After reading John Ronson’s “God that was Awesome”, we found a lot of controversy regarding Justine Sacco’s situation and public shaming in general. It seemed obvious that this shaming was less controlled online than in person after Ronson’s talk with Judge Poe (88). So from there, we looked into Justine’s situation and came up with the question of whether or not shaming should be regulated on social media and if so, how?

We were able to find a piece by Kristine Gallardo that established the legal precedence of shaming cases. In “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob”, Gallardo establishes a basis of shaming in the United States and then explains how ease of access and anonymity of users seems to encourage public shaming on social media. She then takes us through a series of legal incidents and how the Communications Decency Act protects posters and websites from taking the blame of shaming incidents, helping provide a legal background for our question of regulation (Gallardo).

Emily Laidlaw writes the second piece we chose to use, “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy”. Laidlaw lays out the analysis of the victim’s, the mob, and the failure of our current law to provide any protection from these attacks. She furthers Gallardo’s work by focusing more on the reasons the law is failing than a just reproduction of the cases and trends that show that the law is failing, as Gallardo does. Laidlaw also makes a key distinction between humbling and humility that helps fuel an analysis of the social nature of social media and where a line distinguishing user privacy comes into play. This work will help us to give reason the support regulation or no regulation (Laidlaw).

These two pieces provide valuable insight into the question at hand. First, we can look at what little regulation there is, essentially none, in Gallardo’s work. From here we gain the background knowledge we need in order to understand the position we are currently at. We are also given numerous examples of cases that we can choose to embrace, or disagree with, to argue for, or against, regulation. Following this, we are going to be able to use Laidlaw’s work to help pave the theoretical basis of our arguments through her analysis shaming situations. Laidlaw’s key terms can be crucial to the success of our arguments. These two sources provide all the groundwork that we need to build our argument and do so in such a neutral way that we can choose either side to argue. I think that what we have allows us to simply argue our points and create a well grounded paper without reaching too far on biased ideas or getting caught up in something outside the issue we’re focusing on. That is, we should be able to form and defend a stance on whether or not there should be any regulation of public shaming on social media.

Works Cited

Gallardo, Kristine. “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob: Online Public Shaming, the Viral Media Age, and the Communications Decency Act.” Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L. 19 (2016): 721.

Laidlaw, Emily B. “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy.” Laws6.1 (2017): 3.

Ronson, Jon. “God that was Awesome.” So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Riverhead Books, pp. 67–90.