The Bully Is Whoever's Winning

This is Part Two of The Price of Winning, a four-part Tinsel series on harassment, moderation, and the people who compete in public. Read Part One here. Part Three publishes Monday, and Part Four next Wednesday.

There is a maneuver that anyone who spends time in these arenas learns to recognize. A creator pulls ahead, and for a while the crowd enjoys it. Then the lead holds, the underdog stops being an underdog, and the mood curdles. The same audience that was cheering turns, and in the space of a week the person in front becomes arrogant where they were admired and a bully where they were a competitor, with the whole climb recast as something nobody was ever supposed to take so seriously. The accusation arrives at a telling moment, right around the time the scoreboard stops moving in the accuser's favor. That timing is the tell, and it is worth reading closely.

Competition is the product in these rooms. Platforms build them as contests, with live rankings and head-to-head formats that turn an ordinary night into a match with a visible winner. Nobody watching is confused about what they came for. The people who enter know the terms before they play.

Creators who have climbed these rankings know the turn firsthand. "The strangest part is how fast you go from being everyone's favorite to the villain, and the only thing that changed is that you started winning," says Jolene Burns, the singer-songwriter, who has felt it from the top of a leaderboard. "Nobody warns you that doing well is the thing that makes people turn."

The charge follows a fixed sequence. Once the accusation of bullying stops describing cruelty and starts describing a rival's success, the word has become a tool, and the hand reaching for it usually belongs to someone with a stake in the outcome. These are rarely disinterested bystanders. More often they overlap with the kind of campaign described in Part One, and they bring its methods. The pile-on wraps itself in the language of protection. The report that takes an account down is filed in the name of safety. The crowd organizing a removal calls the target the aggressor, and the concern surfaces on schedule, only once the target starts winning. A vocabulary built to name real injury gets requisitioned to launder a competitive grudge.

That requisitioning is possible for one reason. The words carry weight because the injuries behind them are real, and the borrowed authority is the entire point of borrowing. Someone reaching for the language of harm to describe a lost lead is not confused about what the words mean. They are counting on that meaning, and spending it on themselves. The reality of cruelty is precisely what makes the imitation of it contemptible, since the imitation works only by trading on the credibility that actual victims paid for.

The mob part of this is old, and it has been studied by people with no stake in any leaderboard. The journalist Jon Ronson spent a year reporting on the mechanics of online shaming for his book on the subject, and his conclusion was blunt. "We are destroying people routinely, daily," he told PBS in 2015, "and destroying them with the thing we are most terrified would happen to us." The engine he described draws no distinction between a person who did something cruel and a person who simply got ahead. It runs on the destruction itself, which is exactly what makes it available to anyone with a rival to remove.

The objection to watch switches on at the precise moment the scoreboard turns. An objection that appears only once its owner starts losing is positioning, whatever else it calls itself, and the fluency of the objector gives it away. It comes from inside the game, from accounts that know every mechanic they have suddenly decided is immoral, from competitors who spent months or years learning to out-perform everyone in the room and then demanded the room be closed the instant someone out-played them. The rules were fine while they were ahead. The morality arrives with the losses.

Layered under that is incumbency protecting itself. An established group can recast a newcomer's success as bad behavior and route the objection through the report button, and the effect is to keep the arena comfortable for whoever already holds the top. The complaint dressed as principle is a door being shut behind the people who got in first.

None of this dilutes what the words are supposed to mean, and the distinction has to be stated plainly. Cruelty is real and it is wrong, full stop. People do coordinate to make a stranger's life worse for sport, they do send the threats and the slurs, and that conduct is the actual harm this series exists to describe. The line that matters runs between being decent to people and being good at the game. The first is a moral rule. The second is only a scoreboard. Naming that line is what protects the people who are actually harmed, because every time a sore loser borrows their vocabulary, the vocabulary means a little less the next time someone in real danger reaches for it. The maneuver this part exists to expose survives only while those two things stay smudged together, so that an attack on a winner can wear the moral weight owed to a defense of the vulnerable. Pull them apart and it resolves quickly, and it resolves, often enough, into a warning about bullies that comes from precisely the quarter with the most to gain from the target's removal. Said as plainly as it can be said, the bullies in these campaigns are the people running them. The target who kept performing through the abuse is the one who was bullied, and no volume of reports filed in the language of safety changes which side of that line each of them stood on.

Few people understand the cost of a public pile-on better than Monica Lewinsky, who survived one of the first mass online shamings and has spent years since as an anti-bullying advocate. Her summary of where the culture landed is worth sitting with. "Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop," she said in a 2015 TED talk, "and it's time for an intervention on the Internet and in our culture."

All of which would be a quarrel about manners if it stopped at the level of words. It does not stop there. The accusation is only the first half of the maneuver. The second half is the process that turns a coordinated crowd into a deleted account, and it runs with almost no human judgment in the loop.

Sources

• Jon Ronson, "How social media led to a 'renaissance' of public shaming," PBS NewsHour, 2015
• Monica Lewinsky, "The Price of Shame," TED, 2015