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Audience Responses to Online Public Shaming in Online Environments: Mixed Methods Study.
Annie T Chen1, Lea H Dunn2,3, Wei Fan1
1Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, United States.
Journal of Medical Internet Research
|July 23, 2025
Summary
Witnessing online public shaming influences social media engagement. Perceived social acceptability and emotions like fear, anger, and positive feelings significantly impact user interactions and sharing behaviors.
Area of Science:
- Social Psychology
- Media Studies
- Human-Computer Interaction
Background:
- Online public shaming has severe consequences for individuals targeted.
- Reactions of witnesses to online shaming and the influence of social context and emotions remain under-explored.
- Previous research has not investigated how perceived social acceptability and emotional arousal affect social media behavior following online shaming incidents.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how perceived social acceptability of shaming content predicts engagement with tweets.
- To examine the association between participants' emotional reactions and their likelihood to engage in specific online behaviors.
- To explore participants' views on appropriate online behavior through qualitative analysis of their reactions to shaming incidents.
Main Methods:
- A between-subjects experimental design exposed 742 participants to one of four tweets (shaming, wedding, COVID-19 PSA, neutral control).
- Regression models analyzed the relationship between demographic characteristics, social media behaviors, tweet type, perceived social acceptability, emotions, and engagement (liking, sharing, commenting).
- Inductive qualitative analysis of open-ended responses characterized participants' interpretations and compared themes across conditions using ANOVAs.
Main Results:
- Higher perceived social acceptability of a tweet significantly increased liking, sharing, and commenting.
- Positive emotions correlated with higher engagement, while fear, shame, and anger showed complex interactions with tweet type and behavior.
- Qualitative analysis identified five key factors influencing media interpretation and engagement: environment, sense-making, message, tone, and other, with significant variations across tweet types.
Conclusions:
- This study enhances understanding of how individuals respond to online public shaming, highlighting the roles of perceived acceptability and emotions.
- Findings suggest that platform design incorporating these factors could help mitigate the negative impacts of online shaming.
- The research provides a nuanced model of media interpretation and engagement in online environments.
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