The Humiliation Game

The idea of public shaming has been around for centuries, but technology has taken the humiliation of people whose views or actions we don’t like to a new and terrifying level. Lucy Pavia investigates how shaming overtook trolling as our biggest fear online.

- Lucy Pavia

‘Love handles’ wrote bodybuilder Diana Andrews in purple letters over the covert photograph she’d taken of a fellow gym-goer during an evening training session. The picture, which she posted on Instagram Stories to her 17,000 followers, would have disappeared in a day had someone not decided to pull her up on it. Instead, a screen grab of the ‘body-shaming’ post began circulating on Twitter and Facebook. ‘This train wreck of a human thinks bathroom selfies are glamorous but a real woman with a real body, working out at a gym, should be shamed,’ wrote a critic on Facebook. Hundreds, then thousands, of Twitter and Facebook users piled on to mock Andrews’ own ‘plastic’ face and call her a slut, a bitch – and far worse. Her former trainer condemned the picture, as did the plus-sized model Tess Holliday. Andrews issued two written apologies, but a week later the abusive messages were still flooding in.

The incident felt like a textbook case of modern online shaming, when an ordinary person’s mistake, ‘misspeak’ or bad joke catapults them from anonymity to infamy faster than you can say ‘pitchfork brigade’. Andrews joins a hall of shame that features, among others, ‘cat bin lady’ Mary Bale – who was caught on CCTV trapping a tabby in a wheelie bin and later fined £250 – and New York PR executive Justine Sacco, who sarcastically joked on Twitter, ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!’ before boarding a plane. By the time she’d landed, she was an online hate figure.