There’s something morbidly fascinating about seeing someone at the mercy of the online court of public opinion. But what do you do when it’s you in the firing line?
UP UNTIL A FEW MONTHS AGO, the name Rachel Roy meant nothing to me. Perhaps it meant just as little to you – until Lemonade made the possibility of Jay Z cheating on Beyoncé a thing. Until ‘Becky with the good hair’ became a common enemy of the Beyhive, and Roy seemed, thanks to a misinterpreted Instagram post, like a likely ‘side chick’. ‘Online haters have targeted me and my daughters in a hurtful and scary manner, including physical threats,’ said Roy after the online firestorm forced her to make her account private.
Online shame is nothing new. The first real publicshaming scandal to rock the Internet broke in 1998, when a 24-year-old White House intern was found to have had an affair with her 51-year-old boss … who just happened to be the president of the United States. The OG ‘other woman’ Monica Lewinsky explained in her 2015 TED Talk entitled ‘The Price of Shame’ that ‘It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the Internet for a major news story… I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.’
In the time since, social media has added its own nasty edge. ‘Society has always had an appetite for public executions, stoning and hangings,’ says Tails of a Mermaid blogger Natalie Roos (Tailsofamermaid.com). ‘The difference now is that people can do their stonethrowing from their desk, bed or couch. Social media has made it easier to shame, easier to find dirt and easier to ruin someone’s life.’
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