Loose Lips Sink Ships: The Anatomy of Public Cyber Shaming

To give credit where credit is due, this article was inspired by Jon Rosson’s chilling object lessons on the sinkholes of shame our social media posts can open up for us to fall into. His book titled: So You Have Been Publicly Shamed,” is a cautionary tale on the potential perils of not thinking twice or three times before hitting the send button on our social media posts. The book chronicles true tales of the vigilante sentences handed down by cyber courts of public opinion on classes of even minor slights to our sensibilities. I’m focusing here today on injudicious and often unconscious slips of the tongue that fall way below any threshold of being legally actionable, or morally reprehensible. Let’s label them misdemeanor gaffes at worst. Rosson’s book puts in stark relief a warning that loving ourselves as expressed as prudent concerns for our health and welfare does not permit for mindless expressions in public forums. Today we have no idea whose “buttons” we may push when we hit send on our social media posts. We have no control over what misinterpretations of our aims will be clung to with such tenacity that reality testing takes a holiday and we are cast as some mortal threat to be repelled at all costs. Such are the risks of poking those who in the dark corners of their imaginations are would be cyber assassins. In other words loving ourselves dare not be blind or we dare to throw our destinies to the vicissitudes of chance.

What we witness with regularity is how even benign sardonic comments are taken out of context and misinterpreted justify “egregious and irrationally unjustifiable reactions.” To read Rosson’s book is to contemplate the nightmarish and unimaginable consequences that decent people suffer for their capricious mistakes. Human beings have psychological axes to grind that seek targets to gratify their blood thirst for revenge. On social media they may flip a neuro-psychological switch and treat us with the respect and consideration one might extend an electronic avatar in a video game. Many folks have no idea and do not want to know that their vengeful fantasies of ending their suffering are just that, as real as fairy dust. Emboldened by wishful thinking when external stimuli trigger them to re-live their traumas, they will treat those who have tripped their switches as proxies, stand ins for those who they have never forgiven for their sins.  That unprotected group may include themselves. Often, they feel helpless but to continue to punish themselves for having not prevented that which at the time they had no responsibility for and no control over. As the old saying goes in the field of psychology: “When we do not accept what has damaged us in the past, we continue to cast blame in futile efforts to cease the self-perpetuating torture whose misery begs for company. Short of being rescued from or having someone short circuit our obsessive ruminations, we remain faithful to our identities as agents of revenge waiting for someone to provoke us and “make our day.”   

So the moral of Rosson’s book and this short article of mine is as follows. We all run the risk of being unlucky in life as in being in the wrong place at the wrong time to no fault of our own. Other times we make or break our luck as in posting remarks on line that will chafe folks who may have such thin skin that they will react to a careless prick as if stabbed by a fire encrusted blade employed by a sadist they must repel if for no other reason that they may never forgive themselves if they are injured in the least. As is the warped conventional logic that many folks live by, everyone gets what they deserve. If we don’t err on the side of caution we may suffer the equivalent of being stoned and pilloried in earlier times, condemned as outcasts, our reputations in tatters if not our lives in jeopardy. Posting in haste may be hazardous to our health even if free speech is a protected constitutional right. 

Mitchell Milch is a psychotherapist in private practice in Ridgewood NJ and the author of an amazon.com published 2016 memoir titled: Do I Still Need My Head Examined Or Just A New Pair Of Running Shoes. The memoir chronicles his recovery from developmental trauma.