{"id":2221,"date":"2015-02-25T08:15:51","date_gmt":"2015-02-25T13:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2221"},"modified":"2015-11-30T16:25:03","modified_gmt":"2015-11-30T21:25:03","slug":"how-can-we-fight-online-shaming-campaigns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2221","title":{"rendered":"How can we fight online shaming campaigns?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Longtime friend and colleague Boaz Barak sent me a fascinating New York Times Magazine<\/em> article<\/a>\u00a0that profiles people\u00a0who lost\u00a0their jobs or otherwise had their lives ruined,\u00a0because of a single remark\u00a0that then got amplified a trillionfold in importance by social media. \u00a0(The author, Jon Ronson, also has a forthcoming book<\/a> on the topic.) \u00a0The article\u00a0opens with Justine Sacco: a woman who, about to board a flight to Cape Town, tweeted “Going to Africa. \u00a0Hope I don’t get AIDS. \u00a0Just kidding. \u00a0I’m white!”<\/p>\n

To the few friends who read Sacco’s\u00a0Twitter feed, it would’ve been obvious\u00a0that she was trying to mock the belief<\/em> of many well-off white people that they live in a bubble, insulated from the problems of the Third World; she wasn’t actually mocking black Africans who suffer from AIDS. \u00a0In a just world, maybe Sacco\u00a0deserved someone to take her aside and quietly explain that her\u00a0tweet\u00a0might be read the wrong way, that she should be\u00a0more careful next time. \u00a0Instead, by the time she landed in Cape Town, she learned that she’d become the #1 worldwide Twitter trend\u00a0and a global\u00a0symbol of racism. \u00a0She lost her career, she lost her entire\u00a0previous life, and tens of thousands of people expressed glee about it. \u00a0The article rather heartbreakingly describes Sacco’s\u00a0attempts to start over.<\/p>\n

There are many more\u00a0stories like the above. \u00a0Some I’d already heard about: the father of three\u00a0who lost his job after he whispered a silly joke involving “dongles” to the person next to him at a conference, whereupon Adria Richards, a woman in front of him, snapped his photo and posted it to social media, to make an example of him as a sexist pig. \u00a0(Afterwards, a counter-reaction formed, which successfully got\u00a0Richards\u00a0fired from\u00a0her<\/em> job: justice??) \u00a0Other stories I hadn’t heard.<\/p>\n

Reading this article made it clear to me just how easily\u00a0I got off, in my own recent brush with the online shaming-mobs. \u00a0Yes, I made the ‘mistake’ of writing too openly\u00a0about my\u00a0experiences\u00a0as a nerdy male teenager, and the impact that one specific\u00a0aspect\u00a0of feminist thought (not all of feminism!) had had on me. \u00a0Within the context of the conversation\u00a0that\u00a0a few nerdy men and women were\u00a0having on this blog, my opening up\u00a0led to exactly the results I was hoping for: readers thoughtfully sharing\u00a0their own experiences, a\u00a0meaningful\u00a0exchange of ideas, even (dare I say it?) glimmers of understanding and empathy.<\/p>\n

Alas, once the comment was wrested\u00a0from its original setting into the clickbait bazaar, the story became “MIT professor explains: the real oppression is having to learn to talk to women” (the title of Amanda Marcotte’s hit-piece, something\u00a0even some\u00a0in\u00a0Marcotte’s ideological\u00a0camp called\u00a0sickeningly cruel). \u00a0My photo\u00a0was on the front page of Salon<\/em>, next to the headline “The plight of the bitter nerd.” \u00a0I was subjected\u00a0to hostile psychoanalysis not once but twice\u00a0on ‘Dr. Nerdlove,’ a nerd-bashing\u00a0site whose very name drips with irony, rather\u00a0like the ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.’ \u00a0There were tweets and blog comments that urged\u00a0MIT to fire me, that compared me to a mass-murderer, and that “deduced” (from first principles!) all the ways in which my parents screwed up\u00a0in raising me\u00a0and my female students cower in fear of me. \u00a0\u00a0And yes, when you Google me, this affair now more-or-less\u00a0overshadows everything else I’ve done in my life.<\/p>\n

But then …\u00a0there were also\u00a0hundreds<\/em> of men and women\u00a0who rose\u00a0to my defense, and they were heavily concentrated among the people I most admire and respect. \u00a0My supporters\u00a0ranged from\u00a0the\u00a0actual<\/em> female students who took my classes or worked with me or who I encouraged in their careers, from whom there was only kindness, not a single negative\u00a0word; to the shy nerds who thanked me for being one of the only\u00a0people to acknowledge their reality;\u00a0to the lesbians and bisexual women who told me\u00a0my experience also resonated with them<\/em>; to the female friends and colleagues who sent me notes urging me to ignore the nonsense. \u00a0In the end, not only have I not lost any friends over this, I’ve gained new ones, and I’ve learned new sides of\u00a0the friends I had.<\/p>\n

Oh, and I didn’t get\u00a0any death threats: I guess that’s good! \u00a0(Once in my life I did<\/em> get death threats—graphic, explicit threats, about which I had to contact the police—but it was because I refused to publicize someone’s P=NP proof.)<\/p>\n

Since I was away from campus when this blew up, I did feel\u00a0some fear\u00a0about the professional backlash that would await me on my return. \u00a0Would my office be vandalized? \u00a0Would activist\u00a0groups\u00a0be protesting\u00a0my classes? \u00a0Would MIT police be there\u00a0to\u00a0escort me from campus?<\/p>\n

Well, you want to know what happened instead?\u00a0 Students and colleagues have stopped me in the hall, or come by my office, just to say they support me. \u00a0My class has record enrollment this term. \u00a0I was invited to participate in MIT’s Diversity Summit, since the organizers felt\u00a0it would mean a lot\u00a0to the students to see someone there who had opened up about diversity issues in STEM in such a powerful\u00a0way. \u00a0(I regretfully had to decline, since the summit conflicted with a trip to Stanford.) \u00a0And an MIT graduate women’s reading group invited me for a dinner\u00a0discussion\u00a0(at my suggestion, Laurie Penny participated as well). \u00a0Imagine that: not only are MIT’s women’s groups\u00a0not picketing me,\u00a0they’re inviting me over for\u00a0dinner!\u00a0 Is there any better answer\u00a0to the claim, urged on me by some of my overzealous supporters, that the bile of Amanda Marcotte\u00a0represents all of feminism these days?<\/p>\n

Speaking of which,\u00a0I met Laurie Penny for coffee last month, and she and I quickly hit it off. \u00a0We’ve even\u00a0agreed to write a joint blog post about our advice for shy nerds. \u00a0(In my What I Believe<\/a> post, I had promised a post of advice for shy female<\/em> nerds—but at Laurie’s urging, we’re broadening the focus to shy nerds of both sexes.) \u00a0Even though Laurie’s\u00a0essay\u00a0is the thing\u00a0that brought me to the attention of the Twitter-mobs (which wasn’t Laurie’s intent!), and even though I disagreed with several points\u00a0in her\u00a0essay, I knew on reading it\u00a0that Laurie was someone I’d enjoy\u00a0talking to. \u00a0Unlike so much\u00a0writing by\u00a0online social justice activists, which\u00a0tends to be encrusted with the specialized\u00a0technical terms of that field—you know, terms like “asshat,” “shitlord,” “douchecanoe,” and “precious feefees of entitled white dudes”—Laurie’s prose shone with\u00a0humanity and vulnerability: her own, which she freely shared, and mine, which she generously\u00a0acknowledged.<\/p>\n

Overall, the response to my comment has never made me happier or more grateful to be part of the STEM community (I never liked the bureaucratic acronym “STEM,” but fine, I’ll own it). \u00a0To many outsiders, we STEM nerds are a sorry lot: we’re “sperglords”<\/a> (yes, slurs are fine, as long as they’re directed against the right targets!) who might be competent in certain narrow domains, but who lack empathy and emotional depth, and are basically narcissistic children. \u00a0Yet somehow when the chips were down, it’s my fellow STEM\u00a0nerds,\u00a0and people who hang out with STEM\u00a0nerds\u00a0a lot, who showed me far\u00a0more\u00a0empathy and compassion than many of the “normals” did. \u00a0So if STEM nerds are psychologically broken, then I say: may I surround myself, for the rest\u00a0of my life, with men and women\u00a0who are psychologically broken like\u00a0I am. \u00a0May I\u00a0raise Lily, and any future children I have, to be as psychologically broken as they can be. \u00a0And may\u00a0I stay as far as possible from anyone who’s too well-adjusted.<\/p>\n

I reserve my ultimate<\/em>\u00a0gratitude for the many women in STEM, friends and strangers alike, who sent me\u00a0messages\u00a0of support these past two months. \u00a0I’m not ashamed\u00a0to say it:\u00a0witnessing\u00a0how so many STEM women stood up for me has made me want to stand up for them<\/em>, even more than I did\u00a0before. \u00a0If they’re not called on often enough in class, I’ll call on them more. \u00a0If they’re subtly discouraged from careers in science, I’ll\u00a0blatantly\u00a0encourage them back. \u00a0If they’re sexually harassed, I’ll confront their harassers myself (well, if asked to). \u00a0I will listen to them, and I will try to improve.<\/p>\n

Is it selfish that I want to help\u00a0female STEM nerds partly\u00a0because<\/em> they helped\u00a0me? \u00a0Here’s the thing: one of\u00a0my deepest moral\u00a0beliefs is in the obligation\u00a0to fight for those among the disadvantaged who\u00a0don’t despise you, and who wouldn’t gladly rid the planet\u00a0of everyone like you if they could.<\/em>\u00a0 (As I’ve written before, on issue after issue, this belief makes me a left-winger by American standards, and a right-winger by academic ones.) \u00a0In the present context, I’d say I have\u00a0a massive<\/em> moral obligation toward female STEM nerds and toward Laurie Penny’s version of feminism, and none at all toward Marcotte’s version.<\/p>\n

All this\u00a0is just to say that\u00a0I’m unbelievably lucky—privileged<\/em>\u00a0(!)—to have\u00a0had so many at MIT and elsewhere willing to stand up for\u00a0me, and to have\u00a0reached in a stage in life where I’m strong enough to say what I think\u00a0and to weather anything the\u00a0Internet says back. \u00a0What worries me is that others, more vulnerable, didn’t and won’t have it as easy when the Twitter hate-machine turns its barrel on them. \u00a0So in the rest of this post,\u00a0I’d like to discuss the problem of\u00a0what to do about social-media shaming campaigns that aim to, and do, destroy\u00a0the lives of individuals. \u00a0I’m convinced that this is a phenomenon\u00a0that’s only going to get more and more common: something\u00a0sprung on us faster than our social norms have evolved to deal with it. \u00a0And it would be nice if we could solve it\u00a0without having to wait for a few high-profile suicides.<\/p>\n

But first, let me address a few obvious questions about why this problem is even a problem at all.<\/p>\n

Isn’t\u00a0social shaming as old as society itself—and permanent records of the shaming as old as print media?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, but there’s also something fundamentally new about the problem of the Twitter-mobs. \u00a0Before, it would take someone—say, a newspaper editor—to make a conscious decision to the effect, “this comment is worth destroying someone’s life over.” \u00a0Today, there might<\/em>\u00a0be such an individual, but it’s also possible for lives\u00a0to be destroyed\u00a0in a decentralized, distributed fashion, with thousands of Twitterers collaborating to push a non-story past the point of no return. \u00a0And among the people who “break” the story, not one has to\u00a0intend<\/em>\u00a0to ruin the victim’s life, or accept\u00a0responsibility for it afterward: after all, each one made the story only \u03b5\u00a0bigger than it already was. \u00a0(Incidentally, this is one reason why I haven’t gotten a Twitter account: while\u00a0it has many\u00a0worthwhile\u00a0uses, it’s also a medium that might as well have been\u00a0designed<\/em> for mobs, for ganging up, for status-seeking\u00a0among\u00a0allies stripped\u00a0of rational arguments. \u00a0It’s like the world’s biggest high school.)<\/p>\n

Don’t some targets of online shaming campaigns, y’know, deserve<\/em>\u00a0it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course! \u00a0Some are\u00a0genuine\u00a0racists or misogynists or homophobes,\u00a0who once would’ve been able to inflict hatred their entire\u00a0lives without consequence, and were only brought down thanks to social media. \u00a0The trouble is, the participants in online shaming campaigns will\u00a0always<\/em>\u00a0think\u00a0they’re meting out righteous justice, whether they are or aren’t. \u00a0But\u00a0there’s an excellent reason why we’ve learned in modern societies not to avenge\u00a0even the worst crimes via\u00a0lynch mobs. \u00a0There’s a reason why we have trials and lawyers and the opportunity for the accused to show\u00a0their innocence.<\/p>\n

Some might say that no safeguards are possible or necessary here, since we’re not talking about state violence, just individuals\u00a0exercising their free speech right to vilify\u00a0someone, demand\u00a0their firing, that sort of thing. \u00a0Yet in today’s world, trial-by-Internet can be more<\/em> consequential\u00a0than the old kind of trial: would you rather spend a year\u00a0in jail,\u00a0but\u00a0then be free\u00a0to move to another town where no one knew about it, or have your Google search results tarnished with lurid accusations (let’s say, that you molested children) for the rest\u00a0of your life—to have that forever prevent you from getting a job or a relationship, and have no way to correct the record? \u00a0With trial by Twitter,\u00a0there’s no presumption of innocence, no requirement to prove\u00a0that any other\u00a0party was harmed, just the law of the schoolyard.<\/p>\n

Whether shaming is justified in a particular case is a complicated question, but for whatever it’s worth, here are a few\u00a0of the questions I<\/em> would ask:<\/p>\n