Jennifer Jill Fellows: Fighting for social justice can be exhausting. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice as Dr. Martin Luther King said, but he also said it was long. It takes years and sometimes decades to bend that curve. But sometimes we’re given the opportunity to join something that feels bigger than ourselves online. We could join a massive wave of people criticizing, judging, and even shaming an individual for their prejudicial and objectionable behavior. This pile on may even succeed in getting someone fired or otherwise disciplined. And it often feels like a win. And don’t we all need a win? But wait, is it a win? Is it effective in bending that curve towards justice?
JJF: Hi, everybody. Welcome to Cyborg Goddess, a Feminist Tech Studies Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Jill Fellows. And on this episode, I’ve invited Dr. Celia Edell on the show to talk about her research examining the ethics of online from a feminist perspective. Doctor Celia Edell is Fonds de recherche du Québec Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia. She is also a content creator online who has spent over a decade creating educational content on social media sites. In her current research project, Celia combines both her experience in social media with her philosophical interests in feminist ethics to examine oppression, accountability, and blame in online spaces. And that’s what Celia is here to talk to me about today.
JJF: Hi, Celia, welcome to the show.
Celia Edell: Hi, Jill. Thanks for having me on. I’m really excited to be here.
JJF: This should be fun.
JJF: Before we get into it, I’m just going to pause for a moment to recognize that digital space is physical space. The social media sites that connect us that we’ll be talking about today often seem ephemeral and it’s probably too easy to forget that they are actually maintained using cables and servers that occupy physical spaces. And so I want to recognize that Cyborg Goddess is recorded today on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish people of the Qiqéyt Nation. And where are you joining us from today, Celia?
CE: I am recording from the unseated ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
JJF: Okay. So I want to start out by asking you which came first, your interest in social media content creation or your interest in philosophy?
CE: Yeah, I would say the two interests go back so far for me that it’s actually hard to know which one really came first. So as a teenager, I was on social media at the time it was MySpace.
JJF: Yeah.
CE: That was around the same time that I took my first philosophy class, which was offered in my high school. Both interests started to blossom at the same time and they both deepened in undergrad when I specialized in philosophy and undergrad was when I discovered feminism. At the same time, I discovered an online community and I started sharing my thoughts on social media like Tumblr, those kind of sites, and at the time, I didn’t think about it in terms of content creation at all. But in a way, that’s what I was doing.
JJF: Yeah. Oh, I think that’s so interesting. I mean, I don’t think there are that many high schools in Canada that offer philosophy in high school. That’s a really unique experience that you were introduced to philosophy probably earlier than a lot of other people who professionalize in the discipline.
CE: Yeah, it’s true. Yeah.
JJF: Then, MySpace. I remember that. You could customize your MySpace wall so much more than is maybe available for social media today. I feel like. Although I think MySpace is maybe still going. I’m not sure.
CE: Yeah, I think it’s changed a lot. I think it’s more for music now, if anything, I know all of my old photos have been lost to the internet oblivion, which is sad, but also maybe for the best. Yeah. I think I learned sort of rudimentary HTML coding on my space just for the end of customizing my profile page.
JJF: Yeah, yeah. And you were doing these two things and you’re learning about feminist philosophy in your undergrad. When did these two interests kind of begin to merge?
CE: Yeah. Interestingly, I brought my philosophical interests and ideas to social media for many years before I ever allowed my interests in Internet culture to inform my philosophical work. So, for, like you said at the beginning, more than a decade, my online content has focused for a large part on explaining philosophical concepts that interest me to an online audience outside of the academic bubble that I was learning them in. And it’s not that I was coming to the Internet as a teacher already. I mean, of course, I was an undergrad student. I was myself learning them and talking through the ideas that were exciting to me in real time to the people that I knew online. So, I wasn’t coming as an expert. I was and still am just a very curious person, and I liked having people from all over the world to bounce these philosophical ideas off of. So really, I was bringing philosophy to, and feminist philosophy in particular, to the Internet where I existed and it wasn’t until I finished my PhD that I kind of decided that I wanted to reverse the process and bring my understanding of the Internet as this social space to the academic setting that I found myself now embedded in.
JJF: Right.
CE: So, for my post doc research, I’ve pivoted to looking at digital ethics and especially to do with social media relationality and accountability. It’s really just a marriage of these two parts of myself and the journey to where I am now that has been with me the whole time, but never really come together.
JJF: Okay, so that’s so interesting. Maybe this isn’t quite right, but I’m imagining that early on, making your MySpace page and stuff. That wasn’t necessarily about sharing philosophical ideas, but at a point, your interest in philosophy and feminist philosophy in particular meant you wanted to share these things in digital spaces and get a community of other people who are interested and a community of learners. I think when public scholarship, which is basically what this is, when it works well, it is this idea of, like, you’re sharing your learning journey along with other people. Not necessarily that you’re coming as an expert, but you’re like, Well, here’s what I’m thinking right now in real time and other people can respond and bounce their own ideas off of you and vice versa, and that’s the beauty of the Internet when it works well.
CE: Yeah, absolutely.
JJF: So, then we get through your Master’s and into your PhD and at a point you start thinking, well, wait a minute. It’s not just that I can use philosophy and share philosophical ideas online, but I can actually use my experience in these online spaces and think about that philosophically.
CE: Exactly. Yeah, I think I hadn’t put sort of the value on my experience and my time that I’ve spent gaining all of these relationships online and what that has been like, I mean, I, like I mentioned, have been very much embedded in social media since MySpace through the rise of Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram all of these things. And all of these different social media sites have different norms and different norm regulation and different accountability practices. And when I was very much in Tumblr and the Tumblr world, It was kind of it was in the age of call out culture being the main thrust of how we held each other accountable for wrongdoing. And so that’s partially why I got interested in looking at accountability and social media relationships because yeah, you see sort of the way people are trying out different things online and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. Yeah, so that’s kind of where I started to look at it differently and think, okay, maybe there’s something philosophical that I could do here.
JJF: I also I do want to get into the discussion of call out, culture, and stuff like that. But one thing I just want to pause and talk about that you said there is this idea that different platforms have different social norms because I don’t think we always necessarily reflect on that, but the normative behavior of Twitter is really, really different from MySpace or Facebook. And yeah, Tumblr had kind of its own cultural practice and own ideas and norms of acceptable behavior. I think that’s really interesting. One really stark example is technically LinkedIn and Facebook are both social media sites, but people use them really differently, right?
CE: Yeah.
JJF: I think anybody who’s still on Facebook is mostly using it to keep in touch with family and friends and it’s become a little bit more personal, whereas LinkedIn is much more professional, for example, right?
CE: Yeah, absolutely. That’s part of what makes them so interesting is that what they’re used for and the social norms within the platforms also evolves over time. It’s not just that they differ from each other, but I got Facebook right when it started when it was available to only college university students and
JJF: I remember that.
CE: Yeah, it was a very different place at the time that I got Facebook in high school and would just post all of my party photos all at once and it’s not the same place
JJF: It’s not like that anymore.
CE: Exactly.
JJF: And there was a point, I also remember where Facebook at, at least the circles of Facebook I was in was more about professionalization, people were making contacts and advertising job openings and stuff on Facebook. I guess that still happens, but it’s now that people have Linkedin and other places, Facebook isn’t really used for that so much anymore.
JJF: Yeah. Interestingly, similar things have happened with Twitter. I have never been huge on Twitter, but I do know that there has been huge communities of say academics who use Twitter to connect to each other, which I think when it switched over to being X with Elon Musk, a lot of them sort of left the platform, it’s changed a lot since then. But you know, all of these sites have their own lifespan and they changed so much over time. And I watched Tumblr, which is probably the social media that I was most deeply embedded in, especially doing my feminist philosophy work. Yeah, it changed a lot over time, and it sort of died out in a way when they started to have harsher censorship on the app. And so it’s interesting to see how, you know, even if the app makes one sort of change, okay, you can no longer post something that is explicit, say, it really radically changes what people are doing on that app. Even if they weren’t posting explicit imagery, it sort of it changes the culture of the app.
JJF: Yeah. I don’t want to go into a big Tumblr thing, but I do remember. They made that change, and then if I’m remembering correctly, allowed Archive of Our Own to really start flourishing among certain users because they felt that they couldn’t post the content that they’ve been posting on Tumblr or that they were being restricted. And so there was this whole new Archive/Social media site that took off there too.
CE: Yeah. Interesting.
JJF: Yeah. I mean, migration from one site to another is also super interesting. We’re seeing that happen with Twitter right now, X, whatever.
CE: Yeah. It’s true. I mean, teaching undergrads today, it’s so interesting to be thinking about myself as an undergrad using social media, and now I’m teaching it to undergrads who what they report to me is things are changing so quickly, you know, they don’t even have Facebook and Instagram is sort of getting old and it’s all about TikTok. You know, yeah, it’s just interesting to learn the different norms and how they manage the kind of built in surveillance that they’ve grown up with in terms of they are always sort of available for other people to see what they’re doing and how they manage those expectations. Yeah, it’s just a new way of living that even though I grew up on the Internet and have had every social media account, I didn’t have that embedded in me as young as a lot of my students had.
JJF: So, We’ve got a background of your experience and observations. But today, you’re here to talk to us about online shaming and ways of thinking about online shaming, particularly from feminist philosophy. So, I’m going to guess that probably most of our listeners have witnessed or unfortunately, perhaps even experienced a case of online shaming or a form of online shaming. But in case people aren’t aware, could you explain a little bit about what online shaming is, where it tends to happen, just to give us a bit of a background about what we’re talking about?
CE: Yeah, for sure. Online shaming can obviously take many different forms, but one of the most interesting and I think pressing forms to consider philosophically is the mass shaming that can follow some kind of moral error. What I have in mind are the targeted takedowns of a bad actor that are usually conducted on Twitter, sometimes Instagram or Facebook or other places on the Internet sometimes. They typically use hashtags or make memes to garner thousands of participants. And online shaming does often or sometimes target celebrities, but it also often focuses on private citizens. Most people can probably think of, like you said, at least one trending case of online shaming, whether it was a ‘Karen’ filmed doing something racist and public or someone posting a thoughtless tweet, which gains attention from countless other people. We can probably think of a few examples.
JJF: Yeah. Obviously, now the discussion of your interest in social media makes sense because online shaming tends to happen in these social media spaces. It may take different forms on different platforms. But yeah, the hashtag targeting specific individuals, whether it’s a celebrity or a private individual. That makes a lot of sense. And it’s often assumed to be targeting a bad actor. Although one thing that I think is interesting from your research is whether or not somebody is considered a bad actor, obviously depends a lot on the norms of the group targeting them as well, right?
CE: Absolutely.
JJF: We have Karen saying racist things, but I’ve also seen online shaming pile on people saying, for example, feminist or socially progressive things if there’s a target group that is having a backlash against that. For example, like an alt-right group in the most extreme cases.
CE: Yeah, absolutely. So really, online shaming is just a form of extreme norm enforcement. So what the norms of the group are, those norms are going to determine who’s of moral reproach or criticism. And so we have to be aware that even if, you know, we are doing it for a quote “good cause,” the same kind of means can be used against people for, like you said, saying something socially progressive.
JJF: Mhmm. There’s also a distinction you draw that I want to make sure we have on the table for this discussion because you draw a distinction between online shaming as opposed to online social movements like the hashtag #MeToo movement or #BLM movement, for example. Can you talk a little bit about what that distinction is?
CE: Right. So online social movements, like you said, hashtag #MeToo or hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, These have made, I would say, a considerable impact on public understanding and solidarity around sociopolitical issues like systemic racism or sexual violence. These movements were possible and are possible because of this new form of connectivity that we have online. I think these movements have been as effective as they have been because they encourage people to share their own experiences, discuss, disagree with each other, seek accountability from individual wrongdoers, but also from institutions. These issues that they’re trying to deal with are very complex. The response should be multipronged and complex as well. While there’s lots of interesting philosophical questions about the possibilities and limitations of these movements, I’m not really interested here in what I’m doing right now in a kind of shaming that focuses on doing these complex approaches. I’m more interested in shaming that focuses on achieving a retributive punishment for an individual, usually private wrongdoer. Um, so for example, Black Lives Matter might seek accountability and punishment for an individual police officer who has used deadly force against an innocent Black person. But that’s part of a larger project to change the institution of policing, to inform our social understandings and solidarity around forms of violence inflicted on Black communities. So that’s a more expansive structural goal than the online shaming campaigns that just focus on calling out an individual person for some morally harmful behavior and enacting their punishment by crowdsourcing shame, humiliation, and threats. So, if the end goal is to shame the person into oblivion, then we might have reason to consider why we so readily engage in this kind of digital punishment and whether it actually serves our ends as feminists.
JJF: Right. Right. So, if I’m understanding the distinction, you’re not looking at these larger online social movements. There’s lots of philosophical work we could do on that. I have another episode actually this season that looks at. The global #MeTo movement
CE: Oh great
JJF: and the different shapes that that movement took in different regions around the world. As you said, one thing about that movement was that it was a multi faceted movement, that engaged in solidarity, but also people had disagreements about how to address sexual violence. Sexual violence might need to be addressed in different ways in different places around the world and in different contexts. It’s not necessarily about dog piling individuals, so much as it is about having these conversations, recognizing that this problem is pervasive and talking about different strategies for how to rectify this social structural problem that exists in many different communities. Similarly with Black Lives Matter, it’s not necessarily about shaming a single police officer because that won’t solve the racism built into law enforcement. We need something more than that and we need to have bigger conversations about how to deal with this structural racism built into law enforcement. That’s something we can have philosophical conversations about, but that’s separate from what you’re doing because you’re looking at when the issue is to target a specific individual, to try and exert some kind of force or punishment or that kind of thing. It’s not about talking about larger social and structural issues. It’s really the online shaming you’re looking about is targeting a specific individual.
CE: Yeah. That’s right.
JJF: Amazing. Awesome.
JJF: So in thinking about online shaming, particularly from a feminist philosophical perspective, you reached for a number of feminist ethical tools in your research, and I want to make sure that we have these tools and concepts before us as we move through your discussion of online shaming. One of the feminist tools you reach for is that feminists have already actually been discussing the concept of just shaming itself, and these discussions predate the Internet, predate social media. So shaming has existed long before it moved online. So what can you tell us about feminist ethical deliberations on the concept of shaming as a moral concept?
CE: So it was really important for my work to get really clear on what I mean by shaming and what’s distinct about it, say from just blaming. So I draw from contemporary philosopher named Lucy McDonald, who looks at paradigmatic cases of shaming in the media to determine what is common in all cases of shaming. So, she comes up with three sort of criteria. First, shaming always involves communicating a negative evaluation of a person. So of course, we don’t shame positively. It’s distinctly negative in its evaluation. That seems obvious, but it’s important to say.
JJF: Yeah, yeah.
CE: Secondly, shaming is always an extensive act, which means that it always involves calling on an audience to observe or to acknowledge and negatively evaluate the target as well. So, unlike me telling someone directly and privately that I disagree with what they’ve done, shaming involves an audience witnessing this disapproval that I’m communicating.
JJF: So it’s public in some sense.
CE: It’s public. Yeah. In some sense, in the sense that there’s always an audience. How big that audience is is going to depend on how you define it. But there’s always going to be an audience to observe. And finally, shaming will always involve a set of ratified participants, which just means that the target of the shaming and the audience will always occupy particular roles, one of them being the addressee, and one of them being the intended hearer. So, what’s interesting about shaming is that it’s not always the case that the shamed person is the addressee, the one being addressed with the shame, while the audience is the one intended to hear it. Sometimes shaming is addressed to an audience about the target, and it’s done so in a way that makes the shamed target an audience to their own shaming.
JJF: Interesting.
CE: Online shaming most often takes that form, I would say. So when you think about online shaming cases that you may have come across, it’s usually a flurry of users addressing each other about the object of their shaming that renders the object of their shame a ratified hearer in the encounter.
JJF: Okay.
CE: So, the shamed often find themselves on the sidelines watching their name, the reputation get dragged on Twitter, sometimes having their employers or their family contacted, their personal address leaked. This is not, they know their personal address. It’s not being addressed to them. They’re just witnessing it being leaked to other people.
JJF: Right.
CE: So, that’s the kind of online shaming that I’m really interested in and what makes it especially compelling to me is that often the people at the center of these storms have in fact done or said something that is morally egregious. So, as a feminist, I do feel drawn toward wanting some moral correction, but I also feel very conflicted about the ethics and the effectiveness of this approach.
JJF: Right. So we have these three components of online shaming, and I think that third one is really interesting because what you’re saying is shaming in general, whether online or offline, can be shaming that is directed at the target, and so the target is also the intended hearer, the person who’s supposed to hear and respond to the shame. But you can also hold up the target as an example and direct your shaming towards the audience.
CE: Yeah.
JJF: I don’t know if this is true. Maybe this is an assumption I’m making, but it seems to me that prior to online shaming, maybe the shame was more often directed at the target, but I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems like now. . .
CE: Yeah, that’s a good question. Because if you think about maybe in a classroom, if the teacher brings up a student and is telling the class what that student did wrong, but is not actually telling it to the student themselves as the intended here, but is saying don’t do what this student does because it’s wrong. Maybe that would be an old-fashioned version of that, but the scale is so different.
JJF: Right. Maybe in newspapers as well.
CE: Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah.
JJF: Newspaper editorials could shame an individual setting an example for a community. Yeah. But yeah, I take your point that I feel like it’s potentially easier to do that second form of online shaming where the target is not the intended hearer necessarily anymore and the target is being stood up as an example. You’re shaming the target for the benefit of your audience rather than shaming the target for the target to hear that?
CE: Yes. Honestly, I think it’s more fun. That sounds horrible. But often, I’ve witnessed so much online shaming happening online and, you know, sometimes the jokes are funny. I will admit that the memes are funny and they’re not making memes so that the person who’s being shamed is going to be like, Haha, yes, good take on the situation. They’re doing it for other people who are involved in this takedown. It’s really about a relationship with each other as shamers and there’s a group bonding that can happen there and it’s really complicated, the ethics of bonding in that way over these issues. I’m not saying it’s always the wrong thing, but it does seem looking deep into it.
JJF: Yeah. Obviously, the fact that sometimes it’s fun doesn’t necessarily make it morally okay.
CE: Right. Absolutely.
JJF: We’ve got this concept of shaming and how it works and different varieties that can have, and we’ve already talked a little bit about what it starts looking like when we move online. But before we really dive into that, I also want to get another concept that you reached for, which is the concept of moral reproach. Can you tell me a little bit about what moral reproach is and how it might relate to these issues of shaming?
CE: Moral reproach is a concept developed by Cheshire Calhoun as a tool for enforcing moral norms. It basically describes an expression of moral judgment or criticism towards someone who’s violated some moral norm, and it’s meant to signal disapproval or condemnation in some way. So, Calhoun argues that not pointing out wrongdoing and condemning it would amount to sanctioning it or excusing the wrong action. But it’s important to note that Calhoun wrote this in 1989. So, it does not necessarily translate to the modern context of online dynamics. In fact, I think part of what is going wrong in the way that we treat one another online is that we, and I certainly include feminists like myself in this, do a lot of moral judging and critiquing online. And it’s not clear that it’s having the kind of effect that Calhoun was envisioning in 1989, because as we all know, today, mass amounts of people have gained access to online spaces, and it’s extremely easy to communicate with thousands upon thousands of people very rapidly. So, while expressing moral criticism towards someone in your own social environment, say a classmate or a colleague who maybe makes an offensive joke, that criticism might encourage them to do better. Joining in when thousands of strangers pile on someone that you’ve never met for an offensive joke potentially does something very different. So, I’m interested in what to make of that kind of modern form of moral reproach.
JJF: So, if I’m understanding, moral reproach could take the form of shaming, but it sounds like moral reproach, at least the way Calhoun first envisioned it, doesn’t necessarily require there to be an audience to the reproach.
CE: Yeah.
JJF: So I’m thinking about one of the examples that I remember you give in your research is this example of female professor and their students refer to them as Mrs or Ms instead of giving them the honorific of Dr. This is a pretty standard pattern of behavior that happens. Female professors and doctors and PhDs are often not given the same recognition with a title as their male counterparts. So, if the female professor doesn’t do a moral reproach on that student doesn’t say, Hey, actually, my title is Dr., not Ms or Mrs. This might actually lead the student to not recognizing any wrongdoing, and so they continue to call their female professors by Ms or Mrs. So there’s a sense in which failing to call somebody out in that way, failing to reproach them might actually lead to them doubling down on the wrongdoing. You might have a moral obligation to do a moral reproach in this case.
CE: Yeah, exactly.
JJF: But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to call the student out in front of everybody else in the class, necessarily, right? Moral reproach can take the form of shaming, but it might be more context dependent. Some cases you might need the audience, in some cases, it might be more appropriate to take the person aside and go, Hey, just so you know, my title is Dr.
CE: Exactly, exactly. That example comes straight from Calhoun where she’s telling what she’s envisioning for. It would be very easy to just say, Oh, they don’t know better. They don’t, they’re not aware of this discrepancy in how female professors are called versus male professors. I’ll just let it go. But her point is, it’s important that we pointed out. I think it’s important that we point out wrongdoing in the situations like Calhoun is mentioning, like that example. But of course, she does not build into her account that it has to be in front of other people, and it might in some ways be counterproductive to do something like that in front of other people. We can imagine with her example, whether it would be better for her to tell the student this in front of the class. There’s maybe some argument to be made that it would teach more people the same lesson. But would we then extend that to say she should tweet something about the student doing this so that thousands of people can come at the student and leak the student’s name or something like that? Probably not. We’re probably not going to go that far.
JJF: Right.
CE: I think, when we start to extend her account into the modern context, it gets more complicated.
JJF: Yeah. I think this also points out a bit of an issue about what exactly is it we think we’re trying to accomplish with online shaming versus what we might actually be accomplishing with online shaming.
JJF: So, let’s jump into this and start talking about online shaming and we’ve got kind of these feminist frameworks of shaming and moral reproach in the background. So what are some of the moral issues that you think get raised once we start thinking about shaming kind in a digital context. And we’ve already talked a little bit about what some of the issues might be, but let’s get a little more systematic here about what might happen.
CE: Right. So I think one of the maybe obvious and pressing concerns is the concern of disproportionality. So, you know, if a student calls me Mrs instead of Dr and I posted that online, what kind of disproportionate response would come as a result of that? And yeah, there’s a lot of ethical questions that arise. That, obviously, example is one where the moral wrongdoing is quite small. But even when the wrongdoing is severe, we have to wonder sort of what’s going on and sort of whether it’s okay for us to pile on when so many others are piling on already.
JJF: Right. So that is that we want to make sure our moral responses to the wrongdoing are proportionate to the wrongdoing, right? So in the example we’ve been talking about somebody accidentally giving you the wrong honorific or wrong title, or maybe intentionally, I don’t know. But somebody doing that, giving you the wrong title for whatever reason, it is a moral wrong, but it’s a pretty small one. I think everybody can agree that tweeting out the student’s name is really disproportionate to the harm that you have suffered as an instructor. Like getting people to pile onto this student, if you were successful in doing that is a horrible outcome for this person to experience based on the tiny mistake or intentional wrongdoing that they have committed to you. The harm you suffered is so much smaller than the harm that you are unleashing on.
CE: Yeah, absolutely.
JJF: But I take your point that you’re saying even when the harm that an individual or a group of people suffers. If somebody says or does something that is a more egregious example of sexism, for example, the entire Internet starts dog piling them for making this sexist joke or otherwise doing something that is more seriously a harm, it seems like there’s not a good way of trying to rein in the mob or the group. So you can quite quickly end up in a situation where you still want to say, look, what that person did was really serious. But nobody deserves to be doxxed. Nobody deserves to have their personal information leaked to thousands or millions of strangers online, even if they did do something that was seriously a moral wrong. We get into this issue where the punishment or the retribution seems really, really out of line with what the person actually did. Is that the point?
CE: Yeah, I would say that’s accurate. I mean, like I said before, online shaming always involves calling on an audience to observe and to also partake in the negative evaluation. Because of the nature of the Internet, the audience that it’s calling upon is enormous, and it’s often anonymous. It might seem like tweeting once at someone and letting them know that you think their joke is not funny and it’s wrong or that their behavior was vile, you might not think that that’s noteworthy because it’s just one tweet. And on its own, that tweet isn’t that noteworthy. But it’s important that we don’t overlook the aggregate effect of many individuals doing one small even seemingly harmless act. The example of if I whisper in a library, no one is disturbed, but if thousands of us whisper in the library at the same time, then no one can study. So that’s the aggregate effect of doing something little. And online, those whisper, so to speak, are retweeted, amplified, extended, echoed back, commented on, made into memes. This collective action is just a fact of modern life that exists on the Internet and its harms are still very unpredictable. So, what we can plainly see is that online shaming, like you said, often devolves into a frenzy of brutality that leads to job loss, death and rape threats, stalking, physical threats, things like that. And we should know that what we say and do online can have very real impacts on those that we criticize, whether or not we’re saying it directly to them or just about them to others. I think feminists should be aware of the fact that profit driven social media platforms are capitalizing on our interest in gossip and scandal and righteousness and group bonding at the expense of those who have done something offensive but to very widely varying degrees
JJF: Right. And then there’s another part here that I want to draw out, which is that when we’re talking about the disproportionality, it’s not just that an individual who is experiencing online shaming is just absolutely being overwhelmed by the number of tweets, likes, retweets, everything, like I’m thinking of Twitter. But obviously, this happens in other places, hash tags, all that kind of stuff. But also that it’s disproportional, I think, in a sense that it doesn’t go away. So, let’s say you actually tried to make amends for whatever it was that you had done that was transgressing the moral norm. You told a sexist joke. People are piling on you. You apologize for it. Maybe you start reading some feminist theory. You try and understand exactly what you did wrong. But the pile on doesn’t stop even if you have actually reformed your behavior and understood why what you did was wrong. It can crop up years later, the hashtag can start circulating again and everybody starts piling on you again, even though perhaps you’ve really, really changed and become somebody who understands and embodies feminist values, for example.
CE: Yeah, absolutely. The permanency of everything on the Internet is part of what makes it so severe, the way that we treat each other there, because if you say something about a student in front of the class, it might be embarrassing, but then people move on and forget about it. If it’s on the Internet, people will always be able to find it and revisit it and it will become attached to you. I think part of the danger of having online shaming connect to this permanency is that it makes it easier and more tempting and in some ways, more true that the victims of this online shaming are going to ultimately view themselves as victims of character defamation. That makes it harder to actually self reflect and do the work that you need to do to change because even if you do that work, it’s likely not going to be recognized, but you also have very little motivation to do it if you are just being pushed further and further outside of social boundaries online. So, I think there’s a lot of risks to that disproportionality.
JJF: Right. Okay. So now I think I’m ready to ask you about the efficacy of online shaming. We know offline how shaming is supposed to work to try and correct an individual’s behavior or set that individual as an example for groups to not emulate that behavior, for example, and that has varying degrees of success offline and gets more complicated online. We know moral reproach and how that’s supposed to work that not calling out bad behavior is compounding the bad behavior. But again, that seems more complicated when we move online.
CE: Yeah.
JJF: So How does this all work in digital spaces? How efficacious is online shaming? What do people think they’re accomplishing with it and are they actually accomplishing what they think they are?
CE: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a really hard question to fully answer. So, moral reproach is meant to help correct morally bad behavior by calling it out and not letting it slide. And in digital spaces, these aggregate corrections, which often take forms like signaling one’s own virtuous position or making a joke or a meme at the expense of the shamed person or simply joining in to a choir of people digitally saying tsk tsk to someone may not always do what we actually wanted to do. So, I’m taking as fact that many of the people at the center of these online shaming storms did, in fact, do something morally wrong, so-called Karen’s calling the police on innocent Black people or people making transphobic statements on Twitter. These are obviously harmful and worthy of serious moral reproach. What I’m trying to say is not that they don’t deserve the flack or any flack or that they shouldn’t be held responsible for their racism or transphobia or what have you, because they should. But I’m concerned that this online criticism actually ends up normalizing a different form of harmful behavior. That unconstrained norm enforcement through means like doxxing, personal information or threatening people. That’s one concern. Then the other concern is that it might actually undermine offenders or even onlookers ability to appreciate the consequences of their wrongdoing. That might seem counterintuitive because of course, the consequence of doing something even relatively small is so big if you are exposed online. But it can have a kind of opposite effect to what shamers intend. We’ve seen this countless times when someone is faced with mass amounts of moral reproach online with little boundaries that are constraining how people come about, you know, attacking them, perpetrators often end up viewing themselves as innocent victims who are unable to self-reflect under that extreme scrutiny. So, we have to be very careful that we don’t just keep pushing people into the extremist communities that they maybe are already in online or because they feel excluded from the standard online community.
JJF: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. If you are being absolutely dog piled by the Internet at large for something that you said that was racist or transphobic or something like that, on the one hand, you’ve said something that harms people, you have spread an ideology that is harmful to people’s lives, harmful to people’s mental health, etc. etc. absolutely, you are morally blameworthy for that. However, once you are being completely dog piled for something that you said, you may even at first try to apologize and understand, but you probably can’t keep up with just the overwhelming number of things that are coming at you. It may actually push people, and I think everybody’s probably seen an example of this where people get pushed into a more radical space because if the anti-racist group is piling on, whereas people who hold racist ideologies are telling me, I understand, you’re a victim, this isn’t fair. I might start agreeing with them because it doesn’t seem fair that I’m absolutely being dog piled and that can quite quickly end up with you surrounded by a group of people who reinforce this harmful ideology as a way of trying to protect yourself from just the deluge that you’re getting from others.
CE: Absolutely. These kind of communities become so siloed off and there’s so much division that you know, it’s not like you’re just taking a step toward somewhere else. You can end up where algorithmically even you are surrounded by a different kind of belief that’s sort of supporting you or feel supportive of you. I’ve seen this, you know, in feminist communities online where a feminist makes some kind of mistake, says something offensive, does something offensive, and then they are attacked so heavily that I don’t think that they identify as a feminist anymore and they find themselves moving away from it. And you know, that, you know, obviously, I think we should be able to hold strongly to our values. But I have not been under the kind of scrutiny of thousands and thousands of people attacking me at once, and I can imagine how destabilizing that would feel.
JJF: Yeah. But I can see if you had a group of people that was kind of welcoming you in, it would be easy for you to end up in a space where you’re just not engaging with this stuff and a lot of people have been pushed offline as a result of this kind of thing to too.
JJF: Okay, so it’s not clear that this is efficacious for changing people’s behavior, and that puts feminists in this bind. Because on the one hand, I take it, we do want to agree to some degree with this idea of moral reproach and this idea that you want to be able to call out people who are putting out harmful ideologies. But on the other hand, if your call out ends up further isolating and further radicalizing people, it isn’t actually meeting the goals of moral reproach anymore.
CE: Right.
JJF: So, that creates a little bit of an issue. This idea of efficacy also links to something that we talked about a little bit earlier. We talked about the online social movements like the MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter movement that have specific goals in mind that are not the same as online shaming that are aiming at trying to get structural and social changes. And when I think about online shaming and efficacy, you have this quote that I think was really, really emblematic of what I’m thinking about in the difference between perhaps targeted online shaming and these larger online social movements. So you said, quoting, “As feminists, we must reckon with the fact that memification of private citizens and their wrongdoings can only do so much to address the systemic or even interpersonal nature of their wrong.” End of quotation. So can we talk a little bit more of this kind of limitations in the efficacy of online shaming and maybe in contrast to these larger online social movements?
CE: Right. So, The more we focus all our collective energy on making one individual wrongdoer pay for what they did or said, I think the further we get from being able to recognize their role and also our own role in the systems of oppression that led to the wrongdoing. An example can I think help explain what I mean. In Canada in Alberta, I believe, in 2018, there was a case where a white woman shouted racist comments at a group of friends from Afghanistan who were speaking in their native language in a Denny’s. So someone recorded the incident and uploaded it to Twitter, which led to an explosion of tweets from people condemning her. There was a hash tag with just her full name. Was her behavior in the diner morally wrong? Yes, absolutely. Did she deserve to be held morally responsible for it? Yes, absolutely. But what makes, what happened on Twitter is that while people were condemning her racism, they were also making a bunch of other comments about her being white trash, about her hanging out in a low class area, that she must be uneducated, that only, you know, the rabble, eat at Denny’s, things like that.
JJF: Oh, wow.
CE: This was, you know, there was a study done of the responses to this and the structural racism that actually fed into this woman’s reaction, the fact that, for example, right wing populism has been using economic frustration in lower socioeconomic whites with appeals to anger at migrant communities. That sort of structural problem wasn’t only ignored, it was actually fueled by the comments online. The classist stereotypes about uneducated white trash and who eats at Denny’s. These things actually feed into those political systems and that political rhetoric that fuels anger toward racialized immigrants like those men in the diner. The point that I’m trying to make is that the shaming conducted en mass online often miss fires. It aims too low. The underlying societal problems that these episodes of racism are are exposing are often left unaddressed or almost always left unaddressed, I would say, when people make it about themselves being virtuous. I couldn’t be like that. I’m a good Canadian, I’m a good white person.
JJF: No one will take a video of me in a Denny’s doing that.
CE: Exactly. This often ignores people’s own complicity in these systems or makes it into a joke to gain engagement, to get attention online. And I should mention that the woman in this example died very shortly after this happened and it’s likely due to some kind of mental health episode. Her life basically fell apart. She lost her job, lost her marriage, all of these things. And I’m not blaming the trolls completely because like anything else, it’s more complicated than one particular cause, and I obviously didn’t know her. But we should be aware that making a joke that joins millions of other jokes and threats toward one individual person, it won’t change the systemic problems in our society, but it may prove to be too much for that one person to bear. And so we need to be aware of those that tension there.
JJF: Right. All this kind of moral outrage didn’t usefully get directed towards the structural racism that exists in Canada and the phobia that people have regarding immigration and migrant workers and all that kind of stuff and the ways in which certain political parties and institutions fuel or encourage that phobia.
CE: Yeah.
JJF: None of that was necessarily addressed with this.
CE: Yeah.
JJF: In fact, in some ways, that was reinforced by some of the comments that were made online and by the stereotypes that those commenters employed in their memes or in their retweets or what have you. So we end up not necessarily critiquing or changing or tearing down the structural problems, but actually paradoxically reinforcing them with our moral outrage and our moral shaming.
CE: Right. Exactly.
JJF: Probably the opposite of what feminists would want to do in these cases.
CE: Yes. Not just going after her for say, being a low socioeconomic neighborhood or something like that, but also the way that the whole encounter was characterized was often sort of this is an exceptional case of racism in what is a not racist country. Canada was sort positioned as not racist and so she was a racist problem. There was an exceptionalism that was sort advanced there, which actually harms our ability to, or impedes our ability to actually address the fact that there is structural racism in Canada and it is embedded in our systems here. So yeah, it does actually work against what we as feminists would want to be doing. Even though she did do something wrong, we have to be careful with the way we address it.
JJF: So when we hold up an individual, There’s often, and I’ve seen this happen in cases of online shaming, that the individual takes on this unique position as being the exception to moral norms, which doesn’t necessarily let us reflect on the fact that the moral norms that we may hold as an online community are not norms that are reflected in wider social structures, and that the structures, in fact, this individual may not be a unique exception because there’s whole social and structural factors that uphold and reinforce normative behavior that is racist and sexist and ableist, etc.
CE: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s what online social movements do better or do well. They are drawing attention to individual wrongdoers, but in order to make larger points about they are just a piece of the puzzle and they are acting within the norms of policing or within the norms of what’s acceptable sexual harassment in this industry or things like that. So, yeah, I think when you have a hashtag that’s someone’s name, it’s likely that that is not getting a bigger picture, it’s really focusing on just taking that person down and making them disappear.
JJF: Whereas the hashtag MeToo did call out some individual actors, but one of the larger points, especially from the original MeToo movement from Tanara Burke was this idea of showing solidarity that these experiences happen to people, particularly women, but not just women, to people everywhere. This idea of sexual violence as pervasive rather than just saying, Well, there are some few bad actors who are committing cases of harassment and sexual violence. No, it’s everywhere is the point. It’s not about holding a few bad actors. It’s about pointing out the pervasiveness of the problem.
CE: Yeah.
JJF: And that isn’t happening if you’re only targeting one person.
CE: Exactly. And even the people, if you think of the MeToo movement, you know, the big names like Harvey Weinstein, who were taken down or Bill Cosby, they were taken down, so to speak, but legally, they went to court and there was, you know, a whole proceeding that, you know, found them guilty. So, it’s it’s not sort of all in the hands of the online community to exert the full punishment. It’s more about drawing attention to an issue and then going through different means to seek accountability for individual wrongdoers.
JJF: And those individuals, particularly Weinstein, were also in some ways, emblematic of entire industry because of the power they held. That also brings me to another point that you make about online shaming, which is that you say online shaming can in some cases be effective if you’re shaming up, but that isn’t necessarily always what is happening in these spaces. So can you talk about that a little bit?
CE: Yes. Online shaming is not always the way that it’s been described in our conversation. So a philosopher named Jennifer Jacquet actually developed this concept of shaming up and it essentially means using the power of reputation and self-image to enforce norms onto those with more dominant social positions and demand accountability from power, sort of, powerful figures and institutions. So for example, rather than targeting a private citizen, shaming up would likely involve shaming a manufacturer for poor working conditions or shaming a politician or an author with international reach, for example, for their transphobic legislation or comments. So,
JJF: For example.
CE: For example. People like that who are in positions of power of great power, whether that power is economic, political, or otherwise. Those people are more equipped, I would say, to handle the way that networked collectivity lets us demand accountability from others online. The Internet is a very powerful tool for bringing feminists together to place pressure on people and place pressure on institutions to act in more ethical ways. But it’s vital that we choose the right spots to put that pressure where it’s going to be the most effective and we don’t overlook what can happen when we all push at once, on the wrong spot, so to speak, and what that can actually lead to.
JJF: Right. I take your example of politicians. I’ve seen many examples of this, where a politician will say something candidly or even have things in their policy platform that the whole party may be behind, and there’s a lot of critique and what would count as shaming that happens of these politicians and political figures online. Um, so as an example, right now, in Alberta, Daniel Smith’s platform or not platform. They’re trying to pass laws that would disallow trans students in K-12 from changing their pronouns without the instruct, the teachers having to notify the parents for example, which definitely puts some trans youth at risk, depending on the relationship they have with their parents, there’s a lot of public pushback and shaming of Smith and her party right now about that. And so I would take it that that might be an example of shaming up when people are posting very critical views of certain politicians or political platforms, and that’s because you’re trying to put pressure on a governing party to actually change this social structure.
CE: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
JJF: So that’s where online shaming can start looking a little bit like a social movement. You may be picking on an individual, so it’s shaming, but you’re picking on that individual for a social structural change that you’re looking to achieve. That probably isn’t going to happen by picking on the woman in Denny’s, for example, right. She doesn’t have the power to change these structures.
CE: Right. Exactly. Yeah, and the power of addressing someone with political influence. There’s so much more potential in the reach that they can have in changing things, whether it’s someone who is proposing legislation or it’s someone who just has a ton of social economic influence in the world and the stance they take can really influence a lot of people, that there is some reason to think that we should put pressure on those people when they say harmful things.
JJF: Yeah. We have obviously politicians who have a lot of power, but I take your point that also actors, writers, possibly even social media influencers if their base is big enough may also be people for whom shaming up could be quite effective? Though I do want to ask here because it still seems to me that there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed. I don’t want to necessarily see authors and influencers get doxxed or have death threats or things like that, even though I think shaming up could be effective in these cases. Is there still a risk of disproportionality even when you’re shaming up?
CE: Yeah, I would say that there’s probably always a risk when there is an individual being targeted because the disproportionality is so unpredictable. People can actually stalk people in real life and do physically harm them. So, we have to be really careful even when that person has a lot of political power, say, we don’t want to say, then it’s morally fine to stalk and assault a politician because they have some horrible legislation. I think we need to still have boundaries around the way that we use shame to enforce these norms that we’re worried about. I think it’s a really tricky and interesting question about where that line is with influencers, how many followers do you need before you have enough power that you can be held accountable in this way. I’m not really sure. But I would likely say that the flack that Joe Rogan say, gets, he can probably take it a lot more than an Instagram influencer that’s just posting from her house or something like that. The line is getting really getting blurry
CE: It’s getting blurry
JJF: between celebrity and influencer. It’s getting really blurry.
CE: Yeah. And just like the question of what responsibility do people hold as an influencer, so to speak. I think is really muddy right now. It’s that whole question about what is the responsibility of celebrities as role models. The same question is now extending more and more into private citizens who have social media presences. I think it’s a complicated question when we’re dealing with the disproportionality and the other risks of online.
JJF: So we’ve talked a little bit about shaming up. But one thing that you also notice that feminists should be critical of and be aware of is that while shaming up may be effective, what actually seems to happen is that more often than not the targets of online shaming are not necessarily powerful people, but instead marginalized and or oppressed groups or not groups, individuals from marginalized or oppressed groups. So can we talk a bit about this form of online shaming and why feminists should be aware of what’s happening.
CE: So, the examples that I’ve raised have largely been someone from a more dominant group, say a white woman doing something racist and being targeted. But it is actually well documented that women 2-Spirit, LGBTQ and or racialized people, especially activists and journalists are the biggest target of online hate. That tells us that gender, race, and other forms of social stratification seem to play a really significant role in the response that you receive online, whether that’s for publishing a journalistic article or making an insensitive tweet. You’re more likely um, if you are part of a marginalized group, you’re more likely to receive a lot of backlash and hate. And of course, as feminists, this should concern us if it’s following this pattern that already exists in the sort of offline world. And it might suggest that there’s a kind of social expectation that those from marginalized groups should “know better,” and are generally held to sort of different standards than those from socially privileged groups. I’m not sure if that explains it totally, but I do think it’s something that we should be aware of and concerned about when we’re engaging in the normalization of this kind of behavior online.
JJF: So, what we see in actuality is that while it can be effective to target individuals like Weinstein, for example, what often ends up happening is that the individuals who are targeted are already people who are marginalized or oppressed in other ways and probably already people who are facing a lot of just unpleasantness and hate on the Internet in general. And then they say something insensitive or they say something that out of context could be insensitive because that’s another thing we haven’t talked about too much, but the Internet, certain social media sites, it can be really hard to know the context of somebody’s speech, particularly once it starts getting passed around from person to person to person. You can end up in a place where perhaps in context, your speech was not great, but out of context, it starts looking much more radically problematic maybe it actually was. So, we end up with people who are in these marginalized positions who are bearing more of the weight of the shame. People who already don’t have as much social capital, don’t have as much social power. And that is concerning, particularly for people I think who are interested in diversity in digital space because if online shaming is also directed at these people, I think that just increases the risk of these voices being silenced entirely, that people will just stop engaging as much potentially.
CE: Yeah, it has a quieting effect, I think, I mean, I certainly having been on YouTube during some of my time on Tumblr, I’ve been subjected to all sorts of mean comments, but also threats, rape threats, things like that in my DMs. And that was not because I had said something that, you know, feminists found problematic. It was because there was some Reddit thread that found my feminist YouTube videos and decided that I needed to be sort of taught a lesson. And so yeah, I think it’s really, it’s almost so accepted as part of the Internet that just women and marginalized people of various kinds are going to have it harder and are going to face this kind of hatred. So, I think the fact that online shaming is doing something in terms of shaping this online space that we’re existing in, you know, it is an environment that we’re still building and reshaping. And if we are normalizing treating each other in a certain way we think it serves us, then it’s also still normalized when it’s being used against us. So, there’s a danger there in just thinking that it’s okay some of the time but not others. Even if the answer to that is quite complicated.
JJF: I think that’s something I find really valuable about your work is we’ve raised a lot of questions and a lot of problems and things that we need to be aware of. That doesn’t necessarily mean in this podcast, we’ve given any answer about whether or not online shaming is okay morally. But I think maybe that’s the correct place to leave it at the moment because I think this is still being figured out. And as you’ve pointed out, sometimes online shaming is morally effective from a feminist perspective. Yeah. And so we probably can’t give a blanket answer like it’s morally okay to do it or it’s not morally okay to do it. Instead, what I take your work is doing is asking us to really be mindful of the context that you’re in before you choose to engage in the pile-on of online shaming. Like really think about Who is the target? What is it I’m hoping to accomplish by doing this? Be aware that the fact that many of us find this enjoyable is not necessarily a good thing. Social media loves it when we find things enjoyable. Yeah, really think about, is this the best way to affect the social and structural change that feminists are trying to aim for? Sometimes maybe it is, depending on the target and depending on the situation. But there are other times then maybe it’s just bet to back out and not be a part of what’s happening.
CE: Exactly.
JJF: I like that you’re not giving us a blanket answer because I think that these situations, what you’ve shown me is that these situations are incredibly context dependent.
CE: Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad that that’s your takeaway because that’s definitely where I’m at still in doing this research. I feel the clearest part of my answer is that it’s never going to be fully right or fully wrong. It’s always going to be context dependent, like you said, and it’s going to be complicated. There’s going to be pros and cons to any way of using the Internet for moral reproach like this. So, yeah, I think the best thing that I can say is to be wary of it and stress that online shaming, like almost everything online is very unpredictable and it’s shaped by algorithms and it’s fueled by online monetization and engagement and things like that. And like you said, I’m definitely not making the case that we have to give up on online accountability or never use shame online to address wrongdoing. But I do think that it’s worth serious reflection and strategic thinking about which transgressors are most responsible, which ones are most likely to change, and to remain open that we might need to evolve our techniques of moral reproach in the kind of polarized environment that the Internet has become.
JJF: I want to thank Celia again for taking the time to go over her research on the ethics of online shaming with me. And thank you, listener, for joining me for another episode of Cyborg Goddess. This podcast is created by me, Jennifer Jill Fellows, and it is part of the Harbinger Media Network, with music from Epidemic Sound. You can follow us on Twitter or BlueSky. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider buying me a coffee. You’ll find links to social media and my Ko-Fi page in the show. Until next time, everybody. Bye.