Using Facebook as a Wall of Shame

You’ve probably read in the news this week about the city of Huntington Beach, CA.  A city councilman there proposed that pictures of repeat drunk drivers be posted on the city’s Facebook page in the hopes that “public shaming” would discourage people from driving under the influence.

To be sure, the city has historically had a big problem with people driving under the influence.  According to the AP the city was “ranked top out of 56 California cities of similar size for the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities” with 1,687 DUI arrests and 195 people killed or injured in 2009.  Perhaps wisely, the city council shot down the idea when it was proposed, recognizing that it was the wrong solution to the problem.  The city council concluded that it wouldn’t prevent DUI’s, but would instead serve to further embarrass family members of alcoholics, who probably have enough problems to deal with as it is.  And further, the information is already publicly available on the police department’s website.
 

The idea of government using fear and embarrassment to influence behavior is not new: public shaming goes back a long, long way (What? An adulterer? Let’s put a big red “A” on her forehead and lock her in the stocks in the town square!).  What is new is the idea of government using a popular social networking site like Facebook—which is in no way, shape, or form affiliated with the government—to drive behavior among its members. 

It is an interesting, though flawed, concept:  Since lots of people use Facebook (over 600 million at last count), that means that a large percentage of potential drunk drivers and their “friends” are probably members.  Threatening to use Facebook to publicly humiliate someone for illegal or socially undesirable behavior is a form of blackmail: behave the way we want you to or we will “out” you in front of your friends and family (same old story, new venue). To propose that governments leverage this type of influence is a chilling thought and one we’ve moved away from as a society.  In fact we have a term for individuals who engage in this type of behavior:  We call them bullies, and are curiously enough starting to pass regulations prohibiting online versions of it.

It is one thing for government to have a presence on a social networking site in order to interact with its constituents.  To have government use the social networking site as a mechanism to publicly humiliate is quite another.