Moral emotions, good moral panics, social regulation, and online public shaming

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of online public shaming (OPS). OPS has been the subject of interdisciplinary, insightful research. With few exceptions, this research has taken a theoretical, macro approach (Cheong and Gong, 2010; Lazarus, 2017). Digital discourse analysis and netnographic approaches can illuminate OPS further by helping us get “into the mob” and allowing us to tackle OPS's realizations at the micro level. Hence six recent cases of OPS in the US, all exposing perceived incidents of racism against visible minorities - here understood as breaches of the Harm/Care moral foundation (Haidt, 2012) - were analyzed along with a sizeable amount of related user-generated comments. Crucially, the analysis connected OPS to extant models of responses to impoliteness (Culpeper et al., 2003; Bousfield, 2007) by understanding involvement in OPS as digilantes' choice to respond to perceived offense with further aggression and by relating this choice to the diverse types of functionalities associated with impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011). Results additionally showed that conceptualizing OPS along the lines of moral indignation/outrage, good moral panics, and social regulation can help us better understand digilantes' ostensive motivations and goals.