介绍:
Public Shaming: Why are we so eager to see others fall
据BBC报道，因猎杀了津巴布韦最有名狮子而在社交媒体上引发全球网友攻击的美国牙医将不会受到起诉。
然而，强大的舆论声讨再次成为人们的讨论话题。舆论声讨的动机和心理是什么呢？人们是否有权利在查证真相之前发起舆论声讨或是人肉搜索呢？
Transcription:
Michael Butterworth: Zimbabwean authorities have decided not to charge Walter Palmer, the dentist who killed a lion earlier this year. Authorities have decided not to pursue Palmer, saying he had obtained the legal documents and permits allowing him to legally hunt in Zimbabwe. Palmer has faced a barrage of online hate for his actions. But now, the scale and intensity of some of the online has raised new questions about the practice of online shaming. So, are we too quick to judge and convict people online before we know all the facts?
Lincoln Van der Westhuizen: His practice was protested…notwithstanding the ethical and moral questions, legally, he has been found to have done no wrong.
Wu You: His family has faced intimidation...And in Chinese we have a phrase, human flesh searching. Apparently, the next step will be the public shaming. And in China not long ago there has been a quite popular film, which is called “Caught in the Web”. It is about people suing a human flesh search engine by publicly shaming a woman on the bus.
Michael Butterworth: And we’ve seen, I would say, similar instances to this in the west recently. There was the Ashley Madison hack. There was no way of knowing if they had actually had an affair or if the email addresses were correct.
Lincoln Van der Westhuizen: But what I’m more interested in is the kind of, I’ve made a public mistake like Walter Palmer has, and we’ve all kind of gotten together and judged him now. What I’m interested is what do you think makes people have their compulsion to kind of, stand mob mentality, but to kind of create this situation where I’m not the one being shamed.
Wu You: The other people assume that they are standing in the moral high ground.
Lincoln Van der Westhuizen: This is true.
Wu You: This also quickly reminds me of a famous photo about the vulture is waiting for the girl to die and then to eat her. The photograph was taken by a South African photojournalist Kevin Carter, and then he took his own life a couple of months later due to depression because he received those kind of public shaming, and lot of people would write letters to criticize him that why didn’t you save the girl. He committed suicide due to depression.
Michael Butterworth: That could have been a contributing factor, having that sort of weighing on his mind. Another one, last in November a similar sort of thing happened with members of the KKK, the Klu Klux Klan.
Lincoln Van der Westhuizen: I find myself actually engaging in public shaming as well because I actually think that they should be fleshed, because that’s a decision they’ve made. I think you lose the right to your privacy once you engage with such, with a hateful group like the Klu Klux Klan. And I think that’s also something to keep in mind as well is this kind of nuanced look at the issue of big game hunting, that gets lost whenever there’s big public shaming. And even if the things that are being said towards Walter Palmer – “he deserves to be shot”, that all get lost in the white noise of this kind of moral paradox. Also there’s no subtlety in that kind of debate, which is something that I think also is a big part of public shaming.
Michael Butterworth: Another aspect is, there was a question mark over, you know, the game keepers in Zimbabwe, whether they had acted in the right manner, and whether they had deliberately drawn this lion out into an area which maybe wasn’t where it ought not to have been hunted.
