ABSTRACT
In ‘How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life’ (New York Times Magazine, 12 February 2015) Welsh journalist Jon Ronson investigated the effect on victims of public shaming through social media platforms and compared it to the history of public shaming as a form of punishment. Such punishments (the stocks, the pillory, the whipping pole) have gone out of practice, in part because they were considered too humiliating and socially annihilating for the person undergoing the punishment. Ronson finds a clear parallel in the effects of online public shaming in the victims of the present. He both interviewed victims, including Justine Sacco (famous for being shamed online by thousands of people as a racist by the malicious retweet of her ‘funny’ joke tweeted just before going offline on an intercontinental flight in 2013), and people who had been important in setting off such processes, like Sam Biddle, who initially retweeted Sacco’s tweet and posted it on Valleywag, with the hashtag #hasjustinelandedyet. Biddle was unapologetic in his interview with Ronson about the harm done to Sacco as a result of the Twitter storm (she was let go from her job, received numerous death threats, was socially isolated, and traumatized by the ordeal – all effects that have come to be seen as fairly typical for public shaming). 1 However, Biddle later became victim of such a shitstorm himself, and a year after the initial denunciation publicly apologized to Sacco.
