Social Media Shaming: A Life Reduced to One Moment

In today’s world, we are reduced and judged by one word, one action.

We can spend our entire lives being good people raising children, showing up for friends, helping strangers, and building our work and our reputations slowly, one honest interaction at a time. Then a single word, typed carelessly or while driving or said in the wrong moment, becomes the only thing people see.

And, it often begins with a post when someone is upset, and instead of reaching out, they go to social media. Then others chime in, people who have literally never met the person and know nothing about their life or their history. Within hours, strangers have decided what that person believes, what they value, and who they are. And it doesn’t end there; Employers get tagged, and sometimes businesses or friends get named. And before you know it, a reputation built over decades can begin to unravel over a sentence, often before anyone has asked a single question or verified a single detail. Not to mention that much of the time what people hear when they read might be perceived incorrectly.

People should be responsible for what they say, and sometimes what they say does real harm or you don’t agree with. What concerns me is how quickly we’ve come to believe that one moment tells us everything about a person, as though nothing else they ever did or said counts.

Why Our Minds Go There So Fast

Psychologists have studied this tendency, the fundamental attribution error, for decades (Lee Ross, 1977). We explain other people’s behavior through their character and our own through our circumstances. Sometimes if I poorly word something or it comes out wrong, I know I was tired or distracted or maybe even just chose the wrong word. When you say something that might be poorly worded, I’m far more likely to decide it reveals who you really are.

Once that impression forms, confirmation bias reinforces it. We pay attention to what supports our first read or impression of someone and overlook what challenges it (Nickerson, 1998). In addition, we are sensitive to the negative. Decades of reviewed research shows that bad experiences and impressions carry more psychological weight than good ones (Baumeister et al, 2001). Someone can spend years doing good, and one offensive comment becomes the thing people remember. Of course the offensive comment matters, but so does the rest of that person’s life.

What Social Media Adds

None of these tendencies are new. What has changed is how fast our judgments travel. Digital platforms amplify moral outrage by making it effortless to express and rewarding it with likes and shares (Molly Crockett, 2017). In another research study, researchers analyzed Twitter conversations about politically charged issues and found that for every additional moral and emotional word in a post there was about a 20% increase in how widely it spread. Outrage is quick to spread but does so without the context (Brady and colleagues, 2017)!

The online disinhibition effect is the way a screen frees us to say what we would probably never say to someone’s face. It is much easier to judge and condemn a name than to sit across from a person and hear their story. And then… strangers join in! They offer confident judgments about the character, beliefs, and intentions of someone they have literally never met.

The Person on the Other Side of the Screen

But the truth is, a real person reads those comments, and the effects can go well beyond hurt feelings although I think hurting an actual person is enough of a reason to consider your words and actions. One survey found that 41% of American adults have experienced online harassment, which includes being purposely embarrassed (Vogels, 2021). A systematic review of research on adult victims found that most studies reported serious effects on mental health, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and suicidal ideation (Stevens et al., 2021). Public criticism is not always harassment, and not everyone who is criticized will suffer these outcomes, but the potential for harm still deserves to be taken seriously.

Think about what it is like to wake up and find strangers discussing your character, questioning your values, and urging others to stop supporting your work. Of course responding may make things worse, but its hard to stay silent and sometimes staying silent can look like an admission. And long after everyone else has moved on, the comments stay. Everything on line stays forever.

There is also so much we never even see. The person at the center of the negative comments may have just been diagnosed with cancer or perhaps they are grieving someone they loved, or caring for a sick parent, or quietly holding their life together through something no one else knows about. We see one sentence and not everything else someone is carrying while running a business or typing something in a rush. Public shaming lands on top of whatever a person is already living through because again, they are a real human being.

We don’t have to agree with someone, or even like them, to consider what our words, or posts, might do to their life.

Seeing the Whole Person

Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever said or something a few of thousands of people think about you for personal reasons, stripped of its context and handed to strangers who were asked to decide who you are. Would their verdict reflect your values, your relationships, or the people you’ve helped? Probably not. One moment may tell us something about a person, but it rarely tells us everything. The kinder and more accurate thing is to remember that every person and situation we judge has a whole life we cannot see.

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