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Shame Storm

firstthings.com

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Re: Shame Storm

#111

Post by agentultra »

weberc2 wrote: post #76
agentultra wrote: post #64

So the author of this piece appears on a panel to defend a book by an author who had published another book called, Liberal Fascism [0]. This piece is supposed to make me feel sorry for her? Well I don't fully understand the entire context of this person's story but I do know something about being publicly shamed. When I was a kid in high school I had to suffer being called a f got every day. By every one. I had been…

I agree that public shaming can and does serve a useful function in dissuading fringe right-wing ideologies (among others); however, the whole reason we're seeing an uptick in these fringe ideologies is because public shaming has lost its potency after it was repeatedly abused (mobbing moderate liberals and conservatives for violating far-left moral tenets under the overtly false pretenses of fascism/racism/white-sup…

The difficulty I have with this is that many right-wing conservatives with radical opinions on everything from the rights of LGBTQ folks to race are trying, desperately, to rebrand themselves as moderate conservatives. In the same way that white nationalists are trying to avoid being called out as White Supremacists.

I'm sure Jonah would like me to believe he is a moderate conservative. The history lesson in Liberal Fascism is laughably inaccurate and built on a poorly thought-out premise. It was an argument made that had never existed before. In a word, I don't have any reason to believe he is any kind of moderate person.

I think what we're seeing with public shaming are dis-empowered people calling a spade a spade.

What I'm curious to see is whether people who have felt this kind of shame will change. Will they re-examine their behavior? Or will they, like the Jonah's of the world, dig in and continue to bloviate about leftist-shame-mongering hordes abusing their free speech? And in the process what happens to the rest of us? Will my kids be shamed and called a f-g when they get to school and end up in a hospital with a fractured skull? Will we ever change?

Re: Shame Storm

#112

Post by tomatotomato37 »

nostrademons wrote: post #100
Memosyne wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe these tendencies exist because of a strong emotional attachment to personal identity. If you engineered a social system where people devalued personal identity, then I doubt these problems would be so invasive.

That would be 4chan, and it seems to have the opposite effect.

Granted a large part of that is due to the Laissez-faire/incompetent moderation of the site

Actually I'm surprised there hasn't been an anonymous website with strict rules and actually decent moderation; every single spin-off of the site also takes a freeform approach to everything

Re: Shame Storm

#113

Post by commandlinefan »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #86
tlb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're being facetious, but dueling wasn't such a great thing for society. It gave tough people an advantage in life over smart or conscientious people. You wouldn't like living in a society where toughness won. It was one of Queen Victoria's great contributions to make dueling socially unacceptable.

Not joking. That, and it doesn't require toughness so much as good aim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Hudson#Duel_and_disast... I'd much rather roll the dice with duelling again than introduce some new, elaborate, and untested form of social engineering.

> good aim

Andrew Jackson (I believe it was) was challenged to a duel once - he turned around, let his opponent shoot him, and then took his time aiming to make sure that his shot would be fatal whereas his opponents wasn't.

Re: Shame Storm

#114

Post by beat »

harimau777 wrote: post #54
CydeWeys wrote: post #4

FYI, here's the agenda of these people: https://www.firstthings.com/about/ First Things is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and educational 501(c)(3) organization. The Institute was founded in 1989 by Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues to confront the ideology of secularism, which insists that the public square must be “naked,” and that faith has no…

Shouldn't everyone support the idea that every philosophy and religious belief has the right to participate in the public sphere?

No. Because Nazis.

Re: Shame Storm

#115

Post by commandlinefan »

motohagiography wrote: post #14

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." -- Cardinal Richelieu

I'm 44, and either I'm just getting old enough to notice things I never noticed when I was younger, or there's something very concerning brewing - it seems to me like a small but growing subsegment of western society is working as hard as they can to escalate civilization to an actual violent conflict. And, based on my understanding of history, the biggest losers in that conflict will be the ones pushing the hardest for it right now.

Re: Shame Storm

#116

Post by nostrademons »

jerf wrote: post #47

As I've mentioned before, one of the interesting things I like to study in a casual way is the effect of social community structures on behavior. At this point it is not terribly controversial that modern social media systems encourage shame storms, via things like easy "viral" sharing, the existence of moderation systems that can be used to nuke any attempt to defend oneself out of existence, and the way modern soci…

You couldn't engineer one such social system, you'd have to arrange for multiple social systems, all with their own rules. Communities where people are nice to each other tend to be a.) small, so that you can't just find someone else to piss off b.) have lots of repeated interactions, so you're invested in maintaining good relations and c.) have freedom of exit, so when someone's values don't mesh with the community they leave rather than get perpetually shamed by the other community members.

Many parts of the Internet actually do meet these conditions, but they tend to be small niche hobby sites that are either overlooked or private, not the massive media/FB/Reddit/4chan/Twitterverse where shame storms propagate.

Failing that, the best alternative is sharp boundaries between you and the public sphere of discourse. This is how cities work - you have dense groups of people with diverse opinions and many casual interactions, but most people learn to mind their own business, so it really functions as a group of small interlocking communities rather than one mass of people. It's also how to stay mentally healthy on the Internet - when everybody hates you, unplug.

Re: Shame Storm

#117

Post by beat »

warp_factor wrote: post #28

The issue is also that people got more and more sensitive over ybrast decades. Political correctness seems to be at a all time high. Try to say openly in the bay area that you support Trump and you will be shamed like never before. Shaming is now always in our mind and I find myself thinking more and more about redacting what I say to make it "unshameful" in order to avoid any possibility of shaming.

I don't think that's the same thing. It does point to a basic intellectual failing of the modern right, though... conflating being judged with being censored.

Nobody's taking away your right to free speech. We just reserve the right to think you're an asshole for saying it.

Re: Shame Storm

#118

Post by SheepSlapper »

zozbot123 wrote: post #13

The rule for how to deal with this sort of "shaming" is quite simple: no matter what you may have been 'accused' of, always double down and never issue anything that might even loosely resemble an apology or an admission of weakness, no matter what the costs might be. Then simply wait until the mob gets bored and moves on to the next easy target. There are very high profile examples of this working quite well, but me…

AKA the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" strategy of dealing with social outrage mobs

Re: Shame Storm

#119

Post by songeater »

neonate wrote: post #93
zozbot123 wrote: post #13

The rule for how to deal with this sort of "shaming" is quite simple: no matter what you may have been 'accused' of, always double down and never issue anything that might even loosely resemble an apology or an admission of weakness, no matter what the costs might be. Then simply wait until the mob gets bored and moves on to the next easy target. There are very high profile examples of this working quite well, but me…

I'd be curious to hear some mentioned, in case there are examples I missed.

45

Re: Shame Storm

#120

Post by gambler »

zestyping wrote: post #82
jerf wrote: post #47

As I've mentioned before, one of the interesting things I like to study in a casual way is the effect of social community structures on behavior. At this point it is not terribly controversial that modern social media systems encourage shame storms, via things like easy "viral" sharing, the existence of moderation systems that can be used to nuke any attempt to defend oneself out of existence, and the way modern soci…

It's weird to me that almost all posting/commenting platforms are about the same. You get a series of small boxes with text in them and a small box to type into, usually too small to fit more than a couple of sentences, perhaps a button to promote, a button to reshare, and that's it. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same. We've explored so little of the design space. If I had to hazard in extrapo…

About a decade ago I've been thinking about how to design a good discussion platform, and the ideas I came up with have a lot of similarities with what you posted. I think that encouraging long-form communication where quickness of replies is not an inherent advantage and where there are costs to posting (as opposed to not posting) would be great for improving communication quality.

I also think that visual design cues matter much more than people think. Simply having large text fields to type in and clean design where large posts are readable really changes the tone of dicussions. I've seen this on many websites.

Another, newer, idea I have is that there should be some cost to finding/reading new content. It's probably not what you imagined right now. Here is an example. Let's say you have a popular YouTube video when someone plays Overwatch. Instead of the garbled toxic mess we have right now, comments could be split into different tabs/topic. There could be one tab where people discuss the strategy of the player, while in another tab people could discuss balance of the game as a whole. The "cost" of reading comments would be reading the titles of all tabs and clicking on one. It's not much, but I am 99% sure it would do miracles for decreasing toxicity.

People behave much better when they feel they are interacting in a social "space" with a defined (if open) group of other people. Information overflow destroys this feeling in an instant, no matter what other social features you add.

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