Contrarian View: What's Wrong With #MeToo? Here's What

Nearly a week of #metoo and my Facebook feed is still filled with personal anecdotes, reactions from men and congratulatory stories from media outlets, just like the author's. I confess I was beginning to worry about being in the minority when this article popped up.

Here is the contrarian view I was looking for — one that is contrarian for solid reasons and not for the sake of being different.

The article claims #metoo is too perfect — this resonates greatly with those who keep track of online outrage and its predictable trajectories. Undoubtedly, the hashtag has set into motion a social movement of speaking out against abuse — everyone is feeling compelled to put out their story; it has led to a barrage of #metoo memes.

In effect, it has become an entertaining, albeit exhausting, emotive spectacle of escalating outrage and good intentions.

Or, as the article bluntly says, it has become an icon for all that is wrong with the social media.

Outrage is central to social media design — because it is an emotion that inspires sharing. For social media platforms sharing equals revenue. Yale professor Molly Crockett who has extensively studied moral outrage in the digital age notes technologies are transforming the way we experience outrage and in effect “limiting how much we can actually change social realities”.

Crockett writes, since people are more likely to share things that make them morally angry, the ‘outrage’ bar keeps rising and eventually we become numb to tragedies as “we're unable to process the emotions...at the speed which they arise”.

This might lead to habitual ‘outraging’ — where an online shamer might express outrage without actually feeling outraged. Examples of this kind of behaviour abound.

This is not to say that #metoo cannot be a ‘real’ social movement. It can, if it acquires the power to transform cultures — so that women (and men) can always speak out; without hashtags as crutches. And for that to happen, we need to also talk, not just type.