Two web developers, Hank and Alex, were sharing tech-related in-jokes about ‘dongles’ and ‘forking someone’s repo’ at a conference. It was private, jokey wordplay – or at least, that’s what they thought. A woman in front of them, Adria Richards, overheard the jokes, became outraged, took a photo of the pair, and posted it on her Twitterfeed. ‘Not cool’ ran the tweet as she ‘called out’ their ‘inappropriate’ and ‘sexist’ jokes. At the end of the conference, they were reprimanded by the conference organisers and eventually sacked from their jobs. It didn’t end there. The woman who tweeted her outrage received abuse from freelancing misogynists who themselves were outraged by the firing of Hank and Alex. Hackers attacked the IT server system at Richards’ workplace and she, too, was sacked.

It is a grim story, but it is one that, unfortunately, is becoming commonplace. Author and broadcaster Jon Ronson, in his new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, examines the peculiar twenty-first-century phenomena of the Twitterstorm and ‘calling out’ culture. Ronson is a very good and likeable journalist. He has a talent for spotting a potentially great story and the tenacity to bring it to life. He is a journalist in the old-fashioned sense of the word. He pursues contacts, leads and interviews – many times over – until he’s scooped a decent story. And, unlike so many hotshot broadsheet writers, Ronson is always more interested in the people he’s writing about than he is in himself. It is this approach which means his contacts are often prepared to open up to him and which explains why his writing can be so compelling. Ronson, though, has his detractors. His interest in oddballs and freaks suggests he is not someone who takes things too seriously. Yet his eye for the wacky and the strange sometimes ends up hitting on hard political topics. For example, his 2001 documentary, The Secret Rulers of the World, captured how radical lefties were embracing conspiracy theory, once the theory of choice for far-right nutters. Likewise, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed captures how the easily offended, often radically minded, have wrecked people’s lives in a manner which would make corrupt, repressive states feel proud. What’s alarming and chilling about Ronson’s case studies is that, far from being isolated incidents, they increasingly reflect a general trend towards the curtailing of free expression.

Take the case of the American, Justine Sacco. Before a trip to South Africa, she made a throwaway quip on Twitter, to her 170 followers, about how white people can’t catch AIDS in Africa. This bad joke was a dig at her own apparently cosseted existence rather than at black AIDS suffers. But sadly for Sacco, this joke was lost on one of her followers (she doesn’t know who), and by the time she had landed at Cape Town Airport she was trending on Twitter. Ronson provides an extensive list of the tweets in response to Sacco’s original post. They were a mixture of pious, indignant rage and low-level sadism. ‘We are about to watch this @JustineSacco get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.’ Ronson makes the point that Sacco was the first person he’d interviewed who had been destroyed, not by the government or big business, but by her fellow citizens. The same was true of Lindsey Stone. She and a friend had a long-running ‘stupid joke’ that involved pulling poses contrary to what a public sign says, such as smoking in front of a no-smoking sign. At Arlington in Washington DC, the pair saw the ‘silence and respect’ sign for US soldiers who had died in combat – this prompted Lindsey to do a goofy am-dram one-finger salute pose in front of the sign. Due to Facebook settings not being as private as many of us think they are, especially for uploaded photos, this private joke became public. Four weeks after returning from Washington DC, Stone became aware of online hostility towards her and her photo. Incredibly, a ‘Fire Lindsey Stone’ Facebook page had been created and had attracted 12,000 likes. The company Lindsey worked for, LIFE (Living Independently Forever), was inundated with emails demanding her sacking – a request that was quickly met. According to Ronson, Stone ‘fell into a depression, became an insomniac and barely left home for a year’.

Public shaming in the twenty-first century, especially for mildly jokey rather than criminal behaviour, can be devastating for its victims. Ronson, who admits that he’s done his fair share of ‘calling out’ tweets, is right to say the process degrades us all. A harder question to answer is why such unhinged responses to bad jokes and legitimate opinions have become the norm rather than the exception. In trying to answer this question, it would be easy, and wrong, to indulge in anti-human prejudices, and to his credit Ronson picks apart such lazy theories. He demonstrates how the nineteenth-century French doctor and thinker, Gustave Le Bon, was wrong with his ‘group madness’ concept, developed in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon’s theory was that humans totally lose control over their behaviour in a crowd. Our free will evaporates and a contagious madness takes over. Ronson notes that Le Bon is still popular because ‘we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane’. But the problem with theories like Le Bon’s is that they can’t explain why some people get involved in Twitterstorms and others choose not to. It seems that how people react in a crowd or on social media is based on patterns of behaviour that reflect wider belief systems. The predilection to behave in this way exists prior to the coming together of any pitchfork- or Twitter-wielding mob. For the sociologist Émile Durkheim, the process of punishment and shaming served to change an individual’s behaviour and uphold society’s values. From Medieval times through to the nineteenth century, the authorities were willing to tie people to public whipping posts or place them in stocks for their transgressions. Local newspapers would have published a digest detailing the amount of squirming that had occurred. Punishment is primarily expressive – it expresses society’s moral outrage at the offence. Through rituals of order, such as a public trial and punishment, society’s shared values are reaffirmed and its members come to feel a sense of moral unity. Thus ‘calling out’ someone’s Twitter transgressions could be said to be motivated by a desire to do good for wider society. Ronson draws a not too far-fetched analogy between public shaming on social media and how citizens in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) informed the Stasi (the GDR’s terrifying secret police) on their neighbours – they thought this was the right thing to do.