What Does Forgiveness Look Like in the Age of the Internet

Yom Kippur, one of the most important Jewish High Holidays, is a day when Jews across the world reconnect with those they have wronged and apologize for their wrongdoing. The holiday offers an opportunity for new beginnings each year, with the idea that we are eternally growing, becoming better versions of ourselves, and must release both guilt of wrongdoing and resentment of being wronged in order to wholly move forward. It is at this time of year that I find myself thinking about what forgiveness means and can look like during the era of the internet, in which wrongdoings are preserved in human history and captured without fading, a practice that is particularly punitive towards women who become vilified in online spaces. 

The practice of punishing women in the media’s gaze is not a new one. Those who witnessed the treatment of female pop and movie stars from the 2000s might recall the intensely sexist and sexualizing scrutiny that many of them received, contributing to online campaigns of harassment. At a baseline, such treatment is in no way justified as a way to treat a human being, celebrity or not. 

More concerning is how the public gaze has crept into the realm of everyday life, where interactions are recorded and posted online to an abundance of viewers. When the spotlight of shame and ridicule no longer only falls on celebrities, ordinary people—often women—have the potential to go viral for all the wrong reasons, with moments of their lives being preserved and replayed on repeat. 

In 2025, an affair at a Coldplay concert created a firestorm across the internet, leading to significant online harassment for the woman involved in the incident. In 2026, a video of a woman stealing a trash can after a Knicks victory in New York also went viral. Both women lost their jobs as a result of these digital records. Their names are now attached to these stories, something that will no doubt continue to impact their lives moving forward. 

What becomes difficult, then, is indeed moving forward. How do we gain forgiveness when internet records will preserve these moments for decades to come? Vayikra 5:5 from the Torah offers insight into ways that Judaism considers forgiveness, with the chapter dedicated to understanding different transgressions and the way that they can be forgiven socially and spiritually. 

“And it shall be, when someone incurs guilt in any one of these cases, that he shall confess the sin which he had committed, and he shall bring his guilt offering to the Lord for his sin which he had committed.” 

While “guilt offering” in this instance refers to a historical practice of animal sacrifice, it underscores the importance of guilt and harm recognition in Jewish understandings of repentance and forgiveness. People cannot simply expect to be forgiven for wrongdoings, this section suggests, but rather must invest effort, time, and other resources into making amends and repairing the spiritual harm both within themselves and the physical or emotional harm incurred by others. 

The challenge in the modern era is measuring this repair: because repair in the Torah is described as both a spiritual process and a process involving the wronged parties, it can be difficult to assess if an individual has sufficiently addressed their wrongdoing from the outside perspective of internet observers. 

What does forgiveness look like for an interaction that perhaps only directly impacted several people, but now lives on in the memories of countless others? And how does this change depending on gender? 

Maybe our earliest answer to this question comes from Monica Lewinsky, who faced intense media scrutiny and harsh treatment following the publicized scandal with Bill Clinton, something that he has distanced himself from and barely mentions in a memoir. It seems society seeks to define women in the internet era based on moments of scandal or lapsed judgement, even as men are provided the benefit of the doubt or the opportunity to move forward. 

At a time of year when forgiveness is top of mind, I wonder if there’s also merit to being mindful of which social criticism of individuals we participate in and which we abstain from.  Perhaps holding onto the worst everyday moments of others—particularly women—worsens our ability to forgive ourselves and distracts the severe injustices in society that warrant deeper attention.