Social Media, Social Control, and the Politics of Public Shaming

Abstract

While there is disagreement over the value of public shaming, scholars largely agree that social media introduce pathologies. But while scholars rightly identify the effects of online public shaming (OPS), they misidentify the cause. Rather than solely a problem of scale, OPS’s effects are also shaped by the network structure within which they take place. In this article, I argue that the social conditions necessary for productive public shaming are more likely to obtain in a closed social network structure. Using the cases of Twitter, Wikipedia, and Reddit, I show how the design of social media platforms facilitates different network structures among users, with differing results for OPS. In evaluating OPS by way of network structure, I argue, we can not only better understand why OPS works productively in some cases and not in others, but also derive lessons for how to deploy, discuss, and respond to it more effectively.