Most comments on the dangers of social media and blogging tend toward warnings about off-the-cuff comments or presenting a public face that you will not be ashamed of in a year’s time when meeting someone new or applying for a job. Jon Ronson’s new book ‘So you’ve been publicly shamed‘ is bringing back and shedding some new light on the well known examples such as the woman tweeting before getting on a flight from UK to South Africa and disembarking hours later to find she’d created a maelstrom of hate by her supposedly off the cuff comment about AIDS. People really do use the tools to humiliate other and the cost, Ronson argues, can be to make others unwilling to speak freely as we collectively get sucked into groupthink. All true and bad, one imagines, but it can be even worse.
The mainstream media have given more attention to this new book than they have the fact that once again, a blogger who espouses atheism has been murdered because of their words they use. In Bangladesh, a blogger was hacked to death this week. Washiqur Rahman was attacked in the street, in daylight. His ‘crime’ was writing about the dangers of religious fundamentalism. He was right. But he was not alone. Earlier this year another blogger, American Avijit Roy was murdered by what are described as machete-wielding assailants while returning from a book fair with his wife (who lost a finger in the attack). Three bloggers have been so murdered in the last two years in that country. And of course, this is on top of the case in Saudi Arabia where public flogging of a blogger for ‘insulting Islam’ actually brought a murmur or two of disapproval from international allies.
One of the less known aspects of free speech suppression (which is everywhere) is that aethesists are among the most suppressed groups. It is estimated that espousing atheism is a crime punishable by death in 13 countries:Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. And that’s just the list of countries where it is enacted as law. There are many more where crimes against atheists are largely ignored and rarely persecuted. And yet religious groups continually campaign that they are the ones who feel persecuted and need laws protecting them. Protect one, protect all surely — is not that a fundamental of all major religions? Those who speak out and pay the ultimate price deserve more than a small column in the euphemistically titled ‘free press’.
The real point here is that I believe shaming others for ignorant tweets is likely a lower point on the same continuum of crowd-hysteria that leads to machete murder of bloggers. This is a concern for people who use social media to chastise but never imagine themselves as fanatics or bad people. The technologies underlying rapid shaming and the behaviors they enable should be studied as more than a curiosity of our age or as a marketing vehicle for corporate identity and personal image making. But I guess there’s less money or fame in that type of work. Come in Information Science……there’s a research question to answer.