“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
When bad behavior goes unchecked, it will grow and fester in secret. By exposing bad behavior, the system will be forced to clean it up.
This is part of how high trust systems maintain cooperation. As discussed, for example, in Eric D. Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, in high trust societies, the general expectation that people will behave in trustworthy ways leads to people making more cooperative choices. Since people are not perfect, a high trust society also punishes those who violate cooperative norms. In these cases, exposure—sunlight—is a key factor in maintaining trust.
However, it does not follow from this that any and all exposure is good. Another observation from The Origin of Wealth is that when individuals perceive themselves as being in a low trust society, they will avoid cooperative actions. This becomes a feedback loop. The perception of being in a low trust society can lead to the reality of being in a low trust society.
What does that have to do with exposing bad behavior? At any given time in a high trust society, there is uncooperative behavior going on. Under usual conditions the system can easily survive these shocks. Bad behavior is punished and everyone else continues to cooperate.
Now imagine a world where every infraction is publicized for all to see. (We might call that world The Internet.) All of a sudden, people see uncooperative, low trust actions happening ALL. THE. TIME. This environment, which is actually behaving as a functional high cooperation environment starts to feel like a low trust, low cooperation environment. And because people act based on the norms they see around them, more people will start acting as if they are in a low cooperation environment, creating a feedback loop of decreasing trust.
This means that, contrary to what one might think, widely publicizing bad behavior in a high trust environment (rather than just punishing it locally) can turn it into a low trust environment. The change is not caused by the uncooperative acts—remember, the system is designed to absorb a low enough rate of those. The blame goes to the publication of those acts.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but only as long as people are unwilling to have their actions exposed to the light. Overexposure normalizes uncooperative behavior, leading it to multiply.