So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

by

Jon Ronson

4chan is a website that consists of anonymous public forums and message boards dedicated to wide-ranging topics. 4chan sees tens of millions of users visit the site each month—and it has become a hotbed of misogyny and white supremacy due to its central ethos of permitting free speech, no matter how terrible the subject matter.

4chan Quotes in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

The So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed quotes below are all either spoken by 4chan or refer to 4chan. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Good, Evil, and Inhumanity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6 Quotes

It seemed to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.

Related Characters: Jon Ronson (speaker), Hank, Adria Richards
Page Number: 135
Explanation and Analysis:
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4chan Term Timeline in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

The timeline below shows where the term 4chan appears in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 6: Doing Something Good
Good, Evil, and Inhumanity Theme Icon
Shame and Social Media Theme Icon
Shame, Freedom of Speech, and Public Discourse Theme Icon
Shame and Gender Theme Icon
...posted a message on the website where the vitriol toward her had spun out of control—4chan—asking if anyone involved in her destruction would speak with him. A 21-year-old woman named Mercedes... (full context)
Good, Evil, and Inhumanity Theme Icon
Shame and Social Media Theme Icon
Cycles of Shame, Trauma, and Violence Theme Icon
Shame, Freedom of Speech, and Public Discourse Theme Icon
...the internet, Haefer told Ronson, the powerless become powerful. But recent crackdowns on spaces like 4chan had begun to feel like New York’s stop-and-frisk program. Stop-and-frisk was a program that was... (full context)
Good, Evil, and Inhumanity Theme Icon
Shame and Social Media Theme Icon
Cycles of Shame, Trauma, and Violence Theme Icon
Shame, Freedom of Speech, and Public Discourse Theme Icon
Shame and Gender Theme Icon
...Haefer why online shamings were so often misogynistic and violent. Mercedes claimed that places like 4chan aimed to “degrade the target,” and for women the highest degradation was rape (which attacked... (full context)
Afterword
Shame and Social Media Theme Icon
Shame and Gender Theme Icon
Ronson looked back on his discussion in 2014 with Mercedes Haefer from 4chan, and he found it affecting. When he wrote about that conversation in an early draft... (full context)