Last week I started the hashtag #distractinglysexy, in response to Nobel prizewinning scientist Tim Hunt’s ill-advised comments about men falling in love with over-emotional women in laboratories. Despite claims that the response to Hunt’s comments constituted an online “march of the feminist bullies”, no one who was part of this humorous attempt to highlight the varied and complex work of female scientists called for Hunt’s resignation or hounded him online, but that was the way it was framed.

Tim Hunt shouldn't resign. He should lead the way against sexism in science | Van Badham Read more

There were undoubtedly unpleasant people on social media crowing about the man’s downfall but as far as I could see the discussion was largely jocular and – owing to the fact that many of the female scientists were posting photos under their own names – mostly professional.

The Hunt controversy continues to make headlines, with Boris Johnson and Brian Cox wading in this week as the backlash to the backlash. I even heard it said on Radio 4 this morning that “Tim Hunt was hounded from his job by a Twitterstorm”. This is patently not the case.

As Jon Ronson’s excellent book So Now You’ve Been Publicly Shamed deftly illustrates, outrage has become the currency of the internet. A person can go viral as the result of an ill-advised remark and it can leave their real life, their career, in tatters.

It is tempting to think this was the case with Hunt’s resignation. In actual fact it was clearly embarrassment on the part of the scientific community at his retrograde sexism, and that sexism being splashed across the media, which led to pressure on him to resign. University College London, where Hunt held a professorship before his resignation and which was the first university to admit women on the same terms as men, would have no truck with comments such as Hunt’s. No doubt concern about an international PR disaster played a part, but anyone who knows anything about the university’s founding principles would have expected this result, whether justified or not.

By blaming mobs of internet feminists for the downfall of Hunt, the media are ascribing them power

“Outrage” cases such as Hunt’s so often follow a predictable, almost formulaic cycle. I have long felt that the mainstream media overestimate the importance of Twitter, perhaps because it seems to mainly comprise journalists and influential people. Someone says something ill-advised and social media will respond accordingly, with some users making jokes, or indulging in a gentle ribbing, and others being altogether more unpleasant. Said person will then lose their job, or apologise. This is when the second outrage wave, declaring the first outrage wave to have been disproportionate, kicks in like clockwork. Throughout, there is an assumption that social media are some kind of homogeneous entity, with news stories presenting tweets as though they are part of a cohesive, linear narrative rather than the tangled wordcloud that they actually signify.

Twitter also gives the illusion of reversing the normal power dynamics. Suddenly powerful people – often men – and corporations, cannot ignore the outraged voices of the “rest” of the population. Yet this is an illusion. By blaming the downfall of Hunt on mobs of internet feminists, the media are ascribing them power, transforming everyone on social media with feelings about sexism into a dangerous monolith that threatens free speech. They must then be criticised and undermined, rendering them even less powerful than before. Lift the emerald curtain, however, and it’s just a load of men and women with opinions on stuff, in the same way that people have been having opinions on stuff for thousands of years. It’s just that now they are being published.

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I’m not saying that public shaming hasn’t become a problem on the internet – it absolutely has. But as these stories appear again and again, it may be time to ask ourselves who benefits. How much money have media organisations (often run by powerful men) made from social media activity regarding the sexism of other powerful men, for instance? It has generated headline after headline, yet sexism hasn’t stopped.

In voicing their genuine frustrations about sexism, women are providing media outlets with “clickbait” content, largely for free. And it will continue, at least until the media start taking women’s stories seriously by hiring them and allowing them to shape the news agenda in more profound ways.

Until then, going viral is often our only recourse. But ask how much power it really wields, and the answer is probably much less than you think.