Public shaming is nothing new. However, it is much more amplified with the creation of social media. Society today holds people much more accountable these days. We have developed a “cancel culture,” in today’s world. It is much harder to make a mistake nowadays since so much is in the public eye nowadays. Some bad choices are easier to forgive than others. One of the cases that is much easier to forgive is the case with Monica Lewinsky.
As many know, Monica Lewinsky was an intern who worked for the White House under the Clinton Administration. Lewinsky took part in an affair with the President, which the dishonesty of would lead to Clinton’s impeachment. It is simple to quickly blame Lewinsky for the scandal since our society tends to point fingers at the women and call her names like whore or bimbo like Lewinsky stated she was called in her TED talk. What should be taken into account that it takes two to commit adultery and consider Lewinsky’s age. She was twenty-two at the time, yet what she did with the President has made her notorious for the rest of her life. After discussing with my peers, we all were able to say who Lewinsky was and what scandal she was known for even though it took place in 1998 and most of us were born after that time.
Part of the reason Lewinsky’s history is still so precedented in our culture is because of the backlash she received online. This was one of the first cases where a person was humiliated on a digital platform. It was before the times of social media, but Lewinsky stated that people were still able to comment and email about the situation. She now advocates for there to be a stop to cyber bullying.
Other cases that were not so forgivable were that of Justine Sacco and Aaron Calvin. Both of these cases dealt with tweeting out things that were racist. Sacco’s tweet was much more intense talking about the possibility of contracting aids on her trip to South Africa while Calvin, a journalist, tweeted out racist song lyrics. His tweets were discovered after doing a feature on someone and stating that the person had racist tweets of his own. Both of these instances cost them their job. The question is should public shaming follow you forever? How long should the sentence to be?
In my opinion, with Sacco’s case, that tweet did not seem like a simple mistake. One does not accidentally tweet something that horrific. So I believe she should have received the repercussions of losing her job. Where the line should be drawn is when the person starts to receive death threats. I think that our culture can get caught up in the idea of contributing to hating a person without taking into consideration that they are still a person.
It’s also common for people to look back in others’ old tweets to find things that they should be canceled on. I think the question of doing that and whether it is morally acceptable to denounce someone for an action they did in their youth is evolving and depends on the circumstance.
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