Publication date: Jul 23, 2025

Incidents of online public shaming can have devastating consequences for those who are shamed, but how those who witness shaming behaviors react is unclear. When considering online public shaming, it is crucial to be aware of the context in which it occurs. Implicit norms that govern these contexts and evoke emotions can influence what is deemed as acceptable behavior when witnessing public shaming. However, previous work has not examined the role that perceived social acceptability of the shaming content and emotional arousal may have in explaining social media behavior after witnessing online shaming incidents. We posed three research questions to explore and characterize people’s reactions to witnessing online public shaming: (1) Does perceived social acceptability predict subsequent engagement with tweets; (2) Are participants’ emotional reactions to tweets associated with self-assessed likelihood to engage in certain behaviors; and (3) What do participants’ explanations of their reactions to tweets illustrate about their views about appropriate online behavior? We conducted a between-subjects experimental design in which participants saw 1 of 4 tweets: shaming of a couple holding a wedding that became a super-spreader event (shaming condition) and 3 control tweets: 1 expressing positive sentiment about a wedding during the COVID-19 pandemic(wedding condition), a public service announcement providing information about obtaining COVID-19-related information (COVID-19 condition); and a tweet expressing neutral sentiment (control condition). To answer the first 2 questions, we constructed regression models with replying or commenting, sharing, and liking as the dependent variables and factors including demographic characteristics, social media behaviors, tweet type, perception of social acceptability, and emotions as the independent variables. To characterize how participants interpreted the online act, we performed an inductive qualitative analysis of open-ended responses explaining participants’ reactions to the tweet they saw, and then compared the prominence of the themes across the conditions using ANOVAs. We invited 800 participants, and 742 participants completed the entire study. Regarding the first research question, the perception of a tweet as socially acceptable increased all forms of social engagement, with increased liking, sharing, and commenting. Regarding emotions, positive emotions were associated with a greater tendency to engage in all 3 behaviors, whereas fear, shame, and anger involved more interactions between the tweet type, emotion, and the subsequent behavior (liking, sharing, or commenting). Last, qualitative analysis of the open-ended responses yielded a model of media interpretation and engagement in online environments comprising 5 factors: environment, sense-making and assessment, message, tone, and other, with substantial differences in the themes across the tweet types. This study augments our understanding of people’s responses to online public shaming, including the diverse factors that may affect interpretations and subsequent action. Considering these factors in platform design can mitigate negative consequences.

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Semantics

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