Be Careful Out There: On Sarah Jeong and the Future of Public Shaming

What happens when old, publicly shared opinions catch up with our present selves?

By Kaila Philo

My mother always taught me keep cautious online. “Be careful what you do and say,” she told me early on. “It will follow you forever — and impact your job prospects,” she added later, as I began creeping towards college. It’s a lesson that, even if I didn’t always abide by, I thought every millennial was told at least once.

My mother’s premonition has come true over and over again in the past few years, perhaps most often, surprisingly, in the name of social justice. The combination of the internet and an increased emphasis in activist circles on “call-out culture”  has bred a tactic in which perpetrators of racist, sexist, and transphobic language were publicly named and shamed, and often fired from their jobs. This tactic gained national attention back in 2013, when PR manager Justine Sacco tweeted out a stupid joke about AIDS in Africa to her 170 followers, and then boarded a flight to South Africa. By the end of the flight, her tweet had gone viral, she’d lost her job, and #HasJustineLandedYet became an hashtag immortalized in virtual history.

The Sacco affair epitomized the dangers of reckless tweeting. The methods used that night were repeated whenever a clueless racist posted something dumb online. Public shaming seemed like the strongest method to turn bigots into pariahs.

The Internet, however, is not organized. Twitter is not an activist group. It is not a collective; it’s a privately-owned faux-public square harboring the discordant yelling of countless warring factions. There was no meeting of leftwing Twitter users planning to oust racists via public shaming; it’s a method that gained traction partly out of a collective yearning to Do Something About It, partly due to the cathartic potential it holds for marginalized people who’d gone so long without the power to combat bigotry on an individual level, partly because it feels nice to perform your own politics on an international stage, and partly because it grants people permission to be cruel in a way they most likely wouldn’t be in real life. (Imagine how much effort it would take to get Justine Sacco fired if you had to do it in person.)

And because public shaming was not a cohesive politic, but only a cleansing tactic performed in a quasi-public space,  it was only a matter of time before right-wing tweeters stopped pushing out pained think-pieces about how dangerous call-out culture can be and participated in the rituals themselves.

During the week of July 16th, alleged rapist and PizzaGate theorist Mike Cernovich drew attention to Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn for making gross jokes about prepubescent children between 2009 and 2012, prompting a pile-on from other alt-righters and young social justice tweeters alike. This all resulted in Gunn being fired from the third Guardians film, to the dismay of hundreds of left-of-center Marvel fans who noted that Gunn had already acknowledged and apologized for these awful jokes years before. They pushed the hashtag #RehireJamesGunn as a response, citing that the alt-right’s “outrage” was in bad faith — especially consider Cernovich himself had also tweeted jokes about sexual assault.

Disney was placed between a rock and a hard place: give in to the demands of the unapologetically bigoted alt-right, or employ a man with extremely public jokes about pedophilia to direct a high-profile children’s movie. Piss off many, or piss off many more.

What we’re seeing now, with the case of Sarah Jeong, is a bit more straightforward and dismaying. On July 31st, the New York Times announced that the tech journalist was joining the paper’s editorial board, and within a day, alt-righters began pulling up her years-old contentious tweets about white people.

It would be disingenuous to claim that the tweets weren’t bad — some of them were a bit short-sighted and mean. But that was the point: As Jeong explains in her statement, she was “counter-trolling”—throwing the energy trolls brought to her account right back at them. Trolls were never going to respond to valid arguments, and they deem anyonecritical of whiteness as “anti-white,” so rather than try to rehabilitate her image for people who never cared for her or her work in the first place, she attempted to fight fire with fire.

Jeong admits this, owns up to it, and as a result, the Times stood behind their candidate, putting out a statement condemning her past rhetoric and citing her excellence as a journalist at the same time — succeeding only in giving legitimacy to a campaign born from hate, and making everyone madder in the process.

The differences between Jeong’s and Gunn’s situations are both obvious and not. Gunn’s bad tweets were conceived during the height of the edgy, juvenile humor that propelled South Park and Family Guy to fame, and as a result, he barely faced any meaningful backlash for joking about touching children (believe it or not) at the time. Gunn was also employed by the top children’s entertainment corporation in the world, working specifically for the most successful family film franchise of all time. Pedophilic jokes in any context are gross and awful and should be avoided at all costs, but pedophilic jokes within this context may as well have been Armageddon.

Jeong, however, wrote her tweets in response to the cruelty she faced every day, during what could be considered the nadir of socio-political discourse in recent years. Between the Trayvon Martin shooting, Ferguson, Gamergate, and the Trump circus, Twitter between 2013 and 2015 was the closest one may ever see of Dante’s seventh circle of hell. We were all mean—to varying degrees for different ends. Now we’re all just exasperated.

If anything, now may be the time to reevaluate how we proceed with public shaming, seeing as we all have bad tweets. Public shaming itself is a non-partisan tactic; anyone can do it, even in bad faith, and produce valid reasons to question someone. However, one often can’t amass a following on Twitter without being audacious, and large followings help media professionals stand out from the massive pool of applicants gunning for the same positions. The only way to save face when tweeting before trolls is not to tweet at all.

This all just begs the question of how a woman of color facing constant online abuse is supposed to act in the eyes of publications like the Times. Is she supposed to tweet as if nothing is happening in the hopes that someday the rape and death threats will stop? Is she supposed to stop engaging with the platform in order to avoid the abuse altogether? Would she have gained the visibility that she did had she taken this road? Would she have ever been noticed by the Times as a result? What does that mean for any of us?

The alt-right has figured out that public-shaming can work, and the short-term solution to evading this tactic would be to delete any posts that could be deemed as inappropriate. But ultimately this means betraying the right they claim to defend for you to the death: freedom of speech. Suddenly, the right is the silencing force, and we’re left trying to self-censor.

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