In today’s media-saturated world, media organizations need to continually fill their production pipelines with content. Unfortunately, too often these stories involve the destruction of someone’s reputation.
For producers on deadline, this is low-hanging fruit. When the subjects are celebrities, high-profile, or successful individuals, viewers often enjoy the stories of their demise. The emotion of pleasure at someone else’s misfortune is called schadenfreude. It is evoked through social comparison and makes us feel better about ourselves.
Falling From Grace Source: User 245306/Pixabay With 24-hour news networks, true crime channels, countless reality television and contest shows, tabloid magazines, and websites, viewers and readers are offered a buffet of opportunities to be entertained by the failures, humiliation, or suffering of others. The algorithms in social media amplify it, often promoting degrading comments, swarming, and piling on. Within hours, thousands of strangers worldwide can join in attacks on individuals regardless of whether any claims against them are true, exaggerated, or false.
For example, in the Netflix series Cecil Hotel, Pablo Vergara discusses how he was falsely accused of murdering Elisa Lam. He was harassed by thousands of people on the internet even though he could prove he was out of the country at the time. The truth did not matter to the internet vigilantes. The psychological toll of the constant attacks on his character resulted in a suicide attempt.
He is not alone. An internet mob falsely accused a Chipotle employee of racism. Musician Conor Oberst was assailed on the internet due to accusations his accuser later admitted were false. There are countless examples of lives and careers damaged or lost due to misrepresentation or humiliation in the media and social media.
Punishing Others Can Benefit Us
Why do people do this? Participating in the destruction of someone else’s reputation can provide a social benefit. Punishing an individual that violates our ideology can feel positive. We might feel pride or a sense of belonging to be part of a group that cares about an important cause. Our own social currency can increase. If we write a demeaning comment and it is rewarded with likes and positive feedback, the social approval can result in the release of dopamine or oxytocin and that feels good. Punishing others, even strangers, is also a way to signal our own trustworthiness and reduce the chance of becoming targets of similar attacks. Unfortunately, these benefits increase the risk of everyone, including you, of having your reputation and dignity damaged through some form of digital victimization.
What Is Dignity?
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), considered “the father of the modern concept of dignity,” argued that all human beings have equal intrinsic worth and inherently deserve to be treated with dignity. Kant explained that to treat people with dignity, they should never be used as a means to an end. Rather, human beings should be considered ends in themselves. In other words, people should not be manipulated, used, or degraded for someone else’s advantage, regardless of how good the purpose may seem. According to Kant, achieving a personal benefit at the expense of another’s reputation would be a violation of their dignity, as would a media story that dehumanizes or damages an individual or group. Treating human beings as ‘objects of content’ needed for clicks, viewers, advertisers, or revenue, without regard to their personal feelings or well-being, is exploiting them for personal or corporate gain, and it’s humiliating.
Humiliation—a Violation of Dignity
Humiliating a person injures the sense of worthiness, the positive sense of self, and the feeling of acceptance and belonging. When a person is publicly humiliated in mass media, their reputation suffers, and they likely experience a loss of social status and opportunities. Since dignity is also defined as “the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed,” to humiliate a person is to attack their reputation and dignity, to treat them as subhuman.
Stocks Source: sabinevanerp/Pixabay In past centuries, such reputational attacks were seen as legitimate tools for social reform and were commonly used. Activities such as branding people, using whipping posts, stocks, and pillories most often took place in the public square where the public could not only witness the punishment but join in by hurling insults or rotten food. However, in the U.S. in 1787, Benjamin Rush, a physician, social reformer, and founding father, wrote a policy paper arguing that the U.S. should eliminate public punishments. He reminded lawmakers that ignominy, or being publicly disgraced, was “universally acknowledged to be a punishment worse than death.” The public began to realize that after a person was publicly stripped of their dignity, the desire to reform and become a productive part of society was often extinguished. Public punishments designed to strip people of their social worth were soon banished from the legal system.
The Digital Age
Although the digital age has contributed significantly to making the world a better place, it has also enabled public punishments to return with a vengeance—usually without any due process or vetting those making accusations. In some cases, people have been unfairly villainized or misrepresented in the media for entertainment purposes. In other situations, unfamous individuals have been subjected to vicious personal attacks for minor misunderstandings, offenses, or even no offenses at all. Due to the permanent nature of the digital footprint, an innocent person might become infamous, forever branded with the damaging information every time someone searches their name.
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Individually, we can refrain from posting or sharing mean-spirited comments. We can reach out to support those being publicly shamed. The bravest among us might even find the courage to be upstanders for those being unfairly targeted, risking our own reputations to do so. Collectively, we can demand change in the ethics and antics of media and social media organizations. Most importantly, we can retrain ourselves to think of every person on the screen, in the news, or in social media as a human being with feelings, a person that matters, a person that can change, and a person who deserves to be treated with dignity.