Based on the text “God That was Awesome” by Jon Ronson, our group discussed the role of social media, public shaming, and mob mentality and their impact on each other. In “God That Was Awesome’, Justine Sacco, a PR chief, finds her life turned upside down after one fatal tweet. Through Ronson, we were shown the background to this tweet, and the way one badly worded joke on social media was able to effectively ruin a woman’s career. In our search for a question to research, we probed into different aspects of each major theme, until we settled on the question of whether public shaming should or should not be regulated on social media, and if so, how the regulation would be done. To begin answering our question, we picked out two scholarly articles to help flush out our arguments and provide further information on our topic: Kristine L. Gallardo’s “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob: Online Public Shaming, the Viral Media Age, and the Communications Decency Act,” and Emily B. Laidlaw’s “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy,”
Our first article, “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob: Online Public Shaming, the Viral Media Age, and the Communications Decency Act,” delves into a legal aspect of the social media shaming cases we have seen (Justine Sacco’s included). Gallardo starts off with a history of public shaming in the United States, laying groundwork to what we see on social media today. She speaks of the conditions of social media which allows such breeding of public shaming and mob mentality: the ease of making online commentary. The rest of her piece focusses on the legal aspect of social media public shaming, providing us with examples of situations where the Communications Decency Act came into play in situations involving social media and the amount of protection it supported the social media platform and the posters with, compared to what legal justice the victims were able to receive. Overall, Gallardo gives us a legal backdrop to mob mentality on online shaming in social media.
In our second article by Emily Laidlaw, we look into the issue of our right to privacy on the internet by examining online public shaming and the lack of legal protection online shaming victims receive. “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy” adds on to the foundations provided by Gallardo on the inadequacies of our legal systems in social media by explaining why they need to change and where their shortcomings are. Laidlaw makes a clear distinction between “humbling”, and “humiliation”, an important distinction which will help us in our responses to our questions.
Between these two pieces, we have a solid background to start building our arguments on whether or not public shaming on social media should be regulated, and if it should, how we may come about it.
Works Cited
Kristine Gallardo, “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob: Online Public Shaming, the Viral Media Age, and the Communications Decency Act.” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Tech. L, Vol. 19, 2017, 721-746. (2017).
Laidlaw, Emily. “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy.” Faculty of Law, University of Calgary, 2017.
Ronson, Jon. “So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.” Riverhead Books, 2015.
The only thing that could be improved with this is that instead of using the questions Gallardo and Laidlaw are answering you answered our question through their work, this helps us for the paper but doesn’t complete the summary. I did the same thing, so ideally as a group we should just make sure we all can find the question they’re answering in their papers and then we should discuss how we can use those answers in our papers. Aside from that, all the aspects of the summary are there and the content is also correct.