Shamed by Trolls

In 2017 I was trolled for a piece I wrote for The Week magazine on the questionable choice of Snopes.com as one of the main fact-checkers for Facebook, right in the middle of the furore about how they kinda broke democracy. The facts of my piece were judged problematic because they relied on a blog published by Forbes which was, however, not fact-checked by Forbes or subject to editorial oversight. For Snopes this meant my piece failed their fact-checking standards and they demonstrated their annoyance by self-righteously mocking and trolling me on Twitter. Although my editor supported me, the self-righteous anger and threat of my trolls was enough to get me to pull the piece. The trolls had shamed me into giving in, for which I thank Snopes because they gave me first-hand experience of what it means to trolled, in particular the emotional state of being a victim of trolling, namely that of shame.

What is Shame?

Shame occurs when your self-image, which is also tied into your place in a community, is called into doubt. I was a professor of standing doing clever and imaginative work on social media of a standard good enough to be published by a reputable news source. Snopes’ accusations of professional malfeasance undermined my sense of status, and also tapped into a deep-seated personal fear of being found out doing something wrong which has been with me all my life. When they rightly pointed out that one of my sources did not pass muster, I was ashamed that I didn’t know that, that I, the 'expert', was in the wrong.

Ronson's So You've Been Publically Shamed

My shame was brief and minor, Snopes trolling was mild and passing, and certainly does not come close to that felt by the various character-studies of Jon Ronson’s surprisingly unsettling book, So You’ve Been Publically Shamed. All the same the Ronson's book does speak to how I felt that afternoon when I was trolled by Snopes. I think Ronson is spot-on when he identifies trolling as the return of the old punishment of public-shaming dressed up in digital novelty. And in his intimation that shame is effective as a punishment because it reveals the prevalence of imposter syndrome that is the essence of the human condition.

One telling exchange early on in the book takes place between Ronson and a writer and journalist called Jonah Leher whose brilliant writing career is brought crashing down due to old-fashioned journalistic fact-checking and an online witch-hunt of surprising intensity. Ronson is relating the story of Lehrer’s fall from grace to someone he meets at a party. The effect on the other man is tangible, somatic, he begins to shiver, setting the hardened hack Ronson off too.

The man says: “It’s about the terror, isn’t it?”

“The terror of what?” Ronson asks.

“The terror of being found out”. Ronson adds, “He meant that we all have ticking away within us something we fear will badly harm our reputation if it got out…”

We are all trolls

This, I think, is why shame and social media work so well together. Online we are all playing a part aren’t we, that version of ourselves we publish is an avatar? And as such, because taking on a fake persona to get a reaction is basically one of the main tools of trolling, we are all already trolling our followers by hiding the truth of who we are behind the relative anonymity of the web. In other words, every post we make online is dishonest, and it just takes one little troll to spot that, and the whole edifice of our sense of self comes tumbling down.

Lehrer lost everything, his reputation, his lucrative speaking gigs, his cool house, through an online process of shaming that, Ronson notes, is not dissimilar to the original legalised processes of public shaming that were outlawed in the West about 180 years ago. Yet he is also astute enough to note one significant difference between the shaming of criminals in the midst of their community, say by placing them in the stocks, and online shaming: “when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be”.

The story of Hank and Adria

A power that he then documents, destroying the careers and lives of people like techno-Geek ‘Hank’, not his real name, who made an obscure sexual joke about dongles and forking a repo with his friend Alex during a presumably tedious tech-talk. Their comments were overheard by a woman in the row in front, Adria, who took a photo of them and Tweeted it along with their comments. This caused a Twitter-storm that ruined the career of Hank, a father of three.

Adria was unrepentant and self-righteous as regards her actions, claiming the sexual innuendo made her feel unsafe, and that as the perpetrators of the bad joke were white males and she was a black Jewish woman, the fact that Hank lost his job was not something she was going to feel bad about.

This trollish self-righteousness cuts both ways of course. Hank published his version of the events online, including the fact that he had been fired, and when the trolls got hold of that, Adria’s life became truly precarious because she was black, Jewish, a woman and most importantly, took herself and her views too seriously. She was ruthlessly, brutally trolled on the infamous 4Chan site, her life threatened, her face superimposed onto pornography that sort of thing. Finally the trolls hacked her work-place, erasing its website. A few hours later, Adria was also fired. This is an example of what is called in trolling circles a ‘life ruin’, a mode of trolling so virulent and orchestrated in its hatred towards its subject, that the trolls will stop at nothing until their subject’s very existence is affected, permanently.

The Shame Drone

This degree of public shaming is so far from what I experienced that indeed I don’t feel entirely comfortable speaking of my ruined dog-walk in the same breath as the life-ruins of Adria or Lehrer. Nor do I count the comments made by Snopes as really all that awful in the end, it was more that they hurt my pride. Rather, what I wanted to show with this comparison was that I experienced briefly Ronson’s theory of the weaponisation of social media as a kind of shame-drone.

Digital Violence

We are accessing a new kind of digital violence which, however, depends on an ancient tendency for shame within the public sphere. There is a certain espousal of ancient cultural and social tendencies, here that of feeling shame when one is shown to be an imposter among your community, with contemporary digitisation that is typifying a new kind of techno-violence. We call this techno-violence trolling. It originates in the self-righteous anger on the part of the troll. But it would be totally ineffective if trolls did not tap into an almost unconscious appreciation that we all live with the same kind of fear as the man Ronson made shake at that party, the fear of being found out, the fear of being deemed a phony, a kind of crisis in legitimisation that you see all over the net on a daily basis. In other words the fear of being shamed.

Yet why should the net be such a breeding ground of shame?

Yet why should the net be such a breeding ground of shame? Because we are all trolling on there, being something we are not, pretending, I think. And this pretence, the mask or avatar, is put on and performed in the most public arena that has ever existed. We wear the mask to shield our privacy, but what we actually do when we go out in digital drag, is make our privacy a walking target for those with the weapons and the desire to shoot it down.

I think we are only just coming to terms with that, and the ontological impact is has on our sense of self, on what it means to 'be' online, especially when we still haven't cracked what it means to 'be' on this earth in general. Which is, in a sense, what I think trolling is all about, it is a theory of the self, of subjectivity, an experiment in digital existentialism, all tied up with a very modern, very constructed sense of our individual self that emerged from the invention of privacy two hundred years ago.