What Does Embarrassing Yourself on the Internet Feel Like?
It feels like every negative emotion in the world arriving at once.
From 2018 to 2023, Josh Popkin struggled significantly with his mental health. For two of those years, he was also internet famous—very famous. At his peak, his content generated two hundred million views per month and his audience grew to more than 3.5 million followers.
Struggling with your mental health and feeling unlike yourself can already be an isolating experience. Experiencing it while millions of people are watching, commenting, judging and forming opinions about you is something else entirely.
It was a terrible combination: an ambitious person, an enormous audience and a mind that was not in a healthy place.
Josh Popkin has lived through what many people fear most: being seen by the world during the wrong season of your life—and then having that version of you preserved forever.
What Does Being the Target of Internet Hate Do to You?
It can make you resent people.
When thousands—or millions—of strangers attack your character, career, family, friends and community simultaneously, you see a side of humanity that most people never encounter at that scale.
Josh Popkin has been at the center of two major internet controversies. His experience left him questioning whether public shaming actually accomplishes what many people believe it does.
The stated purpose of public accountability is often to make someone recognize that they have done something wrong and encourage them to change. But mass humiliation can have the opposite effect. Rather than bringing someone closer to society, it can push that person further away from it.
According to Popkin:
“Many people who are publicly shamed need more connection, accountability and support—not total social abandonment. People who behave outrageously online may already be struggling in ways the audience cannot see. Sometimes the behavior everyone is condemning is itself evidence that something is deeply wrong.”
Accountability and compassion do not have to be opposites. A person can have done something wrong and still be a human being worth helping.
What Led Josh Popkin to Chase Internet Fame?
Before becoming internet famous, Josh was depressed.
Then when he began posting videos, likes, comments, messages, followers and admiration arrived in enormous quantities. What initially felt validating quickly became something he wanted more and more of.
The problem with attention is that there is always another level. Yesterday’s viral video becomes today’s baseline. To continue growing, creators can feel pressure to become louder, stranger and more outrageous.
How Many People Deal With Internet Harassment?
Social media has made almost anyone capable of becoming the target of mass criticism.
Popkin began to understand this differently after his own career shifted from being a creator to representing other creators.
While working as a talent agent for TikTok creators, he watched clients experience smaller versions of the same phenomenon on a regular basis.
Popkin understands why his own infamous subway video generated outrage. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he filmed a comedy video in which he spilled a container of cereal on a New York City subway. Looking back, he believes the stunt was inappropriate and understands why people were angry.
But later, he watched creators whose content was far less provocative face similar dynamics.
Some were teachers making videos about their everyday experiences in education. Popkin remembers watching creators he knew personally as thoughtful and empathetic people face strangers attempting to get them fired or portray them as fundamentally bad people because of individual videos or disagreements online.
It changed the way he understood his own experience.
Online harassment is not limited to people who have clearly done something wrong. Anyone whose content reaches enough people can eventually become the subject of criticism, misinterpretation or outrage.
The internet has an enormous appetite for controversy. Nuance has a much harder time competing for attention.
What Is the Hardest Part About Embarrassing Yourself Online?
The hardest part is that it doesn’t necessarily end.
Before the internet, a person could make a mistake, embarrass themselves, apologize to the people affected, learn from it and eventually move forward.
The internet changed that.
Search engines, screenshots, archived articles, reposts and social platforms can preserve a person’s worst moments indefinitely. A mistake that lasted several minutes can become one of the first things a stranger learns about someone years later.
For Popkin, that permanence has been one of the most psychologically difficult parts of the experience.
When the moment being preserved is something that already causes intense shame, repeatedly encountering it—or knowing that every new person can encounter it—can make moving forward extraordinarily difficult.
New relationships can begin with a calculation: Should he explain his past before someone searches his name? Should he say nothing and hope they understand the context themselves? What happens if they find the worst version of the story first?
In that environment, a person can stop simply being a person.
They become the full-time public-relations manager for a caricature of themselves created during one period of their life.
What Did the Internet Get Wrong About Josh Popkin?
The story of Josh Popkin is complicated because parts of what the internet reported about him were true.
Popkin was a comedy creator with more than 3.5 million followers. He made increasingly outrageous videos in pursuit of attention. And he did become the center of an internet controversy after filming himself spilling cereal on a New York City subway during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He regrets the stunt and understands why people criticized it.
But Popkin argues that other claims subsequently made about him were inaccurate.
Years later, when his company Carter-Agency became involved in a business dispute, several publications reported claims involving the names “Ben Popkin” and “Ben Carter,” suggesting that Josh had used false identities to conceal who he was.
According to Popkin, those reports conflated him with his brother and business partner, Ben Popkin.
Ben Popkin was a real person and a cofounder of the company. Josh maintains that he and his brother represented themselves using their own names in company contracts and correspondence, and that he did not represent himself as “Ben Popkin” or “Ben Carter.”
For Popkin, the episode demonstrated one of the most frightening characteristics of internet controversy: once a narrative begins spreading, later stories can repeat claims from earlier stories until repetition itself begins to look like corroboration.
The distinction matters.
Popkin does not argue that every criticism made about him was unfair. He argues that people should be accountable for what they actually did—not for things they did not do.
The internet is remarkably good at preserving claims. It is considerably worse at preserving corrections, context and change.
What Should You Do If You’ve Been the Target of Online Harassment?
First, reach out to another human being.
Being attacked online can be profoundly isolating. Imagine the feeling of a rumor spreading about you throughout a high school. Then imagine that the school has millions of students, never closes and remembers everything forever.
For someone experiencing mass online harassment, the psychological consequences can be severe. Popkin’s own experience included periods of depression, anxiety, panic, anger, numbness and suicidal thoughts.
No one should navigate that experience entirely alone.
Reach out to someone you trust—a parent, sibling, friend, partner, therapist, coach, attorney or another person capable of helping you stay connected to the world outside the screen.
If you are in the United States and having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It is free, confidential and open 24 hours a day.
Second, understand that you still have options.
Your life may change. Your reputation may change. Some relationships may change.
But a search result is not a complete human biography.
One of the things Popkin wishes he had understood earlier is that other people do not have exclusive ownership over his story.
Journalists can write about you. Strangers can post about you. Commenters can criticize you. Search engines can index all of it.
But you can speak too.
First-party content gives people the opportunity to explain events in their own words, acknowledge what they got wrong, challenge claims they believe are inaccurate, provide documentation and—perhaps most importantly—show who they became afterward.
Everyone deserves the opportunity to tell their side of a story.
That does not mean rewriting history.
It means adding to it.
Because a human life should never be reduced to its most clickable moment.
More about Josh Popkin, and his own account of Carter-Agency.