Social media shaming is good (in moderation): opinion

Social media platforms take up nearly two hours of our time every day, according to research firm GlobalWebIndex. (Marcel De Grijs/Dreamstime/TNS)

Have you ever lost your temper with a customer service representative, or argued with your partner in a restaurant? If so, you could become a YouTube celebrity. 

That’s because a cottage industry has grown up around humiliating people and organisations by exposing their bad behaviour online – otherwise known as public shaming. As Sue Scheff and Melissa Schorr report in their recent book Shame Nation: The Global Epidemic of Online Hate, now anyone can record your worst moments and sell the video evidence to one of several companies which buy the rights to embarrassing clips. (Those companies then make money from YouTube ad sales and fees from television shows that replay the videos.) In other words, there’s now a financial incentive for strangers to publicly shame you.