Actually, no I cant. No one has come up with an example of mob shaming that couldn’t also be called criticism.
So what? The supporting article and video included their names. Their names were also mentioned by subsequent posters. If the dividing line between criticism and shaming is whether the OP calls out the shamees by name, that’s a damn weak line of demarcation, ain’t it?
"We do a lot of “public shaming” here on the SDMB. Someone posts an article about someone doing something horrible, and we all take turns talking shit about that person."
So we can’t talk about anything unless we know all the facts? Does that sound reasonable to you?
Yes, but unless you’re saying every single post in which someone is critical of someone for “doing something horrible”, which sounds ridiculously broad, is “part of the problem”, then I still don’t know what it is you’re saying.
I understand it may take a few minutes of effort to find such a post, and if you don’t want to do it, then fine. But without that, I really don’t know what actual existing posts are wrong in your mind.
I’ve got an example:
What’s your take on these prankster parents?
I’m curious if DrDeth thinks everyone in that thread was a member of a “mob” just because they dared to express opinions about what those parents did.
Note that none of us posted the parents’ names or home addresses. No one advocated violence against them. As far as I know, none of us applied any pressure to their employer to fire them. But we did contribute to the “virality” of the video by talking about it in public. If someone with poor impulse control were to stumble across that thread and then decide to do something bad to those parents, should I be held responsible for that as the creator of that thread? Or should every individual be held accountable for their own individual actions?
No, but you shouldn’t out a particular private person. Talk about the incident not the names.
So folks can come up with clever nicknames like “Permit Patty” and all is well? Okay then.
This is a false equivalence. If you’re there, watching, by all means push back and call out the perpetrator, in whatever language doesn’t make you more of a jerk than s/he is. I simply don’t think it’s right (which was the OP’s question) for anyone to multiply that offense by thousands or millions of people, most of whom are just piling on for their own satisfaction and the fun of it. And if you’re not there, watching, how can you be sure that the context of the situation supports your interpretation? That is, there might have been intense provocation, something might have been building up for a long time and suddenly exploded where someone had a camera handy to record it. You don’t know any of that stuff from a distance, but you still think it’s a good idea to jump up and down and holler along with everyone else.
We should publicly shame people publicly shaming people. That’ll stop it.
There’s a world of difference between criticizing and shaming. These videos are not meant to criticize. The are not meant to point out a behavior that is unacceptable in the hopes that the perpetrator (and, by extension, others) will see the error of their way and endeavor to do better.
These videos are hateful. They are meant to shame - humiliate, mortify, embarrass. They often come with titles such as “look at what this piece of shit has done.” These videos not only imply that the specific event or behavior is unacceptable, but that the perpetrator is equally unacceptable.
These videos often have more than unfortunate unintended consequences; they are often posted with the overt intention that the person be ostracized, humiliated, unemployed - removed summarily from society.
These are not discourses on proper public etiquette. They are mean. hateful, vile, screes.
That’s how civilized society works. If you are egregiously offensive to someone who was egregiously offensive, then you are adding to the level of egregious offensiveness of society, not reducing it.
Individual in-kind retribution is not acceptable.
If you are guilty of theft, that doesn’t give me leave to thieve from you.
If you run over someone’s kid with your vehicle, I don’t get to run over yours.
If someone acts like an asshole in public, I don’t get a pass on being an asshole to them.
The near universal admonition of “don’t be a jerk” doesn’t come with the codicil “unless he was a jerk first” and it’s a shame that that has to be explained to so many of you!
mc
But that’s the whole point of a mob attack. It’s not realistic to seperate one from the other.
If a mob denounces someone as being so vile that they are outside society and must be punished forever, some people in the mob will punish them in a different way to other people in the mob and consider it to be equally righteous. It’s not reasonable to create a lynch mob and then deny responsibility for the inevitable results of a lynch mob. Particularly since it is always done without due process, without all the evidence (and often without any evidence).
It’s absolutely realistic.
There are several levels of response to such videos.
Actions 1-2 are always fine, IMO.
Actions 3-5 are appropriate in some severe cases.
Action 6 is never appropriate.
The problem, as I see it, is that:
-Bosses are ill-equipped to handle the deluge of complaints about a single person.
-Police are ill-equipped to handle online threats.
We definitely need to get wayyy better at handling online threats. AIUI these crimes are deprioritized; short of SWATTING someone to death, you’re unlikely to face any penalty for issuing an online threat. Folks who issue such threats should be taken seriously and should face serious consequences.
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It isn’t realistic because it doesn’t happen in reality and never has. You list 6 different courses of action of varying degrees of severity. It’s not realistic for you to expect everyone else in the mob to make the same judgement as you regarding which is the appropriate degree of punishment. That would require you to be in total command of the mob, which is sometimes possible in a mob of maybe a dozen people in one place but not in a mob of at least thousands of people in different places. Mobs believe their target is vile and that their own actions, whatever they are, are righteous and they always tend to extremes and they don’t care about due process, evidence, a fair trial, proportionate use of force or any such thing. Those are civilised concepts and mobs aren’t civilised. Even if the individuals in the mob are civilised as individuals, the mob they form will not be.
The trouble is assholes and jerks count on everyone else to have better manners than they have. That’s what enables them to continue to be assholes and jerks.
I don’t know what videos you’re talking about. Can you give some examples to make your case? It just seems like this is a case “you know it when you see it”, and i don’t think that is a good starting place for a debate.
When employers fire people caught on video doing shameful things, I think a lot of yall are assuming this is usually the result of campaigning and doxxing. I don’t make that assumption. Many companies have a strong internet presence and have departments that monitor the news to provide situational awareness. It would be trivially easy for them to discover that one of their employees had done something so obnoxious it could impact their image. Co-workers also pick things up and talk about them in the office.
I have zero doubt that if I was filmed slinging racial slurs or harrassing homeless people or whatever, my federal job would be at risk. This would be the case even if no one called Uncle Sam to complain about me.
This is some serious black-and-white thinking. No, of course I can’t wave a magic wand to make people stop issuing death threats, any more than you can wave a magic wand to make people stop posting shaming videos. But I can encourage more stringent law enforcement against threats. And unlike the “no more shaming videos” proposal, mine addresses the actual problem while leaving the salutary effects of shaming videos intact.
Of course it is - mob members aren’t robots or mind-controlled by the original publicizers. They’re adult human beings with individual agency. Prosecute the ones committing actual illegal offences, and leave it there.
In the olden days, if you were caught being an ass in public, word could still get back to your employer. The only difference is that they wouldn’t have proof. However, they could still decide to believe the witnesses over the employee based on the plausibility of the allegation.
As I said, the only difference between then and now is that now there people come with receipts. Sure, there may be some greater context for why a person is screaming “nigger!” at a five-year-old kid that didn’t get captured on the video. But an employer is not obligated to listen to all the sides of the story. There are some acts that are wrong no matter what the greater context is.
Seems to me the “B-b-b-but they might lose their job!” contingent would do better fighting for stricter labor rights than complaining about people sharing viral videos and talking about them. If you don’t think being a public asshole is sufficient cause to lose one’s job, then you should be against at-will employment. However, I don’t work for an at-will employer and I know that my ass would be fired if I showed up on a video spewing racial slurs.
Right. Jerkish overreaction.
But it seems as if she was correct about the charcoal grill. From this Newsweek article:
People in mobs don’t function very well (if at all) as individuals while part of the mob. That’s why some of them will do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.
If mob vengeance is socially acceptable, why would it remain illegal? Laws can be changed. Or just not enforced.
Mobs can also be used as weapons, but the people who do so aren’t breaking any laws because they wouldn’t be the people carrying out the attacks. If someone denounces someone as a witch in a time of witch-hunting and a mob kills that person, even if it’s still illegal to kill “witches” and even if that law is still enforced, the person who started the process isn’t legally guilty of the killing. They didn’t do it. They might not even have been present. They didn’t explicitly order anyone to do it or pay them to do it. They didn’t even say “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
I think that it’s a bad idea to ditch due process, evidence, fairness and suchlike in favour of mobs. The effect of that is far from salutary even if it isn’t used for directly killing people.