Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky is calling for a “cultural revolution” in how people consume online news so that “more shame” no longer means “more clicks” and more advertising income.
Lewinsky told hundreds of privacy professionals Tuesday “we need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion, and click with compassion.”
“Just imagine walking a mile in someone else’s headline,” she said in a Washington speech that was contractually closed to the press.
Lewinsky did not discuss new laws or regulations, instead proposing a cultural shift akin to growing public acceptance of recycling and same-sex relationships.
“Changing this behavior and our culture begins with evolving our beliefs. We’ve seen that to be true with racism, homophobia, and plenty of other biases now and in the past. As we’ve changed beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equal freedom, and when we began to value sustainability we saw more people recycling,” she said.
“So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a cultural revolution. Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop. It’s time for an intervention in our culture and on the Internet. The shift begins with something simple, but it’s actually not easy to do. We need to return to a long held value of compassion. Compassion and empathy.”
Now 44 years old, Lewinsky did not directly address current political events involving President Trump, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or women claiming abuse of power by powerful men in professional settings. But as context, she revisited her affair with President Bill Clinton.
“At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss. And at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences,” she said. “In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal, and media maelstrom like we’ve never seen before.”
Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton was first reported by the Drudge Report in January 1998, after an investigation by Newsweek that wasn’t published. The scandal resulted in Clinton becoming the second president impeached by the House of Representatives, though he was not removed from office by the Senate.
“If the investigation had unfolded only a few years earlier, it would have been against the backdrop of a much smaller and much less crowded media landscape,” Lewinsky said.
Since then, she said, online shaming has “mushroomed,” and now claims many young victims whose struggles many not be as obvious to parents as were hers.
Lewinsky’s speech touched on the shaming of teens and people in the news, which she linked to the same root cause of cultural decay.
In addition to stemming the profit motive of businesses, she said people should offer supportive online comments, as “compassionate comments can really make a difference.”
The former intern spoke to the International Association of Privacy Professionals in Washington and joked that “believe me, I don’t come here often.” She also joked about wearing a beret in a widely circulated photo from the 1990s.
“I admit I made mistakes, and I think we can all agree that wearing that beret was definitely one of them,” she said.
Lewinsky said she’s re-emerging in the public spotlight because it’s “time to take back my narrative” and to let other people feeling overwhelmed by shaming know that “you can survive it.”
Although focused more broadly on digital shaming, she offered significant criticism for the news media.
“For nearly two decades now we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil — both on and offline. Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets, and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame,” she said.
“This violation of others is raw material, ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit, whether tallied in dollars, clicks, likes, or the perverse thrill of exposure,” she continued. “A marketplace has emerged where shame is a commodity and public humiliation has become an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars. So you can see where this is going.”
Lewinsky acknowledged that it would be difficult for people to change news consumption habits.
“We’ve become people who are in a dangerous cycle. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it,” she said. “And the more numb we get the more we click on these kinds of hate. All the while somebody is making money off the back of someone else’s suffering.”
“With every click we actually make a choice. The more we saturate our culture with public shaming and the more we invade privacy, the more accepted it is. The more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling, online harassment and sometimes hacking. Why? Because they all have humiliation at their core. This behavior is a symptom of the culture that we have created. The private individual is inching toward the endangered species list.”
