Here is something that happens all too often:
- Institution is accused of doing something wrong
- Doesn’t say anything for slightly too long
- People get annoyed and angry on social media
- Institution issues a brief apology (PDF) followed by claims that “our staff have been subject to personal attacks, which must stop”
By presenting a false equivalence between whatever they did wrong (e.g. plagiarism) and the inevitably unpleasant consequences of those actions (people being angry about plagiarism), the institution lessens the gravity of their wrongdoing and is able to paint itself as the victim.
Institutions can execute this playbook every time because pretty much every instance of wrongdoing will generate at least two tweets or emails that can constitute “personal attacks”, plural.
This isn’t just misdirection against the wrongdoing. It’s misdirection about the institution’s own priorities. We take online abuse and mental health much more seriously these days, and institutes have realised how to exploit that. It’s telling that institutions tend to be silent on whatever day-to-day harm they do to their own workers’ mental health like museums consistently underpaying their staff – it’s only attacks from internet strangers that are worthy of condemnation.
If institutions are serious about protecting their staff’s mental health in the face of online criticism of their own fuckups, here’s my playbook:
- Apologise quickly and unreservedly
- Whoever would have taken the credit had things gone well (e.g. director, manager, etc.) must now take the blame; and say the public should not send criticism to anyone else involved
- Provide an email address for criticism (doesn’t need to be a personal address)
- Read and reply to all criticism
When institutions do this mealy-mouthed “the online abuse must stop”, it’s a kind of tone policing that dismisses all criticism because some of it is rude or abusive. We should stop taking it seriously.
mssv 