I read someone online today defending public shaming as a method of community policing. The writer seemed otherwise like a rational person.

I remember, when social media were first available, how wonderful it was to find like-minded people and to be able to make friends and talk about subjects of mutual interest at a time when I was both overwhelmed and lonely. I had hopes back then for the internet, and they were largely justified.

Then social media expanded, and various things happened. What with algorithms instead of interest groups guiding whom you encountered online, with the massive expansion of the number of people using the services, and with engagement and eyeballs becoming a currency, the tone shifted to scorn, sarcasm, and suspicion as currencies in an economy driven by how upset you could get people to get.

I’m a little sad that I was so optimistic. I knew what human beings were like, I just didn’t want it to be like that.

Public shaming is too damn easy now, and it doesn’t seem to work as a method of policing at all. Genuinely dreadful people seem immune. Innocent people get targeted in the haste to humiliate. Public disgrace and vigilante justice were always more often driven by prejudice and personal vendetta than by any kind of urge to justice.

The worst of public shaming is how impersonal it allows people to think they are. As if they were Blind Justices all. As if shaming worked. As if punishment worked.

I have a friend who calls me when she’s upset with her partner, her mother, or someone else, and she used to say to me, “I just want to teach them a lesson. I want to punish them.”

“People don’t learn from being punished,” I said, because they don’t. It’s a shitty way of teaching, even though you’ll run into plenty of people who are proud about how the nuns beat them or their parents swatted their behinds. What people learn from being punished is to punish other people, and to believe in punishment.

So although I am very human indeed, and I want to go back and sea-lion that idiot who believes in public shaming, perhaps for today I will remind myself that I don’t believe in doing that.