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You're looking at a woman
who was publicly silent for a decade.
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Obviously, that's changed,
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but only recently.
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It was several months ago
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that I gave my very first
major public talk
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at the Forbes 30 Under 30 summit:
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1,500 brilliant people,
all under the age of 30.
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That meant that in 1998,
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the oldest among the group were only 14,
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and the youngest, just four.
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I joked with them that some
might only have heard of me
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from rap songs.
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Yes, I'm in rap songs.
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Almost 40 rap songs. (Laughter)
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But the night of my speech,
a surprising thing happened.
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At the age of 41, I was hit on
by a 27-year-old guy.
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I know, right?
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He was charming and I was flattered,
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and I declined.
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You know what his
unsuccessful pickup line was?
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He could make me feel 22 again.
-
(Laughter) (Applause)
-
I realized later that night,
I'm probably the only person over 40
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who does not want to be 22 again.
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
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At the age of 22,
I fell in love with my boss,
-
and at the age of 24,
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I learned the devastating consequences.
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Can I see a show of hands of anyone here
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who didn't make a mistake
or do something they regretted at 22?
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Yep. That's what I thought.
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So like me, at 22, a few of you
may have also taken wrong turns
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and fallen in love with the wrong person,
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maybe even your boss.
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Unlike me, though, your boss
-
probably wasn't the president
of the United States of America.
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Of course, life is full of surprises.
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Not a day goes by that I'm not
reminded of my mistake,
-
and I regret that mistake deeply.
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In 1998, after having been swept up
into an improbable romance,
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I was then swept up into the eye
of a political, legal and media maelstrom
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like we had never seen before.
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Remember, just a few years earlier,
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news was consumed from just three places:
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reading a newspaper or magazine,
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listening to the radio,
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or watching television.
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That was it.
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But that wasn't my fate.
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Instead, this scandal was brought to you
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by the digital revolution.
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That meant we could access
all the information we wanted,
-
when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere,
-
and when the story broke in January 1998,
-
it broke online.
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It was the first time the traditional news
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was usurped by the Internet
for a major news story,
-
a click that reverberated
around the world.
-
What that meant for me personally
-
was that overnight I went
from being a completely private figure
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to a publicly humiliated one worldwide.
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I was patient zero
of losing a personal reputation
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on a global scale almost instantaneously.
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This rush to judgment,
enabled by technology,
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led to mobs of virtual stone-throwers.
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Granted, it was before social media,
-
but people could still comment online,
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email stories, and, of course,
email cruel jokes.
-
News sources plastered
photos of me all over
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to sell newspapers, banner ads online,
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and to keep people tuned to the TV.
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Do you recall a particular image of me,
-
say, wearing a beret?
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Now, I admit I made mistakes,
-
especially wearing that beret.
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But the attention and judgment
that I received, not the story,
-
but that I personally received,
was unprecedented.
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I was branded as a tramp,
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tart, slut, whore, bimbo,
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and, of course, that woman.
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I was seen by many
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but actually known by few.
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And I get it: it was easy to forget
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that that woman was dimensional,
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had a soul, and was once unbroken.
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When this happened to me 17 years ago,
there was no name for it.
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Now we call it cyberbullying
and online harassment.
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Today, I want to share
some of my experience with you,
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talk about how that experience has helped
shape my cultural observations,
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and how I hope my past experience
can lead to a change that results
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in less suffering for others.
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In 1998, I lost my reputation
and my dignity.
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I lost almost everything,
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and I almost lost my life.
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Let me paint a picture for you.
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It is September of 1998.
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I'm sitting in a windowless office room
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inside the Office
of the Independent Counsel
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underneath humming fluorescent lights.
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I'm listening to the sound of my voice,
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my voice on surreptitiously
taped phone calls
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that a supposed friend
had made the year before.
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I'm here because
I've been legally required
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to personally authenticate
all 20 hours of taped conversation.
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For the past eight months,
the mysterious content of these tapes
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has hung like the Sword
of Damocles over my head.
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I mean, who can remember
what they said a year ago?
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Scared and mortified, I listen,
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listen as I prattle on
about the flotsam and jetsam of the day;
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listen as I confess my love
for the president,
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and, of course, my heartbreak;
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listen to my sometimes catty,
sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self
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being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth;
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listen, deeply, deeply ashamed,
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to the worst version of myself,
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a self I don't even recognize.
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A few days later, the Starr Report
is released to Congress,
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and all of those tapes and transcripts,
those stolen words, form a part of it.
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That people can read the transcripts
is horrific enough,
-
but a few weeks later,
-
the audio tapes are aired on TV,
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and significant portions
made available online.
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The public humiliation was excruciating.
-
Life was almost unbearable.
-
This was not something that happened
with regularity back then in 1998,
-
and by this, I mean the stealing
of people's private words, actions,
-
conversations or photos,
-
and then making them public --
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public without consent,
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public without context,
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and public without compassion.
-
Fast forward 12 years to 2010,
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and now social media has been born.
-
The landscape has sadly become much
more populated with instances like mine,
-
whether or not someone
actually make a mistake,
-
and now it's for both public
and private people.
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The consequences for some
have become dire, very dire.
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I was on the phone with my mom
-
in September of 2010,
-
and we were talking about the news
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of a young college freshman
from Rutgers University
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named Tyler Clementi.
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Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler
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was secretly webcammed by his roommate
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while being intimate with another man.
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When the online world
learned of this incident,
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the ridicule and cyber-bullying ignited.
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A few days later,
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Tyler jumped from
the George Washington Bridge
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to his death.
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He was 18.
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My mom was beside herself about
what happened to Tyler and his family,
-
and she was gutted with pain
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in a way that I just couldn't
quite understand,
-
and then eventually I realized
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she was reliving 1998,
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reliving a time when she sat
by my bed every night,
-
reliving a time when she made me shower
with the bathroom door open,
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and reliving a time
when both of my parents feared
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that I would be humiliated to death,
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literally.
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Today, too many parents
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haven't had the chance to step in
and rescue their loved ones.
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Too many have learned
of their child's suffering and humiliation
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after it was too late.
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Tyler's tragic, senseless death
was a turning point for me.
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It served to recontextualize
my experiences,
-
and I then began to look at the world
of humiliation and bullying around me
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and see something different.
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In 1998, we had no way of knowing
where this brave new technology
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called the Internet would take us.
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Since then, it has connected people
in unimaginable ways,
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joining lost siblings,
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saving lives, launching revolutions,
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but the darkness, cyber-bullying,
and slut-shaming that I experienced
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had mushroomed.
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Every day online, people,
especially young people
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who are not developmentally
equipped to handle this,
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are so abused and humiliated
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that they can't imagine living
to the next day,
-
and some, tragically, don't,
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and there's nothing virtual about that.
-
ChildLine, a U.K. nonprofit that's focused
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on helping young people on various issues,
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released a staggering statistic
late last year:
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from 2012 to 2013,
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there was an 87 percent increase
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in calls and emails related
to cyber-bullying.
-
A meta-analysis done
out of the Netherlands
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showed that for the first time,
cyberbullying was leading
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to suicidal ideations
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more significantly than offline bullying.
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And you know what shocked me,
although it shouldn't have,
-
was other research last year
that determined humiliation
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was a more intensely felt emotion
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than either happiness or even anger.
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Cruelty to others is nothing new,
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but online, technologically
enhanced shaming is amplified,
-
uncontained, and permanently accessible.
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The echo of embarrassment used to extend
only as far as your family, village,
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school, or community,
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but now it's the online community too.
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Millions of people, often anonymously,
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can stab you with their words,
and that's a lot of pain,
-
and there are no perimeters
around how many people
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can publicly observe you
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and put you in a public stockade.
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There is a very personal price
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to public humiliation,
-
and the growth of the Internet
has jacked up that price.
-
For nearly two decades, now,
-
we have slowly been sowing the seeds
of shame and public humiliation
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in our cultural soil, both on and offline.
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Gossip websites, paparazzi,
reality programming, politics,
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news outlets, and sometimes hackers,
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all traffic in shame.
-
It's led to desensitization
and a permissive environment online
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which lends itself to trolling,
invasion of privacy, and cyber-bullying.
-
This shift has created
what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls
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a culture of humiliation.
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Consider a few prominent examples
just from the past six months alone.
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Snapchat, the service which is used
mainly by younger generations
-
and claims that its messages
only have the lifespan
-
of a few seconds.
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You can imagine the range
of content that that gets.
-
A third party app which Snapchatters
use to preserve the lifespan
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of the messages was hacked,
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and 100,000 personal conversations,
photos, and videos were leaked online
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to now have a lifespan of forever.
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Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors
had their iCloud accounts hacked,
-
and private, intimate, nude photos
were plastered across the Internet
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without their permission.
-
One gossip website
had over five million hits
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for this one story.
-
And what about the Sony Pictures
cyber-hacking?
-
The documents which received
the most attention
-
were private emails that had
maximum public embarrassment value.
-
But in this culture of humiliation,
-
there is another kind of price tag
attached to public shaming.
-
The price does not measure
the cost to the victim,
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which Tyler and too many others,
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notably women, minorities,
-
and members of the LGBTQ
community have paid,
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but the price measures the profit
of those who prey on them.
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This invasion of others is a raw material,
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efficiently and ruthlessly mined,
packaged, and sold at a profit.
-
A marketplace has emerged
where public humiliation is a commodity
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and shame is an industry.
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How is the money made?
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Clicks.
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The more shame, the more clicks.
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The more clicks,
the more advertising dollars.
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We're in a dangerous cycle.
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The more we click on this kind of gossip,
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the more numb we get
to the human lives behind it,
-
and the more numb we get,
the more we click.
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All the while, someone is making money
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off of the back of someone else's suffering.
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With every click, we make a choice.
-
The more we saturate our culture
with public shaming,
-
the more accepted it is,
-
the more we will see behavior
like cyber-bullying,
-
trolling, some forms of hacking,
-
and online harassment.
-
Why? Because they all have
humiliation at the cores.
-
This behavior is a symptom
of the culture we've created.
-
Just think about it.
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Changing behavior begins
with evolving beliefs.
-
We've seen that to be true
with racism, homophobia,
-
and plenty of other biases,
today and in the past.
-
As we've changed beliefs
about same sex marriage,
-
more people have been
offered equal freedoms.
-
When we began valuing sustainability,
-
more people began to recycle.
-
So as far as our culture
of humiliation goes,
-
what we need is a cultural revolution.
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Public shaming
as a blood sport has to stop,
-
and it's time for an intervention
on the Internet and in our culture.
-
The shift begins with something simple,
but it's not easy.
-
We need to return to a long-held value
of compassion, compassion and empathy.
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Online, we've got a compassion deficit,
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an empathy crisis.
-
Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote,
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"Shame can't survive empathy."
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Shame cannot survive empathy.
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I've seen some very dark days in my life,
-
and it was the compassion and empathy
from my family, friends, professionals,
-
and sometimes even strangers
that saved me.
-
Even empathy from one person
can make a difference.
-
The theory of minority influence,
-
proposed by social psychologist
Serge Moscovici,
-
says that even in small numbers,
-
when there's consistency over time,
-
change can happen.
-
In the online world,
we can foster minority influence
-
by becoming upstanders.
-
To become an upstander means
instead of bystander apathy,
-
we can post a positive comment for someone
or report a bullying situation.
-
Trust me: compassionate comments
help abate the negativity.
-
We can also counteract the culture
by supporting organizations
-
that deal with these kinds of issues,
-
like the Tyler Clemente
Foundation in the U.S.,
-
In the U.K., there's Anti-Bullying Pro,
-
and in Australia, there's Project Rockit.
-
We talk a lot about our right
to freedom of expression,
-
but we need to talk more about
-
our responsibility
to freedom of expression.
-
We all want to be heard,
-
but let's acknowledge the difference
between speaking up with intention
-
and speaking up for attention.
-
The Internet is
the superhighway for the id,
-
but online, showing empathy to others
-
benefits us all and helps create
a safer and better world.
-
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.
-
I'd like to end on a personal note.
-
In the past nine months,
-
the question I've been
asked the most is why.
-
Why now? Why was I
sticking my head above the parapet?
-
You can read between the lines
in those questions,
-
and the answer has nothing
to do with politics.
-
The top node answer was and is
-
because it's time:
-
time to stop tip-toeing around my past;
-
time to stop living a life of opprobrium;
-
and time to take back my narrative.
-
It's also not just about saving myself.
-
Anyone who is suffering from shame
and public humiliation
-
needs to know one thing:
-
you can survive it.
-
I know it's hard.
-
It may not be painless, quick, or easy,
-
but you can insist
on a different ending to your story.
-
Have compassion for yourself.
-
We all deserve compassion,
-
and to live both online and off
in a more compassionate world.
-
Thank you for listening.
-
(Applause)
Camille Martínez
The English transcript was updated on 8/7/2019.