How Online Shaming Returned
Jon Ronson’s interest in public shaming started with something small and personal. In 2012, he discovered a fake Twitter account using his name and photo. The account posted strange, meaningless updates, and the people behind it defended it as art. They claimed they were playing with ideas about identity online, while he saw it as a plain violation of his name and face.
He met the three academics who created the bot, hoping for a simple solution. Instead, the conversation became tense and smug. They talked as if his identity was just a public brand and suggested he was overreacting. What they treated as an intellectual experiment felt to him like a basic act of disrespect.
When he posted the interview online, the public reaction was immediate and fierce. People took his side, but the response quickly became uglier than the original dispute. The creators were mocked and abused until they removed the bot. What first looked like a satisfying correction also revealed something darker: once public anger starts moving, it does not stay neat or proportional.
That moment opened a wider question. Public shaming had once been pushed out of formal justice because it was seen as too cruel. Yet online, it had returned in a faster and more powerful form. Social media gave ordinary people a way to challenge power, but it also created a tool that could easily go far beyond fairness.
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