The Shaming-Industrial Complex

"There is no culture which doesn't have a strong element of self-censorship for at least some of its members."

while this may be true, it does not necessarily reflect that it is right. often times throughout history shame has been used to control minority groups and people who are less privileged.

which sadly means that popular consensus may not always have the best interest in mind. oftentimes the masses overreact and get it terribly wrong if there is awareness outside of pure groupthink

I think "shame" is the wrong anchor point. I don't like the "industrial-complex" framing much either.

The design of twitter, FB or whatnot have something to do with this phenomenon. But, I don't think this is the main point.

I'll (heavily) paraphrase the prophetic Douglas Adams. Social media gave us back our "normal" mode of human communication: unmediated many-to-many. With it, we got back all sorts of negative social behaviours, like mob behaviours.

Dynamics where violence, hatred and such overcome moderation are... human. They have negative consequences, so we develop social machinery to deal with them. That machinery doesn't exist in brand new spheres.

Most people that came across the aids tweet didn't dunk on Justine Socco.. just all people that weighed in. That's a ratchet.

When a mob forms to beat an apple thief or promiscuous woman in the street... most people dont join the mob. Most people walk on by.

Very few are going to try and moderate the mob. Same kind of a ratchet. Spontaneous anger is a much stronger phenomenon than spontaneous moderation and restraint.

Something external needs to prevent mob violence. Maybe you need police, with an explicit mandate to break up mobs. Maybe you need a court system, so the mob might deliver the apple thief to justice instead of DIYing it. Maybe you need an explicit anti-mob belief system, so that an anti-mob mob can form to balance out the anti-thief mob.

That kind of cultural machinery is reactionary. It appears as an eventual solution to a problem. Our modern cultural frameworks (like twitter) evolve so fast that we never reach maturity though.

You've just listed 100% of the presidents who's resignations could plausibly be linked to shaming tactics. It is a very, very short list compared to the number of presidents who have had shame deployed against them as a political weapon.

The two main tools the parliaments use is regular, time based election cycles combined with very formal procedures making sure everyone gets a chance to speak. In the ones I'm more familiar with (Australian, British, probably American) they also have well developed traditions against name-calling and insistence on respectful language and behaviours like using proper titles (which can be a bit off-putting seeing how politicians act outside parliament). If a politician has a solid faction backing them they can get away with some pretty extreme stuff and just shrug off the criticism. Trump is a more interesting case study, but realistically anyone in modern politics has to wade through a tide of abuse to get anything done. It is all but impossible to stop a politician getting a message out and sticking by it if there are votes to be had.

The main tools the courts use are having professional and emotionally unattached advocates who are aligned with the people they represent (aka lawyers) and extremely developed rules of evidence that strip out opinion and personal standards in an explicit quest to work out the facts and make sure any punishment is consistent with the law.

> And zero debate or criticism?

Criticism and responses would be fine. Bloodthirsty attempts at ruining the persons life/career aren't, yet they're extremely common. As others have said, it adds way too much risk to non-anonymous public discourse, where if it happens that something you said, no matter how innocuous, snowballs for whatever reason, you're screwed. So the only reasonable thing to do is just not express opinions online.

I don't even think it's a matter of people really trying to punish intolerant people, it's that mobs are fun to be in, so randoms do just hop in for fun and a rush of moral superiority. You could "cancel" literally anyone over anything if you got enough traction to start going "viral."