“A breach in data protection goes hand in hand with an invasion of privacy.”
These were the words of social activist, writer and public speaker Monica Lewinsky, who spoke at RSA 2018 in San Francisco, reflecting on her own experiences of online public shaming and assessing the current online culture of humiliation.
Lewinsky harked back to 1998, and said that “we had no way of knowing then where the brave new technology called the internet would take us.”
Since then, she added, it has connected people in unimaginable ways – joining lost siblings, saving lives, even launching revolutions. However, it has also given rise to “darkness, cyber-bullying and slut-shaming.”
Lewinsky argued that everyday online people are so publically-humiliated for various reasons that they “can’t imagine living to the next day, and some tragically don’t. There’s nothing virtual about that,” she said.
“Online we’ve seen a shift in the power of humiliation and invasion of privacy given the breadth of the internet’s reach. Online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained and permanently accessible.”
The possible echo of embarrassment – that once would only extend as far as our families, school or community – has now grown to the online community too, Lewinsky explained.
“There is a very public price to public humiliation,” she said, “and the growth of the internet has jacked-up that price. For nearly two decades we have been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both online and offline”
Lewinsky said that public humiliation online has become an industry, and we are in a dangerous cycle because the more we click on online gossip, the more numb we become to the human lives behind it. “With every click, we make a choice,” she argued.
“The more we saturate our culture with public shaming the more accepted it becomes, and the more we’re going to see behavior like cyber-bullying, trolling, online harassment and some forms of hacking – because they all have humiliation at their cores.”
Lewinsky said that changing this behavior begins with changing our beliefs. “We need a cultural revolution, and public shaming as a blood sport has to stop. It’s time for an intervention on the internet and in our culture.”
We need to return to a value of compassion and empathy, she added, as online we have a compassion deficit and empathy crisis. Online, we need to become up-standers – which is to support someone with a positive comment, or step in to report a bully situation.
“We need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression – we all want to be heard, but let’s acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention. We need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion and click with compassion, and we can together make a society where the sometimes distancing effect of technology doesn’t remove our fundamental humanity.”