Digital Smarts - The Fleeting Nature of Outrage on Social Media

How effective is shaming on the internet or via social media? In the short term it is swift and powerful, bordering on vigilantism, but does it have staying power? Not really, indicates Americus Reed, a Wharton School of Business marketing professor. As an article on the subject on the Wharton School site puts it: “Social media outrage, it seems, is a beast with the fangs of a rattlesnake, and the attention span of a gnat.”

To demonstrate his argument, Reed uses the debacle of the per-pill price hike from $13.50 to $750 of an anti-AIDS drug by Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Back in August, Shkreli was the target of an outrage and criticism on Facebook and Twitter, even being dubbed the most hated man in America. Shkreli did promise to lower the price of the drug, but has yet to do so. As Reed points out, in this and in so many cases, “Social media amplifies the illusion of outrage, making it seem more dangerous and risky than it is. The reason is because social media outrage is completely costless. If you have a million people expressing outrage, there may be a hundred who do something that has any traction. Memory fades.”

For celebrities and corporations alike, this implies that all you have to do is wait out the criticism and it will go away. Examples like Cecil the Lion, Tom Brady and Deflategate, and Rachel Dolezal (the white NAACP leader living as a black woman) seem like ancient history, and yet those were the targets of social media outrage less than six months ago. Who knows whether this fading effect will always be this way, but it is an interesting topic of discussion for you and your children about the sometimes permanent and sometime fleeting nature of the digital world.