Nadia Bartel: some shaming is a good thing

The embattled influencer became a hypocrite when she ignored her own commitment to make better choices, and immediately hosted visitors at her home in further breach of the current lockdown restrictions.

For an influencer, the loss of credibility, authenticity and trust is damaging. Being publicly shamed by the Premier for her sustained disregard for rules required by the rest of the community is damning. And being dropped by the companies she was promoting really stuffs up her marketability, her public image and her brand.

Relative misery

Mental health has been a major concern of the ongoing lockdowns in Australia and elsewhere. Although false claims about suicide rates have been weaponised in Australia and the United States to oppose necessary public health measures, the reality is that lockdowns not only provide a safe haven from the far worse mental health impact of widespread death, they provide a shared community bond that itself can be at least a temporary protection from suicide.

Why? Because when a population are broadly suffering together-no matter how bad that shared suffering is-that shared experience potentially promotes the kind of belonging and social participation that helps keep people feeling their lives are liveable. This thesis applies even when what we share is loneliness and isolation.

However, when there is inequality and people start comparing their experience of lockdown in negative ways, we have what is called the 'relative misery' hypothesis: suicide rates may increase because vulnerable people see some people as having greater freedoms, benefits, and capability of getting away with breaches than they do.

Premier Andrews and others are, therefore, right to condemn Nadia Bartel for the damage that she does to that shared social bond by attempting to flout the rules that others suffer through, by hoping to get away with contravening the regulations repeatedly, and by expected to be treated differently. And, worse, by expecting that her apology is enough, while going on breaking the rules again, showing herself to be not just above the law, but above the requirements everyone else must abide by.

In slamming her behaviour, this is not about punishing or shaming an individual. It is about propping up a fragile, wounded community with the reminder-or, indeed, evidence-that community standards matter and that equitable treatment under the law is serious for the wellbeing of the community.

Just as the community feels wounded when a chief executive of a multimillion-dollar technology company lies on a border pass to sail his yacht from Sydney into Queensland in contravention of the border rules while others are unable to rejoin families or take holidays overseas, or when a kid boasts about his family sneaking through back-roads from Melbourne to the Gold Coast when everyone else is stuck on one side of a border, Bartel's behaviour smacks of the kinds of inequities, rule-breaking and 'above the law' mentality that wounds an otherwise obedient community.

Policing this behaviour and ensuring the law is applied evenly and equally to all people is one very serious and very important method of keeping at bay the negative mental health impact of our necessary public health orders. A necessary public shaming.

Influencer responsibility and public shaming

Although they are a relatively new form of media personality and content creator, influencers who trade on their public persona to earn money by simultaneously promoting themselves and their products have an added ethical responsibility to the community-not only because they are content creators privileged by a large following but because they do have genuine influence as role models.