VANCOUVER: Monica Lewinsky made the case for a more compassionate Internet last week, while touting her credentials as “patient zero” of Internet-shaming culture.

Lewinsky returned to the public eye last year and has kept her media appearances to a minimum. Her message at a TED talk in Vancouver on Thursday night recounted the trauma of becoming a public figure overnight.

“Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply,” Lewinsky said. “In 1998, after having been swept up in an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before.”

Her 18-minute long speech, called “The Price of Shame”, explained what it was like to be at the center of the first major scandal brought by the Internet, instead of traditional news sources. “I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously,” Lewinsky said.

With her private phone calls broadcast on television and the details of her romance dissected by the public, Lewinsky said her experience went unnamed then, but is called cyberbullying today.

“This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998. And by ‘this’, I mean the stealing of people’s private words, actions, conversations or photos and then making them public,” said Lewinsky. “Public without consent, public without context and public without compassion.”

She said that the judgment she received, not the content of the story in which she played a role, overwhelmed the news cycle and her.

“Public humiliation as a blood sport has to stop,” she said. “We need to return to a long-held value of compassion and empathy.”

Lewinsky’s crusade against cyberbullying became public last year, in her speech at Forbes’ Under 30 conference in October. She told that audience, and the one at TED, that being portrayed by strangers so suddenly caused her to lose her “sense of self”.