In the endless feedback loop of social media’s shaming machine, Walter Palmer suddenly found himself with nothing to shoot and no place to hide. As soon as word got out that the Minnesota dentist had shot and killed an African lion so beloved it had a Disneyfied name — Cecil — the basic bio of Palmer’s digital avatar was quickly formulated: cowardly lion-killer, serial murderer of the planet’s most beautiful, and endangered, species.
Palmer became the face of evil, in all its abstraction — the focus of thousands of enraged Twitter messages and furious Yelp reviews of his dental practice. But the Internet went ahead and tweeted him right between the eyes. The hunter became the hunted, and social media saddled up a digital lynch mob, forcing Palmer to shut down his business and drop out of sight.
The reinforcement loop on some websites creates what Paolo Parigi, an assistant professor at Stanford University who has studied social media, calls “aggregation points,” not unlike the town square where posses were formed in old Westerns.
“All of a sudden, there is a community that feels like you,” Parigi says. “Someone like Palmer becomes an abstract, an object.”
Even murderers of other human beings usually have neighbors who describe them after the fact as “friendly,” or at least “quiet.” But amid the firestorm, it was all but impossible to find anyone willing to speak up for Palmer. Even a crisis management expert who was hired to release Palmer’s only statement so far — a dry-eyed assertion that he had done nothing wrong, and it wasn’t his fault if he did — dropped the dentist after his own Yelp page was bombarded with angry posts.
Officially, public punishment of wrongdoers in this country ended nearly two centuries ago, but with the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms, the client load of those who have been publicly shamed on the Internet has been steadily rising at public relations firms like G.F. Bunting + Co., which lists “crisis planning” first among its areas of expertise. “I think that this guy has been run over by a bulldozer,” says Glenn Bunting, founder and president of the San Francisco-based company. “That bulldozer is going back and forth, and he is roadkill at the moment.”
That forlornly flattened species has little in common with the magnificent creatures Palmer has often been photographed kneeling over following a kill. Or with the diorama of African animals that Jeffrey Stanley has hunted, killed and turned into the trophies that dominate his home office.
“I feel for this individual, I really do,” says Stanley, owner of Bad Boys Bail Bonds in San Jose. “This guy has put hundreds of thousands of dollars into protecting these species, making sure they’re going to be around. If they didn’t have the money from hunting in the park service, these animals would be eradicated within a month.”
Like Palmer, Stanley fits the classic mold of a Great White Hunter — mostly American males, wealthy enough to spend $54,000 for a single hunt, as Palmer did to stalk Cecil with a crossbow — and like the demonized dentist, he has spent more than $50,000 to hunt lions.
“It’s very costly to hunt lions, but it’s also very costly to protect them,” Stanley says. “And the only way that they can generate revenue is from these big game hunters. Nobody is going to spend $50,000 to $75,000 on a photographic safari. All the parks in Zimbabwe are run on hunting dollars.”
Stanley says that after a big kill, hungry villagers from miles around swarm to where the hunters are skinning the beast for mounting by a taxidermist. “People don’t understand that when you take an animal, and the next day there are 200 people there wanting meat, it’s a great feeling knowing you can give them an extra 60 days (of survival) with that meat,” he says. “To take this life, and to give someone life, it has a different meaning.”
That hasn’t deterred more than 180,000 people from signing an online White House “We the People” petition titled “Extradite Minnesotan Walter James Palmer to face justice in Zimbabwe.”
Unlike Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, the Internet’s darker corners serve as a hide park for the shamers. “You are a monster,” someone identified as Carmen T., of Pleasanton, CA posted on Palmer’s Yelp page. “Kill a lion? Go to hell. … You deserve to get shot and bleed for several days.”
“There are no boundaries, no limits anymore,” says Bunting. “And no consequences when you’re sitting there in your pajamas at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, you haven’t even brushed your teeth yet or opened up the window shade, and you’re just saying ugly, vile things. I guess these shaming campaigns make the shamers feel good. But at the end of the day, they destroy reputations, they destroy livelihoods, they destroy people.”
And when the Internet collectively sets out to get somebody, its search algorithms don’t always discriminate between Walter Palmers. On Twitter, anyone with that name was fair game for furious derision and death threats. Walter Scott Palmer, who played for the NBA’s Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks during the 1990s, received about 15 tweets threatening him with bodily harm this week, before he realized he needed to go on the offensive.
He tweeted, “I shot hoops, never animals. #mistakenidentity #walterpalmer #cecilthelion.” After that was retweeted or favorited on Twitter close to 200 times, Palmer says the haters turned their fire elsewhere. “It’s certainly affected my life on Twitter, let’s put it that way,” he says.
He used his Twitter feed to suggest that people donate money to the Oxford University study group that had placed a GPS tracking collar on Cecil the lion before he died. Palmer has sent the organization money, too. “I hope when they receive my donation, with my name,” says Palmer, “that they won’t reject it.”
Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at Twitter.com/brucenewmantwit.
