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Monica Lewinsky’s Last Week Tonight Interview Should Be Required for Internet Use

In the segment, John Oliver talks to Lewinsky about how public shaming harms the powerless most.

Being online isn't terribly fun these days, but it's not like we weren't awful to each other before Twitter. Just ask Monica Lewinsky, the target of one of the most prominent instances of public shaming in recent history. The former White House intern turned activist was recently on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver for a segment on public shaming—a very real problem that, unfortunately, is often co-opted by people who aren't actually victims.

One of the drawbacks of online life is how it is firmly in the control of people who either do not understand it, or do not care to. Hence Oliver's segment on public shaming—which might come across as basic stuff to people who regularly discuss things on the Internet, but which in reality is vital for navigating an online world that often devolves into a power struggle over who gets to be called a victim and who gets to be called a villain.

As Oliver notes, anyone doing it honestly must consider the interplay between public life, anonymity, and power. So making fun of and/or boycotting Tucker Carlson en masse is not outrage run amok—due to his outsize wealth, power, influence, and stature as a public figure. But for Monica Lewinsky—a young, mostly anonymous 22-year-old woman at the start of her career, in a position of no consequence compared to the powerful man whose indiscretion made her name a scandal—the media circus and late-night comedy pile-on that dogged her for years is beginning to look like a grave injustice in hindsight.

So Oliver had Lewinsky on Last Week Tonight for an in-depth discussion about public shaming and the ways it can legitimately ruin the lives of people who previously—and rightfully—thought themselves to be relatively anonymous, private citizens.

The whole segment is a great crash course in a subject that is often bandied about in bad faith, and an important thing to get a handle on—because there's no shortage of powerful people looking to play you.

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