Feeling the force of the social media shame-game

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This was published 6 years ago

Feeling the force of the social media shame-game

By Imre Salusinszky

On the face of it, you would think the emergence of social media would make us all more resilient and open to the views of others, however bracing. Instead it's turned us into a bunch of offence-takers and shame-makers.

Increasingly, the public domain resembles a bunch of tut-tutting old dowagers at a tea party organised by Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope.

Fox Sports football commentators Gerard Whateley and Mark Robinson. Robinsons's comments on Collingwood forward Alex Fasolo brought a Twitter storm of abuse.

Fox Sports football commentators Gerard Whateley and Mark Robinson. Robinsons's comments on Collingwood forward Alex Fasolo brought a Twitter storm of abuse.Credit: Martin Philibey

The latest target of this mind-set is Melbourne Herald Sun and Fox Sports football commentator Mark Robinson. It's true that Robinson brought his problems upon himself - but then, that's true of virtually all victims of social media shaming campaigns.

Earlier this month, Collingwood Football Club announced forward Alex Fasolo would be taking a break from playing, while he deals with depression. But he would continue to train.

Collingwood forward Alex Fasolo.

Collingwood forward Alex Fasolo.Credit: Michael Dodge

Robinson must have missed the second part of that statement, because, when Fasolo was sighted at training later in the week, he tweeted: "Good drugs – Clinical depression on Tuesday, training Thursday."

The Twitter storm of abuse against Robinson was immediate and vicious. Hundreds piled on, and it quickly went from name-calling and abuse to demands that he be sacked from his media gigs.

Here's AFL player manager Liam Pickering, on Twitter, within hours of Robinson's ill-judged tweet: "What an ignorant & dangerous tweet by Robinson! Showed his true colours & surely should be removed from all media roles immediately!!!"

Seriously? Robinson should be forced to relinquish the career he's built up over decades, and retrain in an entirely different profession, or trade, as a result of a single tweet - and a first offence at that?

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It may not be a coincidence that a dispute between Pickering and Robinson last year, over a story in the Herald Sun concerning Pickering's business problems, went all the way to the Press Council.

Anyhow, Robinson swiftly apologised and deleted his tweet. He had been duly shamed.

The best study of the social media shame-game is So You've Been Publicly Shamed, by the British journalist Jon Ronson, published in 2015.

Ronson looks in detail at the treatment of a range of people who, like Robinson, put something on social media that was ill-judged, but probably not likely to result in economic collapse, civil disorder, or other varieties of mass harm.

There's the couple who posted a "funny" photo of themselves at the US military cemetery at Arlington, Virginia. They lost their jobs. Or the two nerds who made a smutty joke to each other at an IT conference, and were overheard, photographed and twitter-shamed by the woman sitting in front of them. In that instance both the shamed and the shamer were ushered direct to the unemployment line.

Most famously, there was Justine Sacco, the young PR worker who in 2013 tweeted a tasteless joke about Africa and AIDS to her 170 followers as she was about to board a flight from London to Cape Town.

Whether Sacco's remark was a jibe at the expense of poor Africans, or an attempt to make a point about Western racism, is debatable, and irrelevant. By the time she landed in South Africa, her name was the number 1 worldwide trend on Twitter. She was fired immediately and, like Ronson's other subjects, faced a very long battle to resume her livelihood. Thanks to Google, a proper public shaming creates an internet stain on its victim's name that is indelible.

Ronson believes the internet pile-on is a manifestation of crowd behaviour and rehabilitates a form of punishment that has been considered barbaric since the 18th century, when public shaming involved legacy technology such as the stocks and the pillory.

Robinson was never going to get fired. Apart from anything else, he's lucky in his employer: an organisation that won't dismiss one sports reporter for sharing a gambling account with someone he's supposed to be reporting is hardly likely to dismiss another for an insensitive tweet.

But of course the whole episode raises questions about how we are "allowed" to talk about mental health issues.

Nobody should be stigmatised because of their mental health, yet Robinson's crime seemed to be that he spoke of Fasolo's the way he might of any other injury or illness: glibly.

Does that stigmatise mental illness, or does it stigmatise it to say we may address the subject only in hushed and pious tones? And is the spirit of open conversation and "R U OK?" best served by self-appointed internet lynch-mobs forming around any deviation from approved language and attitudes?

Another thing that has emerged from all of this is that many AFL footballers face mental illness challenges precisely because of the pile-ons they experience on social media, if they make even a minor mistake.

Irony, much?

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