Abstract
As social life and communication move increasingly online, we have experienced the expansion and the normalisation of online shaming – different forms of (semi)public cross-platform condemnation of people and their actions by (mass) online audiences. Online shamings can be analysed as combinations of reintegrative (shame-correct-forgive) and disintegrative (shame-stigmatise-expel) social sanctioning practices, usually focusing the ‘serious’ disciplinary shaming on the behaviour of the offender. We propose that equal attention should be given to what we have termed ‘recreational shaming’ – humour-based playful collective shaming that often occurs via online platforms, seemingly just for the sake of shaming, motivated mainly by social belonging needs and entertainment gratification.
By combining the results of standardised content analysis of Facebook recreational shaming groups (n = 65) and in-depth qualitative interviews with the ‘modmins’ of the groups (n = 8) we will give an overview of what is being shamed, how groups and modministrators create and enforce rules and what is the socio-cultural perceived meaning of this practice. We distinguish three spheres of recreational shaming that ‘frame the shame’ and demonstrate how recreational online shaming is often more about the self than the other – me performing the act of shaming for entertainment value, to belong in a group. Additionally, we introduce how shaming is used as a self-reflexive tool for behaviour-correction or base knowledge for dominant tastes.
Introduction
Recently, we have seen the rise of problematic cases that have sprouted from situations where mass audiences engage in online shaming, the (semi)public cross-platform condemnation of people and their actions. Massive shaming campaigns focus on various subjects and themes, often crossing the imaginary boundaries of online-offline spheres, resulting in physical, psychological, financial, or other kinds of harm. In popular discourse, such large-scale social sanctioning is sometimes referred to as ‘cancel culture’ (Clark, 2020), ‘online firestorms’ (Rost et al., 2016) or even ‘culture wars’ (Benn, 2021), but we refrain from using these terms as they are laden with normative assumptions and biases. Instead, we will follow the lead of other scholars (De Vries, 2015; Trice et al., 2019; Billingham and Parr, 2020; Aitchison and Meckled-Garcia, 2020) and use the term ‘online shaming’ as a central concept denoting social practices where ‘social media, and related technologies, are used as a platform for “shaming” individuals for perceived violations in social norms and etiquette’ (De Vries, 2015).
Online shaming can focus on calling out specific people for their behaviour (Finley and Johnson, 2019) but it can also be a broader shared shaming experience, like the 152,000-member (in 2022) Facebook group ‘thats it, I’m wedding shaming (non ban-happy edition)’ where an endless flow of content about weddings is mocked and laughed at (Ellin, 2020). Similar groups on various topics are abundant on Facebook by now, usually having begun ‘as places for community discourse and slowly devolved into spaces for shaming and personal attacks’ (Trice et al., 2019). Shaming practices at the heart of this study share characteristics of affective communication – they are often based on sharing immediate reactions and (pre)-emotions, contributing to and cultivating a culture of instantaneity and the pressure to react and participate urgently (Papacharissi, 2016).
Scholarly work on online shaming has looked either at the broader implications of technology and media on people’s reputations and privacy (Solove, 2007; Detel, 2013; Hess and Waller, 2014; Fulton and Kibby, 2017), or separate specific examples and sites of online shaming (Stroud, 2014; Shaw, 2016; Corry, 2021). Some scholars have analysed the moral dilemmas and conflicts explicitly related to online public shaming (Billingham and Parr, 2020; Aitchison and Meckled-Garcia, 2020), though people’s perceptions and attitudes towards shaming have received relatively little attention except for young people, studied by De Vries (2015). In addition, the few efforts to create typologies of online shamings have focused on ‘serious’ shaming, like digital vigilantism (Loveluck, 2019; Jane, 2017; Skoric et al., 2010) and have mostly neglected to take fully into consideration the cultural meaning of other forms of shaming (Murumaa-Mengel and Muuli, 2021).
In this article, we will specifically focus on shaming practiced seemingly with the primary purpose of entertainment. Although people are engaged in the mass-shaming of actual, often identifiable ordinary people, there seems to be an echo and ethos of ‘have a laugh, don’t take things too seriously’ (Hoechsmann, 2008: 68). Over the past few years, we have noticed a specific social practice emerging – shaming that takes place just for the sake of shaming itself, usually in particular social media groups and pages that have a humorous undertone (Greig, 2019; Harvey, 2019). Thus, we consider the potential of ‘recreational shaming’ as a concept, to zoom in on the reintegrative and disintegrative shaming practices (Braithwaite, 1989). Our study strives to contribute to the subject of shaming by not only exploring the content and dynamics of Facebook shaming groups (content analysis of 65 groups), but we also aim to understand the role of modministrators of such groups (eight in-depth online interviews). We use the term ‘modministrators’ to refer to both a group’s moderators and administrators simultaneously. Modministrators create and modify the rules of groups (Trice et al., 2019), but also introduce and communicate the rules to the group to make their decisions more transparent and reasoned (Matias, 2019). They also block (reintegrative practice) and expel (disintegrative practice) members who have broken these rules, thus shaping the groups’, but also platforms’ general discourses and practices (Gillespie, 2018).
Shaming as a social practice
Shame is usually defined as a painful internal emotion that arises when a person realises the ridiculousness, obscenity, or social condemnation of their actions, their failure to live up to standards, norms or ideals that are internalised and associated with self-esteem (De Vries, 2015; Maibom, 2010). In other words, the emotion endangers one’s sense of self, so people usually try to avoid evoking that feeling. According to Maibom (2010), shame is also about failure to live up to public expectations or opinions of reference groups (Borg et al., 1988), making the existence of an audience central to shame. Gehm and Scherer (1988) have pointed out that once the feeling of shame has occurred in a public setting, the person’s reputation is damaged, which is not easy to repair. Shame is a fundamentally social emotion – for it to come into existence, there need(s) to be ‘other(s)’, as shaming is a form of social condemnation (Braithwaite, 1989).
Shame is often considered one of the most important emotions because it ensures the stability of social norms and structures without external sanctioning in a situation where someone has violated the norms of a group (Borg et al., 1988). Criminologist John Braithwaite (1989) has differentiated between two types of shaming: reintegrative and disintegrative. In the case of reintegrative shaming, the community first expresses their disapproval, which may range from mild rebuke to degradation ceremonies. Public shaming used to be an effective punishment, especially in smaller communities (Morton, 2001). Societies have had different methods for shaming: stocks, flagellation, branding, sandwich boards and scarlet letters, among other methods of shaming (De Vries, 2015). After this, however, the shamed person is included back into the community and forgiveness takes place. In the case of disintegrative shaming, Braithwaite (1989) emphasises its dire contrast with the former, being a type of shaming that divides the community by creating a class of outcasts and excluding norm violators from the community. Shaming is then focused on the person, not so much on the actions and behaviour.
With online shaming, much of the public attention has been on specific people who become infamous because of their actions, words and personal history (see descriptions of notorious cases from Ronson, 2016; Mishan, 2020). Notable examples of this first wave of online shamings include Justine Sacco and Lindsey Stone. Stone posted a photo on her Facebook page that showed her joking around at a war memorial. Sacco tweeted, ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just Kidding. I’m white!’ intending the tweet to mock American ignorance of South Africa. Mass ‘nightmare audiences’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011; Murumaa-Mengel, 2017) decoded the jokes as actual messages of disrespect and racism, turning into a shaming campaign of the original posters and causing a lot of emotional, reputational and material damage to both Sacco and Stone. These cases are clear evidence of what Solove (2007: 95) pointed out – online shaming often tends to spiral out of control, the punishment does not fit the crime and people’s lives can be ruined for rather minor transgressions. Oftentimes, online shaming campaigns revolve around not even transgressions, but rather mundane pieces of information taken out of their original context (De Vries, 2015), presented without contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2004), and tacit knowledge.
It is important to note the central role of humour in shaming, as people have widely used ridicule and mockery as a strategy to point out someone’s deviation from the norm (Wolf, 2002: 333). In online shaming, sarcasm, irony and competition for reactions play a major part and the performative practice often revolves around making the wittiest remark (Laineste, 2013). Absurdity and nihilism are also attributed to online humour as dominant features (Ramoz-Leslie, 2011: 50).
To summarise, online shaming has many forms – from specific notorious cases of misjudging vast online audiences’ sense of humour; to ridiculing and exposing over-curated self-presentation and consumeristic lifestyles (e.g., @influencersinthewild on Instagram); to naming-and-shaming specific people; to pandemic shaming drunk spring breakers and coughing commuters (Tait, 2020). These cases may be seen as new and often terrifying ‘sign of the times’ when there is nothing fundamentally new about online shaming. However, what is new is the rapid development of technology and the ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011). People with different socio-demographic backgrounds, motivations and perceptions of social norms are brought together, often perceiving to have an invisibility cloak. The illusion of anonymity appears in online environments – ‘no one knows me, no one cares, and no one is focusing on me’ (Abril, 2007). Until they do.
Omnoptic structures of networked and refracted publics
When populations expanded and social life moved away from smaller communities, people’s geographical mobility increased and shaming seemed to lose most of its power (Solove, 2007). New technologies and the rise of the networked publics created the perfect conditions for pervasive shamings’ evolutionary jump, as persistence, searchability, replicability and scalability (boyd, 2010) are the main characteristics of social media. In other words, information online can be tough to delete, easily found via searches, copied endlessly, potentially becoming visible to large audiences. Contemporary screen-mediated sociality where people offer glimpses or thorough overviews of their lives via social media, has been described as a state of mutual surveillance (Fulton and Kibby, 2017), sousveillance (Bossewitch and Sinnreich, 2012), or omnopticon (Jensen, 2007). In other words, the contemporary norm of technologically mediated constant availability and visibility (Murumaa-Mengel and Siibak, 2019) has formed into a state of continuous mutual surveillance where every user acts both as an agent and a subject, constantly surveilling other Internet users while being surveilled themselves. This omnoptic structure is a prerequisite for intense social control and online shaming of average users on a mass scale. In a way, the power imbalance within the social sanctioning of masses versus an individual creates a reciprocal ‘guilt’ – the perceived misbehaviour of the shamed, entwined with the ‘guilty pleasure’ of partaking in a mass reaction to it. The latter injustice is usually the reason why online shamings can seek (semi)private spaces and create their own walled gardens (Paterson, 2012) or magic circles (Salen Tekinbaş and Zimmerman, 2004), free and hidden from everyday norms and rules.
Suitably to these observances, Crystal Abidin (2021) has proposed a companion framework to networked publics – ‘refracted publics’ that usually occur through private groups, locked platforms, or ephemeral contents. According to Abidin (2021), refracted publics often form in vernacular culture, ‘below the radar’, consisting of subversive, risky and hidden practices on social media – fitting for the object of our study. Mirroring boyd’s (2010) conditions of networked publics, Abidin (2021) proposes transience (short-term ephemerality of content), discoverability (content is found, not knowingly searched for), decodability (even if content is duplicated, it is illegible due to missing situated context) and silosociality (visibility of content is intensely communal and localised) as characteristics of refracted publics. Additionally, she conceptualises the general trends of such publics, among which Abidin (2021) lists hyper-competitive attention economies and perpetual content saturation which impedes meaningful consumption and results in an infodemic.
Condemning the words and acts of people via mass online shaming campaigns has become a huge part of digital culture and is worthy of a longer look. It almost seems that people have become unable to engage in civil inattention (Goffman, 1963; Sharon and Koops, 2021) – pretending to not listen or ignoring the conversations as a social norm of respect, ‘act of “giving someone space”’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011: 25). The expectation of forgiveness may be unfounded in omnopticon (Ambrose et al., 2012) and the shamed can more likely look forward to the forgetfulness of people in the context of information abundance.
Facebook groups and moderators
Facebook provides a platform for special interest groups, pages and accounts, very often set up by the average users of these platforms. One can create a public or a private group depending if the group’s content is to be shown only to users inside the group or to users outside the group as well. Considering the biggest groups have over a hundred thousand members, ‘private’ is often just the platform’s own label and does not adequately describe the nature of the group.
Structurally, Facebook groups require administrator(s) and/or moderators who create, support and control the discourse in these online environments (Matias, 2019). As a critical sidenote – by delegating policy, control and governance to moderators, social media platforms can reduce labour costs and responsibility in regulating their service, while leaving the impression of being champions for freedom of speech and cultural expression (Gillespie, 2010: 356; Matias, 2019: 2).
Many of the shaming groups at the heart of this study could be considered to fall under the LeftBook category – a network of ideologically ‘leftist’ Facebook groups (Trice et al., 2019; Bowen, 2020). This is implied by the fact that many groups use and explicitly state a specific combination of rules which seek to protect the members from bigotry, racism, homophobia and, in some occasions, ban the supporting of right-wing politics. On the one hand, ‘the flexibility, anonymity, and generative power of online networks make them excellent realms for fighting oppression’ (Trice et al., 2019: 37). On the other hand, as Tufekci (2017) has emphasised, the same characteristics make these networks efficient at enacting oppression at the individual, organisational, national and global level. So, people who share the core values of the groups will perceive the group’s rule enforcements as justified efforts, while others may see them as toxic and threatening (Greig, 2019), creating more ‘drama’ that adds to the entertainment value of these groups.
As we see, the field is bursting with sub-topics to explore and nuances to study. In this article, we will map the landscape of Facebook recreational shaming groups and try to advance the understanding on the role of modministrators of such groups. We set off to find answers to three main research questions: What are dominant characteristics, topics and contents of the typical recreational shaming groups of Facebook? How are rules of the recreational shaming groups created and enforced? How do modministrators of these groups perceive the cultural and societal meaning of the practice?
Methods and data
This study was conducted in two stages – in the end of 2019, we carried out a standardised content analysis of Facebook shaming groups (n = 65). After getting a better overview and a thorough look into a specific site of this niche but systematic online shaming taking place in social media, we conducted in-depth qualitative online interviews (n = 8) with the modministrators of these groups in the spring of 2020. Although some of the specific groups we examined might have disappeared, groups have shut down and been re-established, the general landscape is still similar and thriving. Facebook has provided a structure that enables and embraces collective shaming practices, where groups’ central topics vary from oddly specific, to broader universally shared experiences. Usually, these groups are not public, but rather they hide from Facebook as private communities with tight internal moderation (Trice et al., 2019). Admittedly, the thresholds for being accepted into this part of the refracted publics (Abidin, 2021) or fragmented affective publics (Papacharissi, 2016) are noticeably low – one has to simply request membership by filling out a short application form, which aims to verify whether the applicant has familiarised themself with the group’s rules. It is usually a matter of a few clicks, the applicant most likely being approved in 24 hours to join the group and start shaming or participating in this collective experience otherwise.
Content analysis of Facebook shaming groups
We formed a complete sample (n = 92) of all Facebook groups that met the main criterion: group can be found on Facebook via the search term ‘shaming’. ‘Shaming’ was chosen as a keyword, because most recreational shaming groups on Facebook use the format ‘That’s it, I’m ___ shaming’, leading us to a more defined focus and research material. The criterion excludes all groups that do not have the specific word in their name, even if they actually are engaging in shaming (such as ‘Please show to Jim,,, HA HA’ [sic!], ‘Ok, Karen’, etc.). After a brief initial analysis of the groups, their introductions and other general info available, we removed groups that were not focused on entertainment-driven online shaming. The criteria for our final sample were threefold: 1. The posts are not addressing criminal acts or situations where people are put in danger; 2. Shamed people are anonymised or at least attempted to do so, no name-and-shame sanctioning practices were included; 3. The group is not focused on (fighting) body-shaming, as those focused on supporting members who had been body-shamed, sharing experiences, etc. After excluding the groups that did not meet the abovementioned criteria, 65 shaming groups remained in the sample for the standardised content analysis.
We found standardised content analysis (Krippendorff, 2019) to fit the research aims and design as it enables us to analyse large amounts of textual data and provide structure to the data by interpreting it in a systematic manner, examining trends and patterns. In general, we coded four main categories for all groups in our sample: name and main theme; publicness of the group; the number of members; groups’ stated rules, and written norms.
Shortcomings of standardised content analysis are usually tied to the data reduction process – coding text into rigid categories (Weber, 1990), closer to the scientific ideal of ‘objectiveness’ but at the same time, the content is reduced to triviality. Latent and hidden meanings, abstract notions, nonstandard and peripheral cases, and details can be overlooked. Thus, a second stage of the study was necessary, a method that would allow us to understand the phenomenon and the roles people carry in these groups. By interviewing the modministrators of these Facebook shaming groups, we aimed to understand the typical dynamics of such groups, relationships within them, rule-creation and violations, sanctions within the group, the perceived meaning and function of the recreational shaming.
Qualitative online Interviews with the modministrators
Altogether, we contacted 168 modministrators of Facebook shaming groups, but only eight agreed to participate in the study. Low participation might be due to various reasons, from timing – people were trying to cope with the COVID-19 crisis – to information overload, as larger groups’ modministrators get numerous private messages, recruitment might be lost among others. Obviously, many of the groups are perceived to be fringe, private, or semi-public spaces, away from public attention, therefore modministrators might want to avoid participating in such studies. Also, social shaming practices might be perceived as morally dubious by the modministrators themselves, so they would want to avoid a reflexive interview situation.
In order to prevent linking the information shared by the interviewees to them later, confidentiality and anonymity (Saunders et al., 2015) was promised to the participants. Therefore, in this study, we do not address the names or initials of the individuals, will not link specific groups or other characteristics that would allow the interviewees to be identified. Instead, we mark our eight participants alphabetically from A to H. Our participants have been modministrating in their respective groups for 1–2 years, with the only exception of H, who has been a modministrator for over 5 years. Groups vary in their topics – some are mocking weddings and marriage, some food or pets, some are shaming specific apps or companies.
It was up to the interviewee to decide if they wanted to participate via a video call, audio call or conduct the interview as written communication. As none of the interviewees preferred the video call format, we conducted three synchronous audio interviews and five asynchronous written interviews. Interview data was analysed using thematic qualitative content analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) that allows the researchers to arrive at the logic and patterns in the material during the analysis, rather than assuming them at an early stage of the study as in a quantitative approach. After conducting the interviews, we transcribed the audio recordings and copied the text of the written interview conversations, MAXQDA software was used for coding and categorising. In the first phase of coding, ‘rough codes’ and in vivo codes were assigned to the text (e.g., ‘friendship’, ‘benevolent people’, ‘tight community’). In the second coding phase, large number of codes from the previous stage were summarised and systematised. Then the codes were organised into categories and themes, structured around our research questions.
Results and discussion
Overview of recreational shaming groups on Facebook
At a glance, shaming groups can be categorised into two – first, groups that engage in shaming different objects and belongings, like failed DIY crafts, fonts, cars, thrift store items or Christmas trees, but also pets. Secondly, groups that engage in shaming people (husbands, in-laws) people’s behaviour (from proposals to burials) or their appearance. Many interviewed modministrators quickly emphasised that an important distinction must be made between groups based on what is being shamed. Object-shaming was seen as more acceptable, whilst shaming that targets people’s appearances (e.g., with poor sense of style or make-up) was sometimes frowned upon. It is worth noting that out of eight interviewed modmins, four were from groups that essentially shame people and their behaviour. These modministrators described their groups’ activities as ‘light-hearted pokes’ against people who take something too seriously; ‘self-loathing cringe group’ making fun of their own community; or a ‘safe outlet to voice your opinion on things that you find are ugly’. Even if people and their behaviour are at the heart of the recreational shaming, it is often perceived as morally justifiable when the shamees are anonymised and abstract: C: ‘A lot of the shaming that is in the shaming groups and in my group is about mocking somebody, but in the abstract and not the actual person. As you've mentioned, there are many rules about anonymising the screenshots that we share and I think that part of the point of all those groups, and my group too, is to have a laugh – the pleasure of pointing out that something is stupid and weird and dumb or in some way funny, but often not a nice funny and not have to actually do anything with it, not have to confront the person or to decide if we want to teach them or to shun them’.
From the quote, we can see that reintegrative (teach them) and disintegrative (shun them) sanctions (Braithwaite, 1989) offer a general categorisation scheme for online shamings. Within them, not only ‘serious’ disciplinary shamings can be distinguished, but entertaining recreational ones, too. We can imagine one axis with reintegrative and disintegrative social sanctioning, and another axis mapping ‘serious’ disciplinary shamings and ‘entertaining’ recreational shamings. Facebook groups analysed here fall into the space of reintegrative/disintegrative recreational shamings. Recreational shaming can be a perceived and internalised frame that relieves the shamers from the burden of responsibility or the moral deliberation over their actions – it is just all in good fun. A study by Skoric et al. (2010), also found that people engaged in ‘serious’ online shamings might not consider the activity to necessarily be shaming, labelling it something else.
For the sake of describing the landscape in more detail, we zoomed in and formed seven categories, into which the shaming groups can be divided: - - - - - - -
We see that the groups have very different operational frameworks – some are working on a nearly denotative level – directly shaming what or who is visible on the screenshot. Others are situated in a meta-level context that requires advanced cultural literacy for the decodable (Abidin, 2021) texts, for example, making fun of the shaming groups and the shaming or cringe genre itself (Middleton, 2013), like the group ‘i cant tell if i’m in the ring shaming group or the nail shaming group’. So can we distinguish shaming as disciplinary sanctioning and shaming as a genre-specific (inside) joke?
Imagine three different spheres of recreational shaming – the broadest one is made up of widely accepted socio-cultural norms that do not necessarily need much specific knowledge. That is where shaming as a clear-cut social sanctioning practice takes place, trying to let people know that certain behaviour is not acceptable. There, we can see posts that make fun of people who are inconsiderate towards their family members, ignore their pet’s droppings, park their car incorrectly, do not follow grammar rules, etc. (n = 10). Second sphere of recreational shaming in our study’s context is based on style/taste conflicts and/or shaming of someone’s perceived inadequacy – largely a sphere of subjective preferences, out of which dominant preferences form, becoming part of cultural literacy. Such groups (n = 37) have content from mocking personal style choices and cooking skills, to ‘ugly’ dogs and cheesy proposals. And third, most narrow sphere of recreational shaming has to do with very specific inside jokes where the participant has to have the right interpretative lens (boyd, 2014) or insiderness, in order to understand and decode the text. Some groups have set their focus on such a narrow scope (shaming Disney ears, clocks, wreaths or ill-fitting fonts in written text) that they have become a commentary, a reference on the general shaming groups’ scene (n = 18).
As the second and third sphere of recreational shaming require specific cultural literacy or an interpretative lens, it ensures that the decodability of the content outside the group remains rather low (Abidin, 2021). Furthermore, the fact that most of these groups are private from the general public – being on a specific social media site and (loosely) guarded by approval of join requests – contributes to the creation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and silosociality of this refracted public (Abidin, 2021).
To broadly characterise the typical members of these groups, according to the modministrators – shamers are more likely to be white/Caucasian women of various ages who hold liberal and left-leaning views and who share weak social bonds. Still, the members of shaming groups typically function as an ideal audience for each other, often modelled in our heads based on ourselves, a community made up of mirror images of the user (Marwick and boyd, 2011). Private groups (majority of our content analysis sample) encourage people to be more candid in their expression because they perceive the shaming groups as a safe environment: F: ‘you’re not going to even shame yourself if you don't feel shielded from the rest of the world. So I think with shaming groups, there is that feeling of label “the door is closed, so I can talk now.”’
In other words, when people are posting content in these groups, in the perceived backstage, they expect members of the community to react in a desired way, share the original poster’s (OP) taste preferences, sense of humour, etc. Often, they are correct in their assumptions. Other times, though, they find ‘nightmare audiences’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011; Murumaa-Mengel, 2017) instead. Many modmins described conflicts between the members, which often requires interference. In those instances, the users that have misbehaved are punished by muting or throwing them out of the group, engaging in intra-group re-/disintegrative sanctioning. Muting a badly behaved member is essentially reintegrative sanctioning – the member is made aware of their violation of the group’s rules and norms, but is later welcomed back into the community. However, the case of banning a group member is an example of disintegrative sanctioning – the person that has violated the rules is thrown out of the group.
Creating and enforcing rules in shaming groups
The modmins were very aware of the dynamics that groups go through as they grow, often emphasising their role’s importance to grow with it. As they put it – not needing rules for a group of friends but needing rules to make a ‘nation’ work. Enforcing rules is often a laborious undertaking, volunteer work (Trice et al., 2019) that controls and shapes the (semi)public discourses (Matias, 2019). Two modministrators compared their experiences with managing several Facebook groups, acknowledging the difficulty of managing a larger (shaming) group: C: ‘I’ve been an admin in a 100,000 group, and rules were very needed because among a hundred thousand members there are many more assholes than among 3000 members. So, rules needed to be clear to make it easier to just not argue with people and just say “okay, you broke this and this rule – ban or mute – and everybody else, don’t do that.”’
This also helps to explain why shaming groups often have thorough rules (although it is important to note that 18 groups out of 65 did not have any rules) – it helps to justify the sanctioning acts of the modministrators. Four interviewees were involved in setting the rules themselves, and some of them pointed out that other similar groups were an important source of inspiration. Very often, the rules are borrowed and remixed from the other groups, usually specific to so-called ‘LeftBook’ groups. In order to give an overview of the norms and rules in shaming groups, we systematised all the rules stated in the group page into five different dominant categories:
But at the same time the rule of not mixing online and offline spheres is expected, ‘don’t go real life’ as it is often referred to. This rule is designed to avoid weaponized contexts (Abidin, 2021) where distinct socio-cultural contexts are intentionally collapsed. Harassing and contacting people outside of the group experience is perceived as a strong violation of shaming groups’ norms. From the field of game research, the concept of a ‘magic circle’ can be applied here, too. So shaming groups, like games, create their own enclaves, where they create a new reality with its own rules and norms that players accept within this game/circle and that do not necessarily apply outside the circle (Salen Tekinbaş and Zimmerman, 2004).
B: ‘I have this rule in both the groups I admin for the fact that deleting content means they are not taking accountability for their actions. Posts that got awry also serve as education to not just the content provider, but those observing it. In the age of the internet, it’s so easy sweep things under the carpet rather than trying to learn anything’.
In fact, there are specific Facebook tag-groups (Lorenz, 2019) dedicated to shaming OPs from various groups. Examples of the bigger ones are ‘OP, not even Nationwide is on your side’ with 27,000 members, ‘OP getting lightly sauteéd, seared on both sides and roasted at 350°’ with 24,000 members and ‘OP, you fucking pinecone’ with nearly 9000 members. So, in a way, reactions to posts-gone-wrong and DDs are forming into degradation ceremonies and designated spheres of recreational shaming.
Here, we see a tension between two paradigms – Abidin’s (2021) refracted publics with its risky and hidden practices often driven towards ephemerality – here one moment and gone the other. But modministrators and abovementioned OP-shaming groups are enforcing rules and norms from the viewpoint of boyd’s (2010) networked publics where content is (supposed to be) persistent, expressions automatically recorded and archived, and consequences to actions clear.
Modministrators’ perception of online shaming as a socio-cultural practice
Disintegrative and reintegrative social sanctioning usually focuses on the offender – the practices are oriented towards changing someone’s behaviour or stigmatising and expelling them. When it comes to recreational shaming, it is more about the self than the offender. After all, in most of the cases, the shamee is part of different fragmented publics and will most likely not know that they are being shamed in these groups. So why engage in such shaming practices? Belonging and socialising were repeatedly mentioned as an important motivator for joining and participating in shaming groups – members can express their opinions and discuss various topics with others, even seeking advice and guidance from others, sharing a sense of community: B: ‘Obviously for the fun, but also people want to be with people with similar mindsets. I finally have the opportunity to laugh at stuff that people bang on about being amazing (Harry Potter is a good example for me). You can often feel alienated by people who do like these things so it’s nice to have somewhere to have a laugh and vent about it’.
Humour and laughter have been known to foster such social bonds, as it is a shared activity that promotes social congruity (Billig, 2005). But there is also something deeper in laughing at specific ‘others’ and ‘otherness’, creating a stronger we-sense among the group. In a way, we even see sorts of anti-fandoms developing in these groups, ‘those who strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it insane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel’ (Gray, 2003: 70). Giuffre (2014: 53) argues that ‘unlike hate, which is arguably a destructive process, anti-fandom can be a constructive form of engagement’, so shaming Duolingo, Harry Potter fans or Disney can become a part of a person’s shared identity in what Papacharissi (2016) has called affective publics: F: ‘I think we all kind of just love to hate things. /--/ I think hate is a strong emotion. I think any strong emotion binds people, be it hate or comedy – you think something's funny or you think something is very sad or you think something's very romantic. Extreme emotions drive most of social media because you're not dealing with somebody on a personal level, you can only deal with reactions’.
Quite expectedly, the interviewed modministrators saw entertainment as the most important function of shaming groups, echoing once again the principle of ‘have a laugh, don’t take things too seriously’ (Hoechsmann, 2008: 68), as the central motto of digital cultures. But even if recreational shaming seems to be ‘just for the giggles’ and entertainment, simultaneously sharing a sense of belonging, many other functions and motivations are evident.
Perhaps most interestingly, for example, one of the interviewees suggested an additional, self-reflexive behaviour-adjusting level that functions as an anchor or reference point: F: ‘There is a lot of commentary on what we think is both something we like and something that we maybe like too much, and it’s measuring ourselves against other people to see that I'm not that bad. I'm not as bad as that person. And I think shaming groups where it’s making fun of weddings is a good example. We use it to be like, “okay, well, when I have a wedding, I could I do that thing, or maybe I should do that thing”. So I think it’s also checking how you should see the world, which is totally unhealthy and not great but I think it’s checking in with the community, being like, “is this still cool? All right” or “would I be ashamed if I like that thing?”.’
In other words, shaming groups are used and trusted as a community, a testing ground for social norms. ‘Test-shaming’ something within a community allows people to use shaming groups to check what is acceptable among their ‘important others’ and what is not. So, interestingly, recreational shaming can function as a predictive/preventive strategy to avoid breaking certain social norms oneself.
One interviewee described how a group’s climate and function can change over time, perhaps because of the growing popularity but perhaps because of other societal processes: D: ‘Now, and I don't know how much of this is because of quarantine, because it's only been in the last month or so, it's turned into a lot of people tearing each other down for their opinions. /---/ And like I said, I don't know how much of this is that this is really a lot of people's only means of socialising is Facebook or social media in general, and people are feeling cooped up and angry, and this is an easy way to take your anger out’.
So we see that in some cases, shaming groups can meet escapist needs and gratifications, directing attention away from the stress of everyday life. Often that can happen by breaking the social norm of not being mean to people, not engaging in civil inattention (Goffman, 1963; Sharon and Koops, 2021). Simultaneously, the discussions also highlighted the idea that shaming groups can improve a person’s attitude towards their own lives, creating a sense of gratitude that stems from downwards social comparison.
When discussing the type of shaming – is it reintegrative or disintegrative or something else at core? – opinions varied. One interviewee was of the opinion that the nature of shaming in Facebook groups is rather reintegrative, as in many groups the shaming serves a purpose of giving advice and pointing out mistakes made. Considering that the shamees are usually not present in this shared moment, this seems implausible. But as a self-reflexive tool for the community of shamers, it can be the basis of behaviour-correction or base knowledge for dominant tastes and cultural literacy. Disintegrative shaming was mainly exemplified by the shaming of group members – if someone is being homophobic, racist, or otherwise discriminates against others in the group (i.e., breaking the norms of LeftBook), they will be expelled from the group.
While shaming is usually an activity that centers around the actions of others, recreational online shaming is much more about the self – me performing the act of shaming for entertainment value, to belong in a group. Members of shaming groups would not engage in these practices in their (semi)public profiles, as it would bring condemnation and getting shamed themselves. In a sense, they probably perceive their actions as gossiping or even bullying, not shaming.
Conclusion
In this article, we have explored some aspects of Facebook shaming groups that revolve around recreational shaming and sanctioning – humour-based playful collective shamings that often take place via online platforms, motivated mainly by social belonging needs and entertainment gratifications. Such shamings can function as reintegrative (shame-correct-forgive) or disintegrative (shame-stigmatise-expel) social sanctioning (Braithwaite, 1989), but also satisfy the shamers’ needs of belonging and socialising. Furthermore, as we discovered in our study, recreational shaming is used as self-reflexive tool to increase one’s cultural literacies and understand dominant tastes and preferences.
At the core, we could ask if the practices described even fit under the concept of shaming. After all, the shamees are usually unaware of the attention and thus they are not being socially sanctioned. We argue that boyd’s (2010) concept of networked publics still holds its potential, allowing all published and shared material to persist, be replicable, searchable and scalable (boyd, 2010) and the increasing efficiency of search engines and social networks makes it a question of when people become aware of the shaming, not if. Refracted publics can be ‘off the radar’, but also register ‘on the radar’, whilst interpreted as something else altogether (Abidin, 2021) and recreational shaming fits the latter description as well. Often framed as just a joke, recreational shaming is a new form of entertainment that takes place in the short form of participation, for example, likes and comments. Being unable to grasp the scale of collective actions, the norm of ephemeral content (Abidin, 2021) and not reflecting on the cumulative effect of tiny communicative actions can spiral the scope of sanctioning out of control (Solove, 2007).
Importantly, we move away from the quantitative perspective (‘most do not even find out about 30 000 people mocking them!’) towards the qualitative (‘but some do and it can break them’). The potential for the anonymous mockery to turn into a fixated mass-shaming of specific people is definitely there. And in a way, not being aware of the fact that you are – yes, in an often sloppily anonymised mode – the target of recreational shaming, is even worse. It is a metaphorical unexploded informational land mine, waiting for the discoverability condition of refracted publics (Abidin, 2021) to unfold, to be discovered and stumbled upon.
But indeed, with the evolution from traditional shaming to recreational online shaming, the focus has shifted from the ‘offender’ who is being shamed, in two directions – partly to the shamer (performing the shaming for entertainment and belonging), and partly to shaming a type or group of people, their actions and tastes. The practice of shaming anonymised strangers in Facebook groups still contributes to norm contestation, that is, what is considered to be normal, desirable, despisable, etc. for the members of the group. This was exemplified by the aspect of test-shaming by the members – wanting to make sure their own behaviour and tastes are socially acceptable, they first test-shame someone else. If we deem this phenomenon something else, for example, ‘just’ ridicule or mockery, then the focus of contesting social norms would be less in focus and the practice could be disregarded as frivolous entertainment. After all, one of the main purposes of shaming is to ensure that people conform to social norms by setting an example of what society does and does not accept.
Recreational shaming groups of Facebook can focus on objects, rituals, communities, people’s behaviour, skills or bodies and choices about those bodies. We distinguished three spheres of recreational shaming that ‘frame the shame’: sphere of widely accepted socio-cultural norms and serious shaming of people who have not followed these norms; sphere of subjective preferences and perceptions where we can see clashes over style/taste, cultural literacy and skill gaps; and sphere of highly encoded in-group meta-jokes, where shaming functions as a cultural commentary and pure entertainment.
Shaming groups are mostly private to a certain degree, forming a ‘magic circle’ (Salen Tekinbaş and Zimmerman, 2004) that creates an enclave inside everyday life where different reality forms, a reality where rampant continuous shaming of people is acceptable. Contradictory or disputing voices are muted by excluding them from the group, meaning that the content is visible to the group’s homogeneous members, further strengthening an echo chamber effect (Jamieson and Cappella, 2008), an example of silosociality (Abidin, 2021). The concept of ‘private group’ is of course disputable with spaces of networked publics (Papacharissi, 2016) that have, for example, 150 000 members who gained access by clicking ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on some pre-screening questions and hundreds of tag-groups that are connected via these masses.
Despite thousands of members, the groups operate in almost cult-like secrecy (Greig, 2019), as the act of shaming someone without their knowledge of it goes against the generally accepted norm of ‘do not gossip’. But very much like gossip, recreational online shaming is a ‘guilty pleasure’ for many. There is irony to recreational shaming – members of the groups understand that shaming other people for fun might not be accepted by others. Therefore, in fear of other people’s condemnation, a safe haven for shaming is created. However, when in violation of the group’s rules and norms, the members might find themselves the target of shaming as a plot twist. Practices of reintegrative or disintegrative shaming take place where the person is made aware of their mistakes and either muted or banned from the group.
Various shaming practices have become embedded in people’s media uses, usually beginning as a Bakhtinian carnivalistic sense of the world, but soon normalised and internalised as forms of accepted social practices and structures. Some have argued that we have entered a ‘post-shame society’ (Wodak, 2019; Loeffler and Versteeg, 2018) and the business-as-usual recreational shaming practices might have an impact on its ascent and contribute to the scope and spread of online shaming. Indeed, we have focused on this specific phenomenon because it is easy to discard ‘just for laughs’ practices, as frivolous and insignificant. We stress that macro-societal changes can slither in under the cloak of ephemeral communication, under the radar silosocial refracted publics (Abidin, 2021). When people act in large groups, feeling separated by screens and thus somewhat anonymous, their agency is diluted, and even attributed to the technology and recreational shaming as a shameful practice can evolve into a societal shift.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
