From Public Shame to the Courtroom

The writer Jon Ronson once observed that every day in the social-media era, “a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping.” In Ronson’s 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, his subjects found themselves beset by angry detractors for, say, an insensitive Twitter joke or Facebook photo. They lost jobs, received threats, even pondered suicide. And they mostly retreated from view until the shame storm passed.

Today they might sue instead.

Last year, I reported on a lawsuit that a man accused of rape on the “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet filed against the woman who had created and circulated the document.

In January, a viral video of the high-school student Nick Sandmann at a protest march in Washington, D.C., appeared to some to show him smirking at a Native American elder. That triggered a wave of inordinate social-media hate and flawed journalism. Now the young man who was at the bottom of the pile-on is suing The Washington Post for $250 million, NBC for $275 million, and CNN for $275 million.

Last month, the author Natasha Tynes tweeted a photo of a Washington, D.C., Metro employee eating on a train in violation of the transit system’s policies. Defenses of the black employee and outrage against Tynes culminated in a statement that her publisher posted to Twitter asserting that she “did something truly horrible today” as “black women face a constant barrage of this kind of inappropriate behavior directed at them and a constant policing of their bodies.” It went on to declare that it would cancel her novel.

Now Tynes , “alleging the company defamed her and breached a publishing contract amid a social media shaming.”