A local Facebook group brought out the best and worst of the Ballito community before meeting its demise.
‘Ballito Name and Shame’ was created by Ballito resident Matthew Austin about two years ago after an email from a resident attacking another resident was circulated on social media.
“It was basically character assassination. I engaged with the individual and got a different view of what happened, which kickstarted the concept,” he said.
Matthew and his family moved to Ballito four years ago and soon realised the small community had a lot of “coffee shop politics”.
Matthew started the group in partnership with another page, but was soon going at it alone.
“The ‘name and shame’ concept triggered an initial negative response, but it worked out because people had a place to share feelings of being wronged. At the beginning it was mainly the community versus businesses.”
The whole concept of “name and shame” is an emotional trigger that people are held publicly responsible for their actions.
Many people are scared of the threat of defamation and legal action and after consulting his lawyer, the legal test applied simply is that what is said must be true and of public interest.
“Due to Facebook being a virtual extension of ourselves, your name was associated to all comments placed in the group and the members had to accept responsibility for their posts.”
By having a forum for the community to place in public, either issues and praise enabled the community members to engage with each other.
The page grew to about 1 800 members in about two years, disallowing advertising and seeing posts on anything from bad service at a restaurant to a great experience at a local business.
When issues were raised, Matthew often acted as mediator between the parties.
“There were positives – as a business owner, if you do not know something is wrong, you cannot do anything to rectify it. It took the ‘hearsay’ out of the question.”
Matthew said that members had gone through bad business experiences with companies and individuals and wanted to warn others in the community so that they do not have the same issues as the current options to get recourse via the legal system is costly and ended with no result.
“These unscrupulous business actions are then repeated with more community members being harmed. With a forum to expose their issues, they felt empowered to share their experiences.”
Around two months ago there was shift in “shamings” where personal and community behaviour issues were raised.
“A more empathetic and loving community was shown, you do not kick people when they are down. Moral issues were brought up and community members got behind the parties who were being mistreated ethically and morally. I do not know why it was shut down but someone must have complained to Facebook. I got a message one morning saying the group was deleted for bullying and that was that.”
He believes the page served its purpose.
Since then Matthew has created a new page: ‘People like us – Ballito’. He could not put an identity on the page but said it not the same beast as ‘Name and Shame’ but a free space for people share views focussed on our Ballito community.
“I am happy to admin the site, it will evolve or die off depending on the community,” he said.
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