By Joana Karoshi | Staff Writer
Ariana Grande’s body has been the hot topic for the last few months, as it is for most women celebrities. The commentary isn’t as much focused on her body as it is on her morals. Her apparent thinness has branded her a victim, a villain, a case to be analyzed, diagnosed and ridiculed.
It is easy to shelter these comments under the pretense of concern, but it quickly becomes apparent that most of them would never be said face to face. Cruelty online is rampant; we all know this.
Ariana Grande is not the first celebrity to receive criticism and certainly will not be the last. You do not even have to be a celebrity to be dissected this way.
A 2017 study examining Yik Yak found that students used the app primarily for entertainment, but also described cruel posts targeting specific people. In interviews, students said that certain individuals had become “memes” within their campus communities because people repeatedly posted about them. Some students were even surprised by how many users upvoted offensive posts rather than condemning them.
This shows an interesting aspect of how we think about each other online. While the study said Yik Yak itself was not negative, it also found that people use it to share information and support. We see on Yik Yak how easily entertainment and cruelty can coexist, and yet, so many of us seem to participate.
Part of understanding why we engage in this may be that cruelty rarely presents itself to us as just brutality.
In a 2023 study, researchers found that people’s concern for social justice was not directly correlated with online shaming. Instead, justice concerns were linked to the belief that an offender deserved negative consequences, which was then associated with schadenfreude; pleasure at witnessing another person’s misfortune. That pleasure, in turn, was associated with greater engagement in shaming.
We convince ourselves that we are simply delivering justice, while we happen to be simultaneously enjoying the punishment.
But not every act of online cruelty comes with a convenient moral justification. Sometimes there is no wrongdoing to punish. Sometimes there is simply a person who looks different, says something awkward or becomes an easy target.
In those cases, cruelty becomes entertainment for its own sake.
People screenshot embarrassing posts and send them to group chats with intention. Watching someone else become the target of a joke gives us something to react to. We laugh, we share, and for a moment, we become part of the crowd.
Humor makes this even easier. Calling something a joke creates an escape route: if someone objects, we can always claim we did not mean it seriously. “It was just a joke” describes the speaker’s intention; it does not erase the effect on its target.
The internet also makes this unusually easy because anonymity lets us avoid confronting the person we are discussing. We can dissect someone’s body, speculate about their life and laugh at their humiliation without ever having to watch their expression as we do it.
And perhaps that is why online cruelty can feel so much more casual than cruelty in person. The distance gives us room to forget that there is a person on the other side.
This matters on a college campus especially. Often, the people being discussed are classmates, people who live down the hall or students we recognize on campus. A joke posted anonymously can become humiliating and reputation ruining.
When cruelty becomes entertainment, the problem is not simply that something mean was said. It is our culture’s acceptance and applause that comes after it.
