Online shaming forces 'most hated man on internet' to back off from drug price rise (sort of)

Online shaming is frequently in the news these days, typically for the very worst reasons: ruined lives, lost jobs, frothing mobs in a frenzy to steamroll the subject of their dissatisfaction. But here at last is one case where the mob may have done some good.

In an interview with the American Broadcasting Co last Tuesday night, chastened Wall Street bro Martin Shkreli - previously, internet public enemy No1 - announced that he actually wouldn't jack up the price of an important Aids drug.

reported the mark-up last Sunday in a blood-boiling piece on Shkreli's pharmaceutical start-up; his company bought Daraprim, a generic medication used to treat infections in Aids patients - and then raised the price from US$13.50 a pill to more than US$700.

Predictably, and justifiably, the story sparked a thunderclap of outrage on Twitter, where Shkreli maintained an absurdly flippant personal account. In the three days after the story went online, more than 50,000 people tweeted at Shkreli's handle - many of them calling him things like "the worst person in America" and "the personification of evil".

Shkreli was memed and eviscerated on Reddit; at least one Twitter user published Shkreli's personal contact information, a practice known as doxing. On Pastebin, another vigilante published the emails of all his employees. In other words, the online mob did all the worst, most destructive things that we tell people never to do - and it worked, spectacularly, for the greater good. Shkreli's backflip means people will retain their access to a potentially life-saving medication.

Shkreli's actions were shocking for a simple reason: It was a rare moment of complete transparency in health care, where motives, prices and how the system works are rarely talked about so nakedly.