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- I love it when you pretentious types get it.

It shows how much of a fuckin' asshole that you really are.

- Now you have no friends on our side either,

because you're a stupid fuckin' cunt.

So I hope you kill yourself.

- [Taylor] I wonder what her blood looks like.

I'd take her blood on the streets,

then having to go to jail for a few years.

- I never heard that term cancel culture

until after I'd been cancelled.

- Hey bud, just want to give you a heads up

and warn you that your behavior

is probably going to end

in someone killing you and your wife and child.

You are scum.

Fuck you.

Fuck your wife.

Fuck that baby in the New York Times.

Fuck off forever.

Eat shit and die.

(soft music)

- [Monica] Imagine waking up one morning

with the whole world,

suddenly knowing your name, and talking about you.

Not because you cured a disease,

or saved your neighbor's house from burning down.

Everyone knows who you are,

because your mistake,

your secret, has now been made public.

- [Reporter] Monica, look over here!

- [Monica] Trust me, I know a little something about this.

- [Reporter] Monica, Monica!

Say something, Monica!

- In 1998, I lost my reputation,

and my dignity,

and I almost lost my life.

- If you are hazy on the Monica Lewinsky story, at 22,

she and President Clinton began a relationship

that very long story short ended

up with graphic details being made public.

- I was branded as a tramp,

tart,

slut,

whore,

bimbo.

Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure

to a publicly humiliated one worldwide.

- Monica said at one point today,

she is seeing a therapist over her addiction to sex,

and she's seeing a dietician

to overcome her addiction to food.

You know she could have solved both of these problems

just by keeping her mouth shut.

(audience laughing)

- [Monica] I was patient zero

of having a reputation completely destroyed

worldwide because of the internet.

And I would not be the last.

As the internet grew and changed.

- You make a profile, by answering some questions.

- [Monica] I saw it become a breeding ground for outrage.

- [Reporter] We live in an outrage culture.

- [Monica] And ridicule.

- Shit.

- [Reporter] Threat from a woman who sparked a Twitter backlash.

- [Monica] Whether it was pile-ons.

- [Reporter] Judge and juries on social media

began weighing in.

- [Monica] Hateful troll mobs.

- The video sparking outrage on Twitter.

- So mean.

- [Monica] Or cyber harassment.

- Men going after women in really hostile, aggressive ways.

- Cyber bullying has tripled in the past year.

- [Monica] Our culture was drowning in something.

- Shame.

Shame,

shame,

shame.

- [Monica] And I wanted to understand why.

(upbeat piano music)

- [Monica] So I teamed up with filmmaker, Max Joseph,

who knows a thing or two

about documenting internet phenomena.

And together,

we decided to get to the bottom

of this Renaissance of public shaming.

- Okay, today is the day

I am finally leaving to go film this documentary.

- [Monica] We talked to the thought leaders.

- I'm here because I wrote a book about public shaming.

- I'm asked about cancel culture probably every day.

- [Max] We talked to the experts.

- There's something about social media

that you can get a flash mob of outrage

against somebody in seconds.

- There is a self-censoring effect, a chilling effect.

Even if you're witnessing somebody else become the target.

- The outrage, the bullying.

We are operating at our lowest level

as a species right now.

- Shaming culture.

- I think we've gone way too far.

- [Reporter] So what are the consequences?

- [Monica] How did we get here?

- [Reporter] Celebrities sex taping...

- [Max] Where is it leading us?

- [Commentator] You hit one of those trip wires,

the whole world is gonna blow up.

- [Monica] And where the fuck are we going?

(tense piano music)

(birds chirping)

- [Max] Well, let me show you where we're gonna do this.

- [Jon] Wow, look at this.

- [Max] Yeah.

We pulled out all the stops for you, Jon.

Are you ready to talk all about shame?

- [Jon] Sure, we could do that.

- [Max] Jon Ronson is an author, a journalist,

a podcaster, a screenwriter.

- And I'm here because I wrote a book about public shaming,

called, So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

- [Max] The book was released in 2015

and received a fair amount of attention.

- For a little while I became like Mister Shame,

like people would call on me

to adjudicate shaming situations

like does this person deserve their shame?

I didn't want to be that person for a bunch of reasons.

One reason is that if I've learned anything from this,

I've learned that each individual story

is very nuanced.

There's severities of transgression.

There's the type of world that the transgressor comes from.

They tend to be people who have been deemed

representative of something that's wrong with society.

And the fact is sometimes they are,

and sometimes they're not.

I think it's just,

it's really important to differentiate between, you know,

who is the person being shamed and what have they done?

- Hi, my name is Matt Colvin.

I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee,

and I'm known for

my article in the New York Times about having

17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer.

- It's a story that has gone viral.

A Hixson man purchased 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer.

- It's a story that is dominating national headlines,

after the New York Times wrote about Matt Colvin,

stockpiling goods amid the coronavirus outbreak.

(foregin press non English) - Matt Colvin.

(foregin press non English) - Matt Colvin.

- [Max] Matt Colvin experienced

one of the biggest shamings of 2020.

- If you are selling hand sanitizer for $200,

shame on you. - Who is doing that?

- Shame on you.

- [Max] Pretty much the world over felt justified

in calling him an asshole.

♪ Matt Colvin, you're an asshole ♪

- Hey Max, how's it going?

- [Max] Whatever he was,

how did this guy working out of his garage in Chattanooga?

- This is where the New York Times

photos were done and everything.

- [Max] Become a magnet for worldwide shame?

- In early 2020,

I was the owner of a thriving E-commerce business,

selling things on Amazon.

A lot of times it's a third-party seller

who Amazon is allowing to use their platform.

I sold everything from bird seed to toys, dolls,

going to stores like Ross and Walmart

and finding things that were discontinued

or in short supply,

that people were willing to pay

a little bit more for on Amazon

and making my living off of that.

This patch here is from the time

that I spent in the military.

It's got Iraq and Afghanistan.

I joined the military after 9/11.

It almost felt like a civic duty.

I saw a lot of death, doom, and destruction,

and for my mental and personal safety,

I needed to get out of that environment.

Being able to work around

some of the physical and mental issues

that come and go.

Selling on Amazon with Amazon handling

the fulfillment for things gave me that flexibility.

- [Max] And how did you start getting into hand sanitizer?

- To talk about the hand sanitizer,

you want to go back to February.

- [News Reporter] We only have about a dozen cases

that have been diagnosed in the United States.

Most of those in travelers from China and the flow...

- [Matt] I had heard about the coronavirus.

It seemed like something that was remote

and happening in China.

And I didn't see it gaining a foothold here.

I tracked things that were trending

and hand sanitizer was starting to be a thing.

I bought several thousand bottles from Dollar Tree.

And then from driving around.

I was selling my stuff at higher than market pricing,

but I was never the highest price.

Amazon has conditioned people that shipping is free.

It's not free to the small business,

especially if you're shipping a hazmat substance

like the hand sanitizer that has to be sent a certain way.

So the prices that were being charged

were not something that is indefensible, in my mind.

- [News Reporter] Amazon says

it's blocking or removing thousands of offers

where bad actors are attempting to artificially raise prices

on basic need products during a global health crisis.

- Amazon shut those listings down,

said that my pricing was too high,

while Amazon at the same time

was massively inflating their own prices.

The New York Times was looking to talk to sellers

that had been shut down on Amazon.

I've always tried to advocate for other sellers

and this looked like a way for me to be able to do that.

They asked a lot of questions about the inventory.

In the photos wanted me to look pissed.

The whole article was coached

in that Amazon's being this big bully,

and we're gonna expose them for that.

But that's not what it turned out to be.

(phone buzzing)

When the story came out,

we were in bed and my phone was going crazy.

And then I read the article, and I understood.

March 1st, the day after

the first death from Coronavirus in the US,

Matt Colvin went out and started buying

hand sanitizer like an asshole.

I was horrified.

It said I was selling a single bottle for $70,

but that was a pack of multiple bottles.

Didn't matter.

I was just getting bombarded.

There was a certain level of glee.

The hate if it was even possible,

just got ramped up even higher.

- [News Reporter] Matt Colvin bought nearly 18,000 bottles

of hand sanitizer,

while many are still searching to find even one.

For Matt Coleman, a pandemic meant an opportunity.

- [Max] Was Matt's public shaming anything new?

- [Monica] Or was it just a new version

of something we've always done?

- So there's this extraordinary history

of public humiliation.

- [Monica] Tiffany Watt Smith is a cultural historian

at Queen Mary University of London.

- In our distant past,

this is still true of many communities today,

we were living in very small groups of people,

and it was very important that everyone kind of pulled

together and we're playing by the same rules and

things are shared equally,

and no one is hoarding anything.

These kind of societies

punish very quickly and very severely

anyone who is trying to take more than their fair share,

anyone who sort of thinks

that they don't have to abide by the rules.

And societies across the ages

have this kind of this strange process

of ritualized public humiliation.

- [Narrator] For many of our students,

this is the lesson you've been waiting for.

- [Max] In the beginning,

there was shame.

Swiftly followed by banishment.

In China, they put you in a cage

and leave you at the gates to the city.

In ancient Mediterranean cultures,

they'd shave your head and burn off all your body hair.

(sizzling) ♪ Yeah ♪

- [Matt] In ancient Greece,

citizens could vote you off the island

and you couldn't come back for 10 years.

They voted with these shards of pottery called ostraka,

hence ostracizing.

(bell rings)

♪ Gonna wash my hands ♪

- [Max] Tarring and feathering first appeared

in 12th century England,

an instant classic.

There was also the bride's muzzle, the scolds bridle,

the drunkards cloak, and the cucking stool.

But it was the early 1300's

that witnessed the emergence of what would become

everyone's favorite public shaming device, the pillory.

- It was a kind of wooden contraption,

and you'd put your arms and your head

kind of through this contraption,

and that would be fixed in place.

And you would be made to kind of parade

to the site of the pillory.

And those parades were vicious.

People would shout abuse,

hurl things at you.

There are examples of people who died

on their way to the pillory.

This is a person who is suffering

because they have done something wrong,

and we have to punish them in order to tell everyone else

not to do the same thing.

- Some people had actually found my home address.

In my head, I was convinced that everything

that I've read that was negative

was about to actually happen.

We went and stayed in an Airbnb.

I'm glad that we did because about 11 o'clock that night,

someone showed up and started banging on the door.

I purchased a small handgun,

because I was that concerned for our family's safety.

- Just don't buy up all the guns

like you did the sanitizer man.

- The fact that somebody actually recognized who I was,

that shook me.

Some of the items that I sold,

I feel like I did get caught up

and didn't take everything into account

and did make a mistake with how high my pricing was.

And it costs me in a big way.

The economic impact from this has been substantial.

We're dipping into our emergency funds

and don't really have a way out.

- Someone said to me once,

Twitter purports to hate tabloids,

but acts exactly like a tabloid, you know,

ridding the story of nuance, context.

Just treating somebody as this,

as this one monolithic aspect of their personality.

I mean, yeah,

British tabloids were tearing people to shreds

since the dawn of the printing press.

- [Monica] The printing revolution

was a big leap for civilization,

for literacy, for culture, for the spread of knowledge,

but it was also the heir to the pillory.

- We go from the stocks and the pillories to the tabloids.

They take no prisoners

when it comes to the spectacle of public shaming.

They'd make this link between the sense

that we enjoy seeing people

exposed and punished in the papers,

and the sense that we're willing to pay for it.

- [Monica] Technology had taken our love of shame

out of the town square and put it onto the newsstand.

And with that, humiliation had been monetized.

Fast forward to the 1970's when Rupert Murdoch

brought his wildly successful tabloid formula to America,

where capitalism found a million new ways to distribute it.

It was the beginning of a blending and bleeding

of supermarket tabloid culture

into every form of media.

- [News Reporter] Coming up on E-news, a Week in Review,

celebrities and their sex lives.

- Ratings for my show.

(cheering)

- When I started, I understood the media

might be interested in what I did,

but I was not aware of how overwhelming

that attention would become.

(camera shutters clicking)

- [News Reporter] It's been reported in the last few minutes

that Diana, Princess of Wales has been seriously injured

in a car crash in Paris.

- Now there is confirmation

that Diana, Princess of Wales, has died.

- [Reporter] French officials say the couple

were being chased by paparazzi.

- [Monica] Diana's death could have been

a catalyst for change,

an indictment of this culture of humiliation,

but it wasn't.

(somber music)

And less than five months later,

I would personally come to understand the price of shame.

- The vote is just in,

an overwhelming vote

in the House of Representatives

as a whole,

to release the details of the Ken Starr report.

- We're told they're going to put this on the internet.

I think what is going to be stunning to people,

is how graphic some of it is going to be.

- [Monica] Public humiliation wasn't new,

but public shaming on the internet was a whole new thing.

(modem connection beeping)

- [News Reporter] It was a star-filled day for the internet

with some websites getting 20 times the visits

of a normal day.

So many people tried to reach the congressional websites

to read the Starr Report,

those sites were shut down by the overload.

- [Monica] There was no handbook on what to do,

being publicly shamed on the internet.

I was mortified.

I couldn't draw a border around how many people knew,

how many people were reveling in my shame,

and the image of people laughing,

proliferated like stars in the night sky,

as it gets darker and darker.

- Monica was a young tramp.

- [Monica] The internet allowed anyone, anywhere,

to instantly read about my shaming,

and to take part in it as well.

- When someone is just a name on a screen

with some of their text,

as well as maybe a stranger you've never met,

that is not enough information for our human brains

to fully perceive them as a human.

- [Max] Doctor Helen Weng is both a neuroscientist

and a psychologist.

She has spent the last decade studying

how our brains evolved to process emotions.

- So one quick route that our brain

understands the mental states of others,

is viewing people's faces and body language.

And our brains process this information very, very quickly.

If we don't have access to that information

through the internet,

then it's harder for us to even think about

what this person might be thinking or feeling.

We need all of those inputs to fully understand

that someone is a full human being with their own feelings.

- [Matt] All it takes is one mention of price gouging.

And next thing you know,

I'm going down the rabbit hole of

reading my own press.

There's a part of me that's searching for an answer

to your question of am I really that guy?

- [Max] In an election year,

where there was also a once in a century pandemic,

the New York Times article on Matt Colvin

got the attention of the world.

- People love to say, oh, it's the internet.

It's not real,

so I am not responsible for dehumanizing the person,

the internet is.

The internet is there,

but we are responsible for the ways

in which we dehumanize each other.

- [Monica] Roxane Gay is a writer, professor, editor,

and cultural commentator.

She's won the Eisner award, a Guggenheim fellowship,

the Penn Freedom to Write Award,

and she's a New York Times bestselling author.

She's also a big deal on social media.

- I think social media is a good idea,

but people ruin everything.

It's a very toxic atmosphere.

It's an atmosphere where the more marginalized you are,

the more harassment you're going to receive for existing,

and expressing thoughts and opinions.

It's a medium now where people are very punitive.

There is no tolerance for mistakes or nuance.

It's really unfortunate to see

how the platform has devolved, it used to be really great.

I loved that you were able to connect with people

you would never have the opportunity to meet,

and expect nothing in return, but sometimes get a response.

And that's just really cool.

It's just like a cocktail party

you can go to in your pajamas.

I think social media has really allowed

wallflowers to shine.

- The first, maybe four years of Twitter,

between about 2008 and 2012, it was kind of utopian.

- You could have conversations and you could be left alone.

- People were curious about each other.

- And nobody would be like, oh,

it's time to end you because you disagree with me.

- The change started around 2012.

We realized that when people outside of our circle

transgressed, we could do something about it.

I remember there was a heavily pregnant woman

who tried to cancel her membership to LA Fitness.

LA Fitness wouldn't let her cancel her membership,

so she went on Twitter and complained.

(Twiter bird tweet)

(bell ringing)

We got them, we got LA fitness.

We just piled on LA fitness and we got them.

We hit them with a weapon

that we understood and they didn't,

which was the social media shaming.

It was that, whoa,

we've got all this new power.

- For most of modern history,

we've seen information coming to us from people in power,

from authority figures, from politicians.

The information only goes in one direction.

- [Max] Aja Romano is a

writer and journalist,

whose expertise

is internet culture.

- But now because of social media,

you have people without power

using their collective voice to speak back.

- [Man] I am leading a Twitter revolution.

- [Reporter] You're giving Facebook

a lot of credit for this.

- [Wael] I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day

and thank him.

- I think we see public shaming

being used for good all the time.

Like a boycott, having a positive result.

- [Protester] Whose streets?

- [Crowd] Our streets!

- [Protester] Whose streets?

- [Crowd] Our streets!

- [Monica] That long predates cancel culture.

- [News Reporter] Protests held

at every sea park around the world.

- There are things that happen in this world

that are outrageous.

- [Student] I go to UVA!

- Stop (beep) fighting.

- You (beep) racists!

- There's a lot of resentment and it's reasonable.

- [Protester] Black lives they matter where?

- [Crowd] Black lives they matter here!

- People are so unseenand so unheard,

and they've been unrepresented for so long,

and you see something done about it.

That is incredibly satisfying.

- [News Reporter] President Joe Biden has revoked

the permit needed to build the Keystone XL pipeline.

- [News Reporter] Social media posts

calling to stop Asian hate.

- [News Reporter] In city after city around the world.

- [News Reporter] Watershed moment for the #MeToo movement.

Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 23 years.

- [News Reporter] The NFL's Washington Redskins

are changing the team name

and the team's Native American logo.

Proof today that activism matters.

- And I think what started to happen around that point

was that we fell in love with this new power too much,

that our standards began to slip.

And instead of getting powerful corporations

who had committed transgressions with actual victims,

we started getting people for, who had misspoken.

- [Monica] In this picture, Lindsay can be seen

flipping off the Tomb of the Unknowns.

- [Woman] And Kim Kardashian is facing backlash

after flying her family and friends

to a private island to...

- [Reporter] Mothers all over are being shamed

for their parenting decisions.

- Because we were too in love with this new power.

So a day without a shaming, felt like a day, you know,

picking fingernails and treading water,

that it felt weird and empty

when there wasn't somebody who had done something wrong

that we could get.

And that's where we started disproportionately

shaming people who didn't deserve it.

- [News Reporter] It's the viral encounter

that ignited a social media powder keg.

But now new footage showing there were other tensions

before that incident.

- Or we just find out that we got it wrong.

They hadn't done the thing

that we'd all thought they'd done.

(birds singing)

- I'm from San Diego.

I love having San Diego as a first, you know,

part of the title of my job,

San Diego Gas and Electric Locator.

I like that.

That sounds like somebody.

When I landed the job at SDGE,

it felt like my proudest professional achievement.

When she told me over the phone, she said,

it's gonna start at 41.05, is that okay, she asked me.

I put the phone down, okay?

Yeah, it's way more than okay.

And when I first told my oldest daughter about the job

and she was like, oh, so I guess

our Christmas presents will be upgraded this year,

which I thought was funny,

but it turned out to be true.

I knew who I was.

I was a locator for San Diego Gas and Electric,

and I was gonna do that till I retired.

- [News Reporter] George Floyd tomorrow

here in Minneapolis.

- [Emmanuel] It's early summer,

eight days past the George Floyd murder.

I filled out my time sheet

and I started heading home for the day.

That's when I come across a Black Lives Matter protest.

I travel east for over a mile, hand on the wheel,

window down, I got my hand resting on the door,

and I'm just doing a series of these,

just a fidgety habit I have.

It's just my hand tightens up sometimes

at the end of the day.

So I'm doing that,

when I'm approached by a motorist,

a balding, Caucasian in his mid 50's.

Pissed, pissed like I stole his dog.

He does this thing.

And he says, "You're gonna do this, asshole?

Really? You're going to do this?"

The light turns green.

He calls me a piece of shit, speeds away.

And that was it.

Couple hours later, I get a call

from one of my immediate supervisors.

He tells me there's been a photo of you in your work truck

posted on Twitter,

and the accusation is that you're doing

a white supremacist hand gesture

in front of a Black Lives Matter protest.

(dark music)

The higher ups have gotten wind of it.

They are taking it very serious.

The following Monday, I get a call.

We all gathered together in a conference room.

We haven't sat down 10 seconds when, before he says, well,

we've decided that there are too many holes in your story

and we're going to terminate you.

I asked him, what are these holes?

Let me fill them for you right now.

I got to the point where I raised both my arms and I say,

"You do see this, right?

You see the color of my skin, right?

So you see how preposterous it would be

for me to be a white supremacist when I'm not white myself.

Well, so now it's been determined, it's official.

I'm terminated.

- [Woman] If it wasn't so serious

I would bag on you so hard for all of this, it's funny.

- [Emmanuel] What's funny, go ahead, bag on me.

What's funny about it?

- [Woman] Everyone's like, oh, you're trying to battle

like the white supremacist system.

You're trying to battle this institutionalized racism.

And all it takes is a white dude

saying that this guy's a racist

for a Mexican dude to lose his job.

That's the irony of it.

- There was no punch line in this shit, no punch line.

- I never heard that term, cancel culture,

until after I'd been canceled.

First time I heard it,

this cancel culture stuff has got to go.

I had to look it up.

Like what is that?

- The origins of the term cancel culture

are a little nebulous.

You can trace back dating from 1991.

when the Wesley Snipes film "New Jack City" came out.

(upbeat music)

Basically there's a scene where Wesley Snipes

is breaking up with one of his girlfriends,

or mistresses, and he says-

- Cancel that bitch.

I'll buy another one.

- Right before the term, cancel culture, really takes off.

At the end of 2014, December, 2014,

you have an episode of Love and Hip Hop.

- I have a daughter.

- You what?

- We're all gonna be one big happy family.

- You're canceled.

You're canceled.

- It took off from there.

People started using it initially humorously.

- Finally, welcome to my caucasian home, come inside.

- Well that's over, it's canceled.

- And then it sort of.

(clicking) (gunshot)

(upbeat music)

♪ Check it out ♪

- I want to apologize to everybody.

- I want to apologize.

- I'm simply here to apologize.

- I'm just genuinely sorry.

I'm sorry.

- I'm sorry.

- I am so unbelievably sorry.

- And I'm really sorry.

- I beg for your forgiveness.

- I just call it consequence culture.

It's when people make missteps or mistakes and get caught,

and have to face the public court of opinion.

Does it happen sometimes happen to people who are innocent?

Yes, and just like with the judicial system,

we have to address that.

It just, it's not canceling.

There's consequences.

And sometimes the consequences

for sexually harassing women at your job

is to lose that job.

I'm sorry, but maybe you shouldn't have grabbed her ass.

- You say something offensive,

and then you're offended that people are offended.

I don't know what's wrong with you.

Stop saying offensive things.

Stop saying stupid things.

Stop saying racist things.

- [Max] Kara Swisher does a lot.

- All right, let's answer some questions

from the New York Times.

I'm Editor at Large, at New York magazine.

What do I think will come out

of these congressional hearings?

Nothing.

I do commentary for NBC.

They make the market,

and then they own the market.

And I do podcasts for Vox media.

I have a lot of content, I make a lot of content.

- [Max] She's also known as one of Silicon Valley's

most feared, but respected journalists.

- What would happen is for years,

people got to say these things without any price.

Other people who never got to talk

are sick and tired of listening to them,

and they're sick and tired of not having a voice too.

And so they're saying your voice on your elite platform

has dominated for so long,

and we don't want to listen to you anymore.

And we're gonna tell you why.

And they're suddenly like, I can't speak.

People in power do not willingly give up power.

You take it from them.

And that's what's happening right now.

So it's gonna be ugly for a while.

- The best use of call out culture for me

is to help marginalized people find a voice.

And it's not so coincidental at the same time,

we're finding our voices,

and calling out white supremacy and the patriarchy,

and ableism and homophobia and transphobia,

and all the isms,

that now we're being criticized,

and told that we're lacking reason

and we're lacking civility

and we are suppressing free speech and all that stuff.

I think that we can use it,

but we have to use it judiciously.

- [Monica] Loretta J Ross has been fighting

for human, civil, and women's reproductive rights,

her entire life,

and has long been a luminary in activist communities.

She's also a professor at Smith College,

where she teaches courses

on both intersectionality and white supremacy.

- I think call-outs are wonderful when they're used

to bring corporations into accountability,

to bring political figures who are unreachable

into accountability,

because then public shaming actually works.

But public shaming of people never is effective.

It doesn't really take into account

the humanity of the person being called out.

It doesn't set up any kind of opportunity

to actually achieve accountability.

It's a way of trying to hold people accountable,

theoretically,

but doing it in such a publicly shaming way

that you actually achieve another goal,

and that is to blow up somebody else's life.

- I think outrage is one of those things

that spreads very quickly

and all too often, and I include everyone in this,

we don't do any research.

We just sort of take this person at face value,

when they say this outrageous thing happened

and it just spreads.

- This guy who did this picture.

I think he either he wanted Twitter followers

or he wanted to be a part of the movement somehow,

but he kinda lost his venom early in the fight.

- We spoke to the man

who originally posted the picture on Twitter.

He has since deleted his account

and says he may have gotten spun up

about the interaction and misinterpreted it.

- That was a punch in the gut, another one,

but this couple who re-posted it,

recontacted SDGE,

they never did, like blew the picture up,

changed the filter so you could see my face more.

Time is compounding the

uncomfortable uneasiness uncertainty

that I'm feeling, because now I'm running out of money.

Right? I had some savings.

I had a 401k, but it's depleting.

I've tried to downsize, get a smaller place.

And without a job who rents to you?

Nobody.

(birds chirping)

- [Jon] The problem with social media justice

is that we really want to do the right thing.

We really want to right wrongs,

and be moral, good, ethical, empathetic people.

But maybe because we want that so much,

sometimes it gets a little bit dizzying and we, you know,

tear somebody to shreds on no evidence,

not because we're cruel and horrible,

but because we want to do the right thing,

we want to do something good.

- We used to have zap squads where we'd go around

and what would probably now be called doxing,

people who were rapists,

who couldn't be brought to account

in the criminal justice system

and we'd out them in the community,

like this person is a rapist, don't hire them,

that kind of thing.

Lawyers used to get really nervous

around our tactics back then.

We didn't pay any attention.

We took a lot of joy out of that.

Almost,

and that's why I tend to describe

the whole call-out culture,

having more than a tinge of sadism in it,

because I do remember the joy of calling out people.

I cringe thinking about

how much satisfaction I got out of that.

- There are studies that show that dopamine is released

when we see a transgressor being punished.

You see now, I think it's possible

that we just are chasing

that kind of hit that we get

when we see someone that we've perceived to be a wrongdoer,

get that kind of comeuppance.

- People talk a lot about moral outrage.

They talk about injustice.

You know what they're not really talking about

is the pleasure.

They're not talking about why we might

get something from this experience

that is more than morality,

but is actually just about fun.

You know, why do we want to be spectators

of these terrible pile-ons?

Perhaps the answer is what I study, which is Schadenfreude.

- [Max] Tiffany Watt Smith

is also one of the world's leading experts

in Schadenfreude.

- Schaden, from damage, Freude, from joy, Schadenfreude.

It's okay.

The pleasure that you get

in seeing someone else's misfortune.

We feel a lot of Schadenfreude around envy.

You know, when all these people who are better than us

and better looking than us and richer than us,

and they get taken down a peg or two,

and that sort of makes us feel good in that moment.

We see these extraordinary

curated images of people's lives.

And of course, we compare ourselves to them

and we feel like losers.

And of course,

a community of losers is exactly the kind of community

that wants that hit of Schadenfreude,

that wants to feel that ersatz moment of superiority.

(shouting)

(rock music)

There were these Dutch psychologists

and they got football fans to allow their faces

to be rigged up with electromyography pads.

And they show these football fans,

videos of their own team scoring a goal.

And as you'd expect,

everyone was pleased and smiled and so on.

And then they showed them videos

of their arch rival missing goals.

(crowd cheering)

At those videos, that's when they smiled most broadly,

and most quickly,

it wasn't seeing their own teams score a goal,

it was seeing their rivals miss a goal.

(crowd cheering)

What that experiment shows

is that we enjoy seeing other people fail

more than we enjoy winning ourselves.

- [Max] I don't know much about European soccer rivalries,

but we've got a rivalry here in the US

that's been heating up for decades.

(cheering and applause)

- [Crowd] U-S-A!

- Freedom!

- What's being found over and over again

is that Schadenfreude is at its most intense

when we are divided into rival tribes.

And that's a very, very dangerous place

for a society to be in.

(dog barking)

- My husband is a Republican.

My brother's incredibly conservative.

I am incredibly liberal.

And somehow we learn how to coexist.

Even though you are at political ends of the spectrum,

they're still your friends and family,

and they make fun of you,

and just sort of rip on you.

It's like this sort of a blue-collar thing.

When people give it to me, I can dish it right back,

and it's just, it's funny.

- How'd you get the camera, I thought he was the director.

- Shut up.

- I wanted to be in politics, helping women electeds.

I had almost 10 years working

for these amazing female elected officials.

And through that,

I was able to plan my next step.

I had a passion for cancer advocacy.

My father died at a very young age from throat cancer.

I wanted to work in the field,

advocating for cancer patients trying to get funding.

And I did that.

I used Facebook and my Facebook was mostly my kids.

My settings I have it set to private.

Mostly everybody was someone I knew

or had some sort of interaction with.

I didn't have any strangers on my page,

which makes all of this more strange.

Okay, I did.

Sorry, someone told me I could-

That morning that the incident happened,

the only reason why I was even on social media,

because I was trying to source toilet paper

from mommy groups.

As I go on social media,

I see all these articles about the disbelief

that there was a need for ventilators in New York state.

And I got annoyed.

And so I posted the articles,

and I just wrote,

(keyboard keys clicking)

(digital chime)

(digital chime)

(keyboard keys clicking)

(digital chime)

and I see, you know,

a friend says "this isn't real."

Like fine, if you don't think it's real,

don't go to the hospital.

(keyboard keys clicking)

(digital chime)

And then my kids were clamoring at the door.

I went outside for a little bit.

And when I came back, everything was just

lit up.

I was tagged by someone who was in my Facebook friends.

He had given this commentary

to someone who's a public figure.

My friends were telling me it's Michael Caputo,

who's going after you and

then I got scared.

- [Caputo] People like you,

who sit here and take uncorroborated testimony.

- I knew how vicious he could be.

- Decent man, and ruin him because it gets you ratings.

Enough of that.

- I knew he had thousands of followers.

Then I start to get calls and I'm getting text messages

from people I don't know,

and it's like literally my whole world is vibrating.

I issue an apology right away.

But the frenzy just kept growing.

I would see people making comments

saying she has a bot operation on her.

Michael Caputo kept tagging my employer.

And then our newspaper did a story saying I was fired.

And that's how I found out I was fired.

I was at the bottom of this avalanche,

except I didn't know I was in an avalanche,

and I was immediately so humiliated.

I went to a dark place.

I just became this comedic thing on the internet.

And people were just tearing me apart.

- [Max] Laura made a bad joke that offended a lot of people,

but how much of that outrage was even real?

- So in the earlier days of organized online hate mobs,

we saw the use of fake accounts and bots.

- [Monica] Yasmin Green heads up

research and development at Jigsaw,

which is an independent unit within Google,

dedicated to solving toxicity on the internet.

- Then we started to see fake accounts

with a little bit of investment in them,

you know a lot of photos.

They had presence on different platforms.

The major platforms actually got quite good at spotting

when there was fake accounts,

or when somebody was operating in a different country

to the one they were claiming to be.

The way this is evolved is,

kind of worries me for our ability to be able to detect it.

And that is because the new innovation is,

and I saw this in the troll farms in the Philippines,

is that rather than trying to buy fake accounts,

or create fake accounts,

they were starting to rent the accounts of real people.

And once either you convince people

to do this type of thing in their own name,

you understand that this is a threat that is not going away.

- Two, three days later,

I think it's gonna die down.

Then I get a call from a friend

that says you were on Sean Hannity last night.

I said, oh great.

- So many villains to choose from sadly

in the midst of a national emergency.

But well, there are two hospital executives

hoping that Donald Trump's supporters

get infected with coronavirus.

- One exec wrote, quoting here,

Trump supporters need to pledge

to give up their ventilators for someone else.

- First of all,

the fact that hospital executives

are wishing an illness on anyone.

- [Laura] The story starts to proliferate

into larger media markets.

- A high ranking Roswell Park employee has been fired

following negative comments

that the person made on social media about supporters.

- That was the story that got regurgitated

into all the national media outlets.

The Hill ran that story.

(digital chimes)

And then that same article was then regurgitated

and bastardized in these alt-right websites.

They got a lot of play.

The commentary

on the page, I mean, they were getting

thousands of comments on their article.

I feel like I was just clickbait.

- Trolling women is big business on the internet.

I mean, there's an incredible amount of profit

to be made from the distortion and control

of people's lives.

- [Max] Safiya Noble is a Professor

of African-American and Gender Studies at UCLA,

a board member of the cyber civil rights initiative,

and the author of Algorithms of Oppression.

- Clicking on those stories, reading those stories

is a money generator for those platforms.

And the more they can spin that story

in a shameful, degrading, titillating way,

the more money they're gonna make.

So we want to always remember

that across all internet platforms

engagement is the business model.

If the engagement is around misogyny,

that's just as profitable

as if the engagement is around education

or some other type of entertainment.

This is the big money-making model of the internet.

(soft music)

(birds chirping)

- [Max] Tristan Harris used to work at Google,

but then he had a crisis of faith, left the company,

and started the Center for Humane Technology.

The Atlantic once called him

the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.

If someone could tell us how big tech

is making money off of our humiliation, it's him.

- So, you know,

how does the business model relate to these problems?

Well, how much have you paid

for your Facebook account recently?

Or Twitter?

Well, if you haven't paid anything,

then what are they making $500 billion of market value

and their stock price from?

Well, they're selling human attention,

because the business model is advertising,

but it's not just that

they want to show you a rectangle with an ad.

To get you to see those ads,

it means they have to get your attention.

So one study from NYU found

that for every word of moral outrage,

negative, moral emotions, that you added to a tweet,

it's horrible, it's a disgrace, it's an abomination,

it increased the retweet rate by 13%.

It's not like at Twitter there's just Jack Dorsey,

sitting at the top,

thinking that tweet, I'll promote that tweet over there.

And this that's a good one,

I'll promote that tweet over there.

In fact, the reason these tech companies are so profitable,

is that a machine is choosing

which tweets to show at the very top of the list.

If you think about you driving down the highway,

and you had a computer that was like, okay,

what does this person want?

And we're gonna determine that

based on what their eyes look at.

Well, when you drive down a highway,

suddenly there's a big car crash

and your eye just like stares

at this car crash as you go by,

the computer says, oh, I know this person wants car crashes.

And they start feeding you car crash

after car crash after car crash.

And that's what the Twitter algorithm is like.

(upbeat orchestral music)

- One of the things we want to understand

is that the way most people

think of algorithms or kind of AI systems,

is most people think of these

as being just neutral and objective.

But you see what they're interested in

is drawing eyeballs to material in their platforms.

(uptempo orchestral music)

- They kind of created this Frankenstein.

All it knows is, oh, if that gets attention,

then my job is to elevate it,

make sure everyone sees that thing.

I often think about being a kid

on the playgrounds, you know,

when you see the two kids

kind of just barely start to disagree with each other,

and some third kid shows up and goes,

fight, fight, fight, fight.

Well, that's like Twitter.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- The algorithmic bias is really about

looking for titillating kinds of content.

And much of that is racist,

it's sexist, it's inflammatory.

(dramatic orchestral music)

And it's also a big business.

- You think about outrage as an emotion.

It causes you to shut down

and act more reactively and impulsively.

And usually in that reactive action,

we're not gonna like yell at the plant in our room,

we're gonna hit the button that's available

to show other people why we're right.

- And the more that people look at it and click on it,

the more those companies make.

- I say why I'm angry, I'm contributing more content.

You didn't have to pay me for that.

So I'm a useful idiot in a scam

to create more attention for everyone else.

(dramatic orchestral music)

You run that algorithm for three to 10 years,

and you let society run through that washing machine.

That dystopia is exactly the world that we live in now.

We're more profitable if we're addicted, outraged,

irritable, disinformed, and polarized,

than if we're a human being.

(dramatic orchestral music)

(water burbles)

- Okay, so there are a couple of things

that we have to understand.

When you pick up your phone, when you log on,

it's not just a transaction,

you're actually going somewhere.

And the place that you're going

is a powerful psychological space.

- [Max] Mary Aiken is one of the world's

leading experts in forensic cyber psychology.

She works with Interpol,

the European Cyber Crime Center,

and the United States government

to help track down cyber criminals around the world.

- Human behavior changes online.

There are powerful psychological drivers, or effects,

like the online disinhibition effect.

Online disinhibition is like inebriation,

or being drunk online.

It means that you do things online

that you wouldn't do in the real world.

As we're given opportunities to have platforms

where we can actively target people relentlessly,

what we've seen is decreasing levels of empathy

in students surveyed across the US,

and increasing levels of narcissism.

As we continue our journey with technology,

I think the most important thing

is that we remember what it is to be human.

If however, we see the rise of the narcissists

then we're going to

live in a very ugly society going forward.

- [Amy] Welcome to Democracy Now, democracynow.org.

I'm Amy Goodman.

Michael Caputo, a long-time Republican political operative,

and Trump ally was appointed last week

as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HHS.

- Michael Caputo, who managed the effort against me

was appointed to the White House.

- [Reporter] Michael Caputo has no health background,

no science background whatsoever,

but in April, the Trump White House

installed him as the top spokesperson

at the Department of Health and Human Services.

- Department of Health and Human Services'

new spokesperson repeatedly made racist comments

about Chinese people and claimed Democrats

wanted the coronavirus to kill thousands.

- His employer said, so what?

And he said, so what?

So what I said these things?

- A really bad,

and I think probably unexpected consequence

of the over use of public shaming as a weapon

is that some transgressors are mutated

to become impervious to shame.

- If you look at Darwinian principles

of survival of the fittest,

what we're looking at is survival of the shameless.

- Some trolls are misogynists, some are homophobes,

some are genuinely cruel.

The challenge is that you rarely know

which flavor of troll they are,

and which are going

to take it too far

and bring it off of the internet and into the world.

- [Taylor] I had applied to eight different

colleges and universities,

and I got a text message from my mom in my English class

in my senior year saying,

"I have one more school for you to apply to,

and it's American University."

And so I got to see American University's campus.

And I walked around the quad and I was able to see

myself there and to really think

like I could definitely just sit out on the grass

and just relax, like a college student.

And I applied to American,

and that ended up being my first choice.

As a black student at AU,

I was gonna put in a bunch of work

to try and make sure that the university

was a better place than the place that I came into.

I was Vice President for Student Advocates

for Native Communities.

I was involved in the Black Student Alliance.

- So much of who she is today

is who she was when she was growing up.

- When I was in elementary school,

I wanted to be an astronaut,

but I'm actually afraid of heights,

so that kind of went out the window.

- [Kim] We always were ready to prepare her

for understanding who she was.

- [Taylor] My dad's mom went to the March on Washington.

My grandmother did sit-ins with SNCC.

- Whether that meant understanding

her own family roots

or understanding the accomplishments

of people of color.

- I came from a long line of freedom fighters,

and that was what I really was interested in doing.

I became a member

of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated.

And I became the intercultural Greek Collective President.

By the time that I was a junior,

I was like, okay but like what's next?

And I decided that I needed to run

for Student Government President.

I remember stopping students

that were just walking on the way to class.

Hey, hold on a second.

Have you voted for Student Government President?

I'm running, please vote.

The odds were not in my favor, it looked like at first.

And the person's like.

- Taylor Dumpson. (crowd cheering)

- I don't have words for this.

I just,

I don't have any words.

And then I went home and I went to sleep,

and I woke up.

And when I was coming out of the train,

I was reading my phone,

and I had seen a message from one of my classmates,

who said, Taylor, I don't know if you've seen this yet,

but I just wanted to share it with you.

- [News Reporter] A still unidentified person

committed the on-campus hate crime,

stringing up bananas with nooses,

with the initials of the historically black sorority

Dumpson belongs to, and other racist messages.

- I remember going to the bathroom,

locking myself in the far stall, and I called my mom.

- At this point we have a number of outside investigators,

including the FBI, including the...

- [Taylor] I hadn't processed anything.

I was going into, okay, crisis mode.

How do I make sure that students are safe?

I didn't really give myself the space to feel.

It was like, everybody's looking to you to be president,

so you don't really have a chance to process

that this is targeting you.

- You know, when you see public shaming,

people are trying to shame them

for things that they've done.

But the harassment that is identity-based,

is bigotry in action.

And they're not the same thing.

When people are harassed for their identity,

that harassment sometimes ends in a noose.

It sometimes ends in a murder.

Whereas when someone is being publicly shamed

for a mistake that they've made,

they're generally gonna reap some repercussions,

and some of those repercussions are horrible,

but they're not going to lose their life at the end of it.

- [Loretta] We kept warning people

that these storm clouds were coming,

but we felt like Chicken Little,

because nobody was listening,

particularly with the elections of Bill Clinton,

and then the election of President Obama,

everybody thought that it was all over,

that we have turned the corner on

a dreadful history in America,

and we were gonna march forward into the 21st century.

And we saw how that turned out, didn't we?

- [Crowd] You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

- [Loretta] There's a white grievance culture

that's still out there resentful of the women's movement,

resentful of civil rights,

resentful of the fact that their power to dominate

everything in our society is being challenged

by these social movements.

(crowds yelling and chanting indistinctly)

- [Taylor] My mom had just dropped me off

at my apartment,

and she was like, "Taylor, you need to get some sleep."

I got an email from the Anti-Defamation League.

We would like to notify you about

an emerging online campaign targeting

Student Body President Taylor Dumpson.

Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website,

The Daily Stormer, is encouraging his followers

to troll Miss Dumpson and any related social media accounts.

Andrew Anglin runs a website called The Daily Stormer,

which is one of the most clicked on

white supremacist websites in the world.

He wrote the article and published that actually

on a section called Race War.

These comments that I saw initially

were underneath of his article,

but that was not where they stopped.

He really opened up Pandora's Box and you can't close that.

Those people left The Daily Stormer,

and continued to comment on any kind of post

where there's a comment section

that has something to do with me.

- [News Reporter] A hate-filled feeding frenzy

began when the website published her name,

photo, contact information, and social media accounts.

- [Man] He told his many, many followers to go get her.

- My heart jumped to my throat.

I started shaking.

I got up and I closed the blinds.

I turned the lights off.

I locked the doors.

I read the comments and I read the articles.

I looked at every single comment.

I've seen the N word, I've heard the N word in person.

But seeing in that way, people were gendering racial slurs.

So they weren't just calling me a nigger,

they were calling me a nigger agitator.

They weren't just calling me a nigger agitator,

they were calling me a Negress.

They weren't just calling me a Negress,

they were calling me a sheboon.

Sometimes people think of harassment

as one person saying a bunch of things.

But what happens when it's hundreds of people

saying one thing?

- Everyone is not equal on the internet.

People who are vulnerable are often made more vulnerable.

People who are powerful are often made even more powerful.

There are already so many ways

in which harms are enacted against people,

vulnerable people, people of color, trans people, women.

When you are fomenting hate or misognying on the internet,

you really don't have,

no one's gonna hold you accountable.

It's like the ultimate cover for crime.

- Initially I filed a police report,

but I'm sitting here right now I can't say that

I remember them following up too much on that.

They were very much like,

there's not much we can do for you.

It's like online.

I mean, it's not really crossing the line.

And I'm like, it's illegal to place a threat over the phone.

So like, I don't really understand

what you're talking about.

- [Max] The legal situation surrounding cyber harassment

in the United States is a bit nebulous.

So we went to talk to someone

who could demystify it for us.

- I've been described as a renegade lawyer,

as a social justice warrior,

as a complete asshole. (laughs)

- [Monica] Carrie Goldberg is one of the few lawyers

in the US that specializes

in defending victims of cyber harassment.

- It was the victim of a retaliatory ex-boyfriend,

and I couldn't find a lawyer who could help me.

And when I finally got to the other side of my crisis,

I stopped everything.

I left my very secure job at a non-profit,

and started this law firm.

Social media companies are the most malicious,

but untouchable actor when it comes to online harms.

We have no right to demand that they remove our content.

Even if they have policies,

there is no legal obligation

for them to enforce those policies.

Try to find anywhere on Facebook or Google,

where you have some sort of ability

to email or contact somebody.

- You don't really hear back from Facebook.

They just say, thank you.

If you feel like you're being harassed,

you can just block this person.

- Mark Zuckerberg has created a city

that has no police, has no firemen or firewomen.

They have no water department that works.

They have no electrical department that's regular,

but they collect all the rent for all of us that live there.

And every night they go, good luck.

- They won't take responsibility.

I think it's because of hubris.

I think it's because of laziness.

But most of all, I think it's because of section 230.

("Beethoven's Ninth Symphony")

(gun firing)

- [Max] Section 230 has been in the news a lot lately,

because everybody seems to have a problem with it,

but they just can't agree on how to fix it.

Section 230 is part of a law that says that tech companies

can't be sued for anything users post on their platforms.

But the thing is when it was passed in 1996,

it was actually a good thing.

Without having to worry about being sued,

plucky tech startups could innovate and create.

But now as online harms become an everyday reality,

they're being forced to grapple

with their broad immunity more and more.

- Mister Dorsey

from Twitter, the floor is yours.

- We acknowledged there's still concerns

around how we moderate content,

and specifically our use of section 230.

- I do think that we have responsibilities,

and it may make sense for there to be liability

for some of the content that is on the platform.

- I'm in media, if I get it wrong, I get sued.

Companies like Facebook or any of these internet companies

are not liable for anything.

Why do you think Facebook's so profitable?

Because they don't have to pay for cleaning things.

If you don't have to pay

for cleaning the river that you've polluted,

you could make a lot of money.

Over the last 20 years,

those companies have become the most wealthy,

omnipotent companies in the history of the universe.

You're a cheap date to these people.

They are the richest people in the history of Earth.

The top 10 richest people are all tech people, by the way.

- And yet we don't have the ability,

because of federal law, to hold them accountable,

if our life has been destroyed.

- We had a final assignment to create a wearable sculpture

that explains who we are.

I can see the physical toll,

my weight fluctuating,

probably like 105 pounds in that picture.

The next few months was me going to counseling,

me trying to figure out how to walk

on American University's campus,

while constantly being triggered

every single day that I'm there.

I was diagnosed with PTSD, depression, and anxiety.

- We need cyber civil rights, because we need civil rights.

We need to understand the way in which

what happens on the internet directly erodes

people's civil and human and sovereign rights.

(somber music)

- So, imagine you get a video

where someone has committed some transgression,

and then you see them being sort of pulled up for it,

or called out for it in some way,

and you get to feel pleased about that.

And then you see another video

kind of six months down the line

where that person has, you know, lost their job,

and they're incredibly depressed.

If you were to see that video of someone suffering

the terrible consequences

of what has befallen them six months earlier,

you might well think about the role

that you played in that whole experience.

- [Monica] There is actually a country in the world

that did reconsider their role in online harms.

But it took a tragedy to wake them up.

- [Woman] Big, old, tough Charlotte,

even big old opinionated, tough Charlotte,

can sometimes be punched down too.

You talking about depression is really admirable.

- [Man] It's weird, isn't it?

I would never have known that.

- [Man] In 2012, Charlotte was admitted

to hospital with depression

after she received a barrage of vicious comments on Twitter.

She posted a picture of herself

holding tablets with a comment,

hope this ends the misery.

- After a long and public struggle with depression,

television personality, Charlotte Dawson's life,

has ended tragically, with her body discovered this morning

at her Woolloomooloo home.

- A petition started in response to Charlotte's death.

Hundreds and thousands of people

said enough is enough.

This should not be happening.

Government needs to step in

and start regulating the internet.

- [Monica] Julie Inman Grant

is Australia's eSafety Commissioner.

- I'm essentially a regulator of social media,

and our goal is to keep all Australians safer

and to help them have more positive experiences online.

If a child in the US was being seriously cyber bullied,

and reported to Facebook or Instagram,

and it didn't come down, they wouldn't have any recourse.

So if a social media company

doesn't take down content

that we deem to be seriously harmful,

we can compel them to take them down

through a range of civil penalties, including fines.

- [Max] And Australia isn't the only country

that's passed legislation to curb online harms.

The UK, France, Germany and India have also passed acts

to protect their citizens on the internet,

giving us a bunch of examples of how we might reconcile

free speech with all those other civil rights.

But here in the US, we still have section 230.

(electric blower whirrs)

So if you want to hold someone accountable, legally,

you've got to think a little outside the box.

- By December of 2017,

they had exhausted all credible leads on the hate crime.

And so while I was an intern at the lawyers committee,

I remember going to my supervisor and being like,

can we sue neo-Nazis?

And she was like, yeah, you can do that.

Somebody needs to be held accountable

for what happened to me.

We figured out who we needed to sue.

And then I was in an intake meeting that afternoon.

Andrew Anglin was a foregone conclusion,

but because we had compiled screenshots

from some of the messages,

we were able to identify people

based on their Twitter handles.

We were able to make a kind of creative argument

that the online harassment impacted my ability

to go to school and to utilize my campus

to the fullest capacity.

My attorneys, they didn't promise me anything.

And they were like, you know,

this is going to be really, really difficult.

- [Interviewer] What would you say

to the Andrew Anglins of the world?

- You picked the wrong one.

And you picked somebody that wasn't gonna back down.

- [Interviewer] Dumpson won her case.

(compelling piano music)

- We sued three people and one corporation,

but two people and the corporation did not respond,

but one of the individuals did respond.

That person happens to be around my age.

One of the things that we discussed

with my attorneys in the beginning

was what did I want out of litigation?

I remember doing a class, it was about punishment.

One of the things that we studied

was different forms of punishment,

and who do you punish for?

Is the purpose rehabilitation?

Is it retribution?

I had been exposed to what restorative justice

looked like and what it could be.

So I was really interested in trying to incorporate

those kinds of principles into a settlement.

He was required to do 200 hours of community service

with a racial justice organization.

He was required to renounce white supremacy,

and we scheduled an apology.

I gave sort of like a victim impact statement,

and I was looking him in his eye the entire time.

After I spoke, then he spoke.

After that, I felt like I was able to take my next steps,

which were to close that chapter of the book.

- Calling in is a call-out done with love,

'cause we share a desire to hold people accountable,

not only for the harm they do,

but help them learn how not to do more harm in the future.

People change from the inside

because they want to call on themselves to be better people.

I am not so much a turn the other cheek girl

that I just think that restorative

or transformative or calling in is available,

or will work with everybody.

I just think we overused calling out

in situations where it being less punitive

could actually become a more effective strategy.

And even if the person is wrong,

you can offer them the grace of being wrong about it.

- After everything went down,

I hadn't had any sort of release.

And I got an email,

I got an email and he's like, hey dude,

I just wanted to let you know that

I don't feel like you did anything wrong.

You were just trying to provide for your family,

and you got caught up in the midst of the situation.

I lost it.

I was sobbing so hard that I was shaking the entire bed.

I woke my wife up and she asked me, she's like,

what's wrong, what's wrong?

And all I could get out was, someone was nice to me.

(ethereal music)

- These are not chess pieces

to be moved on a board to your pleasure.

These are human beings.

And if you fail to see their humanity,

then you will always thwart your own goals

in changing hearts and minds.

(dramatic music)

Anger is such powerful fuel.

And so when you're bereft of that,

you have to land somewhere else

and really embrace what I call a concept of radical love,

starting with love for self

and calling on myself

to be the best human being I can be.

- [Monica] Imagine waking up one morning

with the whole world suddenly knowing your name.

What kind of world do you want that to be?

(acoustic guitar music)