[Itse]

Thanks for the thanks

Originally Posted by troutman

Is shaming a group (ex. anti-vaxxers) different than shaming an individual, because it is not personal?

I'd say mostly yes.

You should however IMO avoid punching down, and you should avoid being offensive towards people you should know you probably don't understand. (For example people much poorer and less educated than you, or people from clearly different cultures.)

Also, make sure you have your facts right. I think that's a major problem with many of these internet crusades. Like in the Justine Sacco case, she was probably not in fact being racist, just misunderstood. That's at best partially her fault.

Of course you should also always seriously consider the severity of the crime. Is it really something that everybody needs to know? When we're talking about vaccinations, yeah, it's kind of important that everybody agrees, and that's kind of s**t for the anti-vaxx crowd because no, that isn't something where everybody can just make their own minds.

When we're talking about some mid-level corporate employee somewhere being possibly slightly racist? Who cares.

At this point we come to the Social Justice Warriors I think. Or maybe it would be best to call the Culture Warriors.

I'm guessing that the people most prone to internet shaming tend to be the kind who feel a need to participte in the culture wars of our time, on one side or another. So like in the minds of the person writing that article, their personal attacks on some unknown person are a part of a larger war over what is acceptable and what is not.

The part where it gets really tricky is that those people are obviously kind of right. These kinds of personal attacks DO frame what is acceptable in our society, to some extent. As GGG said:

Originally Posted by GGG

Shaming to conform to social norms was maybe is and important part of our evolutionary make up. How do things like racisim, homophobia and others get changed. The first step is usually logic and converstaion but when that fails what are societies options to further in act positive change? Refusing to tolerate and objecting to the offending behaviour is the only way to stop it.

However, I disagree strongly on this part.

She problaby should lose her job for the tweet. I think that is reasonable for a public person.

I think this idea is the problem. To me, this idea that there should be an additional punishment on top of public shaming crosses the line between attacking an opinion, and attacking a person.

People have a right to have a a job and a life despite their opinions. In fact many countries have laws specifically protecting such rights, originally intended to protect people's right to participate in politics.

Obviously corporations fire people in these cases mostly because of the fear of public image damages and not because of the opinions as such, but those damages are only related to the corporation because of the number of people who seem to WANT to see some "concrete" form of punishment.