The shaming impulse asserted itself right from the start of the pandemic. On Twitter, #covidiot began trending on the evening of March 22, 2020, and by the time the night was over, 3,000 tweets had coopted the hashtag to denounce poor public health practices. When CBS News posted a video of spring breakers partying in Miami, outraged citizens shared the students’ names in their social media networks, accompanied by such missives as “do not give these selfish dumbfucks beds and/or respirators.”
In the early days of the pandemic, when panic and confusion reigned, such indignation could perhaps be forgiven. But the shaming gained momentum and wove itself into the zeitgeist. Also: it didn’t work.
As noted by Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Julia Marcus, “shaming and blaming people is not the best way to get them to change their behavior and actually can be counterproductive because it makes people want to hide their behavior.” Along similar lines, Jan Balkus, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington, maintains that shaming can make it harder for people to “acknowledge situations where they may have encountered risk.”
If shaming “covidiots” for their behavior doesn’t accomplish much, you can be sure that shaming people for Wrongthink won’t change any minds. Instead, we heretics simply stop telling the shamers what we’re thinking. We nod and smile. We give them the match point and continue the debate in our own heads.
Hellbound and Down 