[This post an open letter to Nicole McCullough and Julia Cordray, co-founders of Peeple. If you are not them, and do not support them, feel free to read it anyhow.]
JAC & NIC,
Before you launch your new app designed to allow people to publicly rate (and berate) other people, please take the time to read and carefully consider Jon Ronson’s new book about how weaponized viralized public shaming has destroyed lives.
Read about what happened to Justine Sacco.
Read about what happened to Lindsey Stone.
Maybe skip the parts about what happened to Jonah Lehrer, since he probably had it coming. Well, much of it, anyhow.
Now imagine that we can do this sort of thing to just anyone, at any time, for any reason. All you need is a cell phone number and some transgression (real or imagined) which has the potential to spread rapidly around on the internet.
Lest you believe that the threat of viral shaming is limited to a few exceptional cases, let me quickly relate a story from my own experience. During an annual event for skeptics and atheists, a local gelato store owner posted up a sign reading “Skepticon is NOT Welcomed To My Christian Business.” As a result, the atheist community quickly mobilized to destroy his reputation online. The public backlash was gleefully recounted by atheist blogger Greta Christina:
Atheists brought the nuclear smackdown.
Someone took a photo of the sign, and within minutes it was Facebooked, Tweeted, G-plussed, texted, blogged, emailed, and probably sent by smoke signals and carrier pigeon. It raced through the atheosphere like a wildfire on meth. Gelato Mio was inundated with angry calls and emails; their ratings on Yelp and UrbanSpoon sank to the basement; on UrbanSpoon, their “most popular menu item” was quickly voted as “Bigotry.”
Greta Christina praised this social media driven ratings-bombing, saying “Atheists will not be fucked with.” Popular atheist blogger Hemant Mehta asked us to “Think of how much discrimination we could stop if we took this kind of approach every time.” Blogger PZ Myers took it one step further, completely discounting the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation:
.@jennifurret: No. Fuck him to the ground, let him be a lesson to others. I do not find his apology at all sincere — it's pure venality.
— PZ Myers 🕷 (@pzmyers) November 22, 2011
I don’t want to give you the impression that this kerfuffle is representative of the atheist community as a whole. We are not generally a hateful and unforgiving people. That said, in the heat of the moment many of us will succumb to the impulse to digitally destroy an individual who violates our social norms, and we are no different than theists in this respect.
The app which you are building will commoditize this impulse, weaponize it, and (worst of all) normalize it. Unless you take effective steps to prevent this from happening, you will be at least partially responsible for ruining reputations and lives. You may even wake up one day to headlines proclaiming that your app has pushed suicidal individuals over the edge.
Please think carefully about what you are doing, and ask yourselves what will happen when your tool falls into the hands of an angry mob.
Oh, and do enjoy the book.
