Let's stop apologizing on the internet
The Chrissy Teigen-Courtney Stodden debacle kicked off a predictable cycle.
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Full disclosure: I should probably examine my soft spot for Chrissy Teigen. —Kate
For all the problems—around communication, activism, shopping without putting on pants—that the internet has solved, the business of apologies is undeniably worse off. They’re a tired trope on platforms like YouTube and in the form of Notes App statements on Twitter and carefully-crafted PR blasts from celebrities. Yesterday—as, like it or not, you probably know—Chrissy Teigen had to issue another one.
I’ve always been generous in my assessments of Teigen. She’s put her foot in her mouth and posted ill-advised tweets, but I believe the backlash she receives has not been proportional to the actual amount of harm she’s caused—until this week. In the early 2010s, she used Twitter to publicly—and, allegedly, privately—tell a then-teenage Courtney Stodden to kill themself. Multiple times.
This is as mind-boggling as it is horrific. It’s hard to square the Teigen who wrote those tweets with the Teigen we know now, who has endured similar abuse and (briefly) left Twitter because of it. She issued a public apology on Wednesday, saying she’s also attempted to reach Stodden privately. Stodden says they have not heard from Teigen.
Which is a shame. Stodden needs to be the one to receive this apology, because I think it’s high time we accept that public internet apologies almost always make things worse.
An apology is not a performance. It’s an acknowledgement of regret between the perpetrator of an offense and the person they hurt or offended. Whether or not the apology is acceptable is only up to the latter to decide. But now, everyone else on the planet is allowed an opinion, too. And somehow, it's those people who decide whether or not an apology is successful.
This means that Teigen’s genuine “I’m mortified and sad at who I used to be. I was an insecure, attention seeking troll. I am ashamed and completely embarrassed at my behavior” has been totally overshadowed by people picking apart the awkward but relatively benign fact that she said she works so hard to be “beloved.”
People today, the theories go, are either too sensitive, too ignorant, too obsessive, or too forgiving. But people are all these things, and none of them. Only recently have we had seemingly every single person in one digital room, and somehow this created an expectation that they all need to agree on everything that happens.
This is why public apologies always, on some level, fail—universal public forgiveness is not possible. We all have different backgrounds and brains and experiences that inform our opinions on whatever just went down. And if you look up from the dissecting and the anger and the but-what-abouts, you may discover that the actual people involved have already moved on.