‘If I can’t unsee this, then you can’t either,’ Dani Mathers typed, posting a picture of a naked woman in the LA Fitness changing room in Los Angeles – only pausing to take a selfie while laughing at her own joke. But that offhand, ill-thought-out moment is no laughing matter and now it’s cost the model everything from her 500,000 Instagram followers to her radio-hosting job.
Social shaming – a label that’s only come into existence in the past five years – where you take photos of someone without their permission for ridicule has become a common occurrence. In 2014 the Facebook page ‘Women who eat on tubes’ became a viral hit before it was closed by Facebook due to the backlash of disgust, while live-tweeting couples on first dates has become the norm. How have we ended up tuning out our morals just to get a ‘like’?