GAWKER HYPOCRISY FULL

'The public isn't wrong to find infidelity distasteful and worthy of condemnation, but it's important not to confuse that with a personal right to expose and denounce the activities of strangers.' 'The only people who really have the right to make moral judgments about cheaters are the people they're cheating on - at least if we're talking about private figures,' Mary Anne Franks, law professor at the University of Miami and board vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, told Mic.

GAWKER HYPOCRISY FULL

From websites that allow jilted exes to post the full names and contact information of their former partners, to a 2013 viral photo of a man overheard bragging about his affairs on a commuter train, the Internet provides us with an ideal platform for publicly chastising those who've wronged us. After all, if there's anything to be learned from last week's Gawker scandal, in which a prominent married media executive was outed by an anonymous male sex worker whom he refused to help with a legal dispute, it's that publicly shaming people who might be experiencing marital problems in their personal lives is both cruel and unnecessary.Ī question of ethics: The shaming of Ashley Madison users falls squarely into the Internet's tradition of publicly shaming unfaithful spouses. In fact, one 2006 study reported that women who had been cheated on experienced symptoms similar to those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.īut one thing that's also becoming more and more universally agreed upon is that cheating is complicated, and it reflects all sorts of private realities that anyone outside the relationship can never truly understand. The truth is, nobody deserves to be lied to, and being cheated on by a trusted partner can be a genuinely traumatic experience. And in light of the fact that trust is a universally agreed-upon necessity in healthy relationships, that's kind of shitty. Given Ashley Madison's mission to help married people cheat on their spouses, plenty of its users were probably low-key jeepin' behind their unsuspecting partners' backs.

The problem of publicly shaming cheaters.

Gawker hypocrisy