“So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” begins with a mini-example involving the author, just to give a taste of how aggravating Twitter can be. He finds a fake @Jon_Ronson tweeting and discovers that the spambot is the creation of a team of academics. When he tweets to ask them to take the spambot down, the response is “We prefer the term infomorph.” This spat isn’t much, but it’s a good lead-in to the book’s first major episode: the outing of the popular writer Jonah Lehrer for including fake quotes from Bob Dylan in his book “Imagine,” which was subsequently withdrawn and pulped. This episode made headlines when it happened. But Mr. Ronson has the tangled story of what Mr. Lehrer’s shaming was really about.

This book’s he said/he said is as fascinating as it is awful. It combines the stories of Mr. Lehrer and Michael C. Moynihan, the Dylanologist who spotted the fake Dylan quotes. They were truly inconsequential: Mr. Lehrer had just tacked on a little extra verbiage to things Dylan had really said. They probably wouldn’t have done him ruinous damage. It was lying about them that did that trick.

As Mr. Lehrer says to Mr. Ronson, who admits he had to do a lot of disingenuous flattering and agreeing with Mr. Lehrer to get this information, once he had insisted the quotes were real and begun trying to fake their provenance, he was cooked. His self-pity and lack of insight are stunning. The more he lied, the more of a challenge he gave Mr. Moynihan, who sounds as if he didn’t want this fiasco any more than Mr. Lehrer did. “It was like they were both in a car with failed brakes, hurtling helplessly toward this ending together,” Mr. Ronson writes.

Mr. Moynihan reached the point at which too many people knew about his full exposé for him not to publish it. As for Mr. Lehrer, he made a public apology with a giant Twitter feed on a screen behind him, so that reactions were visible in real time. For a while he played it genuinely contrite, and viewers were willing to forgive him. But then he blew it so badly that the hate-on began, and talk turned to his $20,000 fee for the event at which he was speaking. All was lost, as in: “Wish I could get $20,000 to say that I’m a lying dirtbag.”

Less well-known, really shocking parts of the book tell of two guys making dumb jokes at a conference for tech developers. One of them made a nerdy, techy joke with sexual overtones, at which point a woman in front of him stood up, turned around and took his picture. She posted it on Twitter and was very proud of herself. (“Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard.”) He lost his job. He posted an apology that included the fact that he had three children to support, and the woman demanded that he remove that information. Who suffered more? He was out of work; she remained smug; but she became subject to vicious sexual comments on the web bulletin board 4chan/b/.