Diana’s Reviews > So You've Been Publicly Shamed > Status Update

For each of them the shaming "occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre and so frequent that one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent behavior in adulthood occupied an equally extreme end of the continuum of violent child abuse earlier in life."

So they grew up and--"all violence being a person's attempt to replace shame with self-esteem"--they murdered people.

When Justine left me that evening to clear out her desk, she got only as far as the lobby of her office building before she collapsed on the floor in tears. Later, we talked again. I told her what Sam Biddle had said--about how she was "probably fine now." I was sure he wasn't being deliberately glib. He was just like everyone who participates in mass online destruction. Who would want to know?

I suddenly remembered how weirdly tarnished I felt when the spambot men created their fake Jon Ronson, getting my character traits all wrong, turning me into some horrific, garrulous foodie, and strangers believed it was me, and there was nothing I could do. That's what was happening to Justine, although instead of a foodie she was a racist and instead of fifty people it was 1,200,000.

Was he right? It felt like a question that really needed answering because it didn't seem to be crossing any of our minds to wonder whether the person we had just shamed was okay or in ruins. I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

I left the Massachusetts Historical Society, took out my phone, and asked Twitter, "Has Twitter become a kangaroo court?"

"Not a kangaroo court," someone replied quite tersely. "Twitter still can't impose real sentences. Just commentary. Only unlike you, Jon, we aren't paid for it."