the levels of latent disbelief held by people.
i.e. people could (soon) care less.
Maybe?
EDITED: fixed line-break formatting. Why do I keep falling for the same thing?
The specific mores and taboos don't matter. People get hung up on this being a "liberal" thing, but go to a very conservative part of the Borg hive mind and you get the same behavior. Criticize Donald Trump on Reddit's conservative forums and you are instantly brigaded, shamed, or banned.
It’s simply a way to get people to behave in a society, without invoking the heavier tools such as the law.
Which is true in some sense. He's become well funded through donations and book sales even as groups of people direct a ton of hate at him. He can afford to almost totally ignore them, because for every hater there are ten fans.
Which leads to a crazy thought: If the social media mobs knew that they were going to make their victims rich, might they moderate themselves somewhat?
Would they tell each other to "stop talking about X, you're just making them more money!"
I think some kind of meme like this might be a strong antidote in some cases. Maybe some benevolent person or organization could give a $100k patreon seed to each victim of the mob.
Maybe one solution to hateful internet mobs spewing bile is loving internet "mobs" sending donations.
The reality, I think, is that the population of mobs is otherwise quite small, but because of the social media and news media megaphones they appear larger than they are. We're at a point now where everybody else is in fear of being attacked by those mobs so they quietly fund whoever they perceive to be in opposition of the mob. But at the same time, because of the media megaphones, the mobs incorrectly believe they are having success and thus the negative cycle continues.
This is exactly what's already happening - coming from both sides, in fact.
It's not going to stop because it works.
Others got on the "Band wagon" at different intervals. Whatever the justification is for such behavior, ultimately there is no justification.
But put that aside. Maybe he's actually guilty of at least one of them. Even then, though, some of the allegations ended up being false:
Most recently here [1], but also here [2], and here [3], and here [4]. Four clear examples of accusations made that turned out to be completely false. So at best, one must acknowledge that this man endured a national media spotlight under four false accusations of sexual assault/rape, but came across as "too partisan" when speculating as to one of the few possible explanations for why these false accusers may have come forward.
I sure hope I'm never in the situation he's in, but if I'm on national TV being essentially questioned if maybe I don't remember all the gang raping I did because of how drunk I was, I can assure you my answers will be far less dignified.
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kavanaugh-accuser-admits...
[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fifth-brett-kavanaugh-ac...
[3] https://www.apnews.com/c5ecf76c62ec4c398e35020b5df01061
[4] https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/649787076/kavanaugh-accuser-c...
Think of it another way - it's a job interview. If you were crying and screaming about a conspiracy of your interviewers, would you get hired for any other job?
The GOP should have pulled him and put forward another candidate, one without that controversy. They've managed to find such candidates before. The resemblance of the Kavanaugh vote to a bunch of men having their way with women and covering their mouths while they screamed was unsettling.
Try to say openly in the bay area that you support Trump and you will be shamed like never before.
Shaming is now always in our mind and I find myself thinking more and more about redacting what I say to make it "unshameful" in order to avoid any possibility of shaming.
Nobody's taking away your right to free speech. We just reserve the right to think you're an asshole for saying it.
Answer: Violence
Not targeting a specific side btw, this is a trend on the left as well as on the right.
Do you think it has something to do with all sorts of common, abhorrent behaviours that were tolerated, or encouraged in the past becoming unacceptable today?
Sixty years ago, it wouldn't be out of place to tell the ------ to go to the back of the bus. Social expectations change, and there's always a few people who double down, dig in, and drag their heels, and insist that everyone around them is being too fucking sensitive.
Try being a 12 year old, in the south, who is openly mocked and degraded by his father for having a friend of a different race. How's that for shaming.
Try being a 16 year old, getting kicked out of your home and called a faggot for getting an ear piercing. Are we politically correct yet?
There is a lot of hate in this world and it is very rich for people to just turn and point the finger instead of taking a long hard look inside themselves and the company they keep.
If you believe what you believe, then stand steadfast in the face of the tsunami, but don't blame others for forcing self censorship, that's just cowardice.