Why failure feels so good

From the pandoro-gate to Fogazzi’s balance sheet: two ways of telling a crisis

In January, Chiara Ferragni’s acquittal in the Balocco case closed a legal chapter, but not a reputational one. The numbers tell a story no verdict can erase: her company’s revenue collapsed by more than 80% between 2023 and 2024, staff dropped from 27 to 6 employees, and fines plus settlements drained more than three million euros from its accounts. Figures that any business owner would read with dread, and that instead became, for a slice of onlookers, material to comment on with the lightness of a gossip magazine.

A few weeks ago it was another protagonist of digital beauty’s turn. Cristina Fogazzi, known online as Estetista Cinica, told her followers that Re-Forme, the company behind the Veralab brand, had closed its latest fiscal year with revenue down ten million euros and an operating loss of roughly three million. She announced it herself, through a video and an interview, getting ahead of anyone else who might have broken the news first. And she is the same entrepreneur who, during the pandoro-gate, had refused to join the chorus against her friend Ferragni, comparing the mood on social networks to Hunger Games: people ready to “tear each other apart” for a few extra likes.

Two different stories, one common thread: a stumble, real or assumed, by someone who was admired only a moment earlier sparks a kind of collective euphoria. That reaction has a name.

Schadenfreude: the science behind the pleasure of misfortune

Germans call it schadenfreude, literally “harm-joy”, and researchers have studied it for decades. Marco Brambilla and Simona Riva, social psychologists at the University of Milano-Bicocca, showed in a 2017 study that witnessing someone else’s misfortune isn’t just a passing guilty pleasure: it satisfies fundamental psychological needs such as self-esteem and a sense of control over the world, especially when the person affected is seen as morally questionable, or simply too lucky compared to us.

Even more striking is the research led by Harvard psychologist Mina Cikara, who with Susan Fiske showed that the brain reacts differently depending on who trips: when a rival stumbles, the brain’s reward region lights up almost as if we had won something ourselves. It isn’t an individual quirk but a group-identity mechanism: if “they” lose, “we” win by reflection, even from the couch.

Applied to social platforms, the mechanism intensifies. An influencer with millions of followers stops being seen as an individual and becomes a category: whoever made it, whoever earns money with apparent ease, whoever sells an image of perfection. When that category wobbles, onlookers feel little empathy for a struggling human being, and much satisfaction at seeing a hierarchy they resented get turned upside down.

Justine Sacco and the other cases that became shaming textbooks

The phenomenon isn’t limited to Italy, and it isn’t new either. In 2013, American manager Justine Sacco boarded a flight to South Africa with a hundred and fifty followers on Twitter and a tasteless joke posted right before takeoff. She landed to find her name topping worldwide trends and her career in ruins, while thousands of strangers followed the unfolding drama live, as if it were a television series. Journalist Jon Ronson told that story for The New York Times Magazine and later expanded it into the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, now a reference point for anyone studying digital shaming: according to Ronson, people who take part in an online pile-on rarely think they’re hurting a real person, because the screen turns the target into a symbol.

A study published in the Italian journal Culture e Studi del Sociale tried to measure this dynamic systematically, analyzing hundreds of shaming episodes: the punishment, almost always disproportionate to the original offense, feeds itself, because every share and every outraged comment produces visibility and gratification for whoever posts it, regardless of what actually happens to the person on the receiving end.

Me and Umberto Eco: when the pub moved online

In 2015, during a lecture at the University of Turin, Umberto Eco delivered a line that later became famous: social media, he said, gives legions of idiots the right to speak, when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without damaging the community. They used to be silenced right away, while now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel laureate. The first time I read it, I found it a bit snobbish, as Eco often struck me. Years later, scrolling through the comments under any ordinary post, I had to admit it: he was completely right.

At the bar, the local loudmouth ran into a natural limit: a handful of regulars, one evening, maybe a bartender who told him to pipe down. Online, that limit no longer exists. Someone who sneers at the news of a company’s financial slide, or an influencer’s stumble, isn’t speaking to three friends anymore, but to a potentially infinite crowd, with the same typographic dignity as a real columnist or economist. And the uncomfortable truth is that no one is entirely immune: even people who consider themselves level-headed have found themselves scrolling through a thread of insults with a mix of unease and morbid curiosity, unable to close the tab.

Why hating online costs so little

Social platforms strip away most of what, in real life, keeps us from judging out loud. There’s no face to watch in real time, no tremor in the voice to notice, no risk of an awkward reply in front of witnesses. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect: physical distance and anonymity, even just perceived, lower the threshold of moral self-control. On top of that sits a very concrete incentive, the algorithmic one: content that sparks outrage gets more interactions, hence more reach, and platforms have no business reason to slow that down.

The result is a near-perfect feedback loop. The more admired someone once was, the more their collapse drives engagement; the more engagement it drives, the more the algorithm pushes it; the more it gets pushed, the wider the pile-on spreads, reaching people who, until the day before, had never even heard of Chiara Ferragni or Cristina Fogazzi.

What’s left after the pile-on

Fogazzi has said she seriously considered shutting down her profiles. She didn’t, but the temptation says a lot about how exhausting it has become, for anyone working online, to be honest about bad news knowing it will land as someone else’s victory rather than as a moment of transparency. It’s an uncomfortable paradox: brands and public figures are asked for more authenticity, and then punished for the very authenticity that shows a crack.

I don’t think we’ll ever stop feeling a flicker of satisfaction at the stumble of someone we once admired: the research explains that far too well to pretend otherwise. But between feeling that flicker quietly and turning it into a public comment, signed with a name and surname, lies the whole difference between a human thought and summary justice. The corner bar used to close at eleven. Our comments, unfortunately, stay open forever.