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How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  • deong 12y ago
    This is probably true, but it's shameful. The consequences of making a joke that doesn't land shouldn't be this severe. For what it's worth, nor should overreacting to one. I think Adria Richards was in every possible way, wrong. We're all wrong quite often though. She didn't deserve a tiny fraction of the shit that came her way either.
  • theorique 12y ago
    If you are a relatively famous person who has an audience/market who supports you despite (or even because of) an obnoxious persona or offensiveness to some people, then you are relatively immune to this kind of thing. Certainly, an "edgy" comic, or political commentator, can get away with a lot more than a CTO or CEO, even if the content is approximately the same. The danger comes when you misunderstand your core audience, or alienate them. If you go off brand at the same time as you write something dangerous, you risk offending your own audience. That can be deadly.
• lazyjones 12y ago
  Aren't all these Twitter sh*tstorms over within a few days, or in the worst case, weeks? People should just sit them out and not panic / call their lives ruined. Seems to work even for politicians.
  • tjic 12y ago
    Pax Dickinson is still unemployed a year later. People's names become toxic. Note that the Donglegate guy wouldn't let his name be used, and another woman in the article wouldn't do a followup interview.
    • ForHackernews 12y ago
      To be fair, Pax Dickinson wasn't one stupid tweet, it was a pattern of awful shit over years. At some point, it's not a careless lapse anymore, you're just a d-bag. A few examples: "In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though." "aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?" "Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron." And arguably the worst, for a freaking CTO: "Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn." Would you hire that guy to represent your company?
      • cheald 12y ago
        The first tweet, which seems to be the one that people reacted most strongly to, is pretty clearly a lampooning of Mel Gibson. I suspect most people missed that, though. It's distasteful, but it's not exactly Dickinson himself expressing racist, victim-blaming sentiments; it's a mockery of them. The second is a pretty standard libertarian talking-point (which is more "personal responsibility rah rah rah" than "yay, starving poor people!"). The third I don't really get (but I don't really follow basketball), and the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"; the truth of the statement is debatable, but I do think it takes some willful effort to read that and be offended by it. I think Dickinson made unwise choices in how he chose to tweet, but I also think the backlash he's suffered has been orders of magnitude worse than the offense. He has been made persona non grata to the point of being unemployable over a handful of ill-considered tweets - he's unemployable now because of the extent to which people have gone to associate him and anyone associated with him with racism, rape, and sexism - regardless of the reality of his actions. On one hand, he's suffering the consequences of his decisions (see tweet #2 for some schadenfreude). On the other, because the internet loves a shitstorm, it seems that the magnitude of the consequences are way out of line with the original offense.
        • 12y ago
  • freehunter 12y ago
    HR has the ability to use Google before they hire you, as do clients. So while you and I might not remember this person's name, it's still infamous.
• interknot 12y ago
  For whatever reason, the following snippet prompted me to see who the author was: Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?” As it turns out, the author is Jon Ronson. He's well worth checking out. I've particularly enjoyed The Men Who Stare at Goats (the book), The Secret Rulers of the World, and The Psychopath Test.
  • TheHippo 12y ago
    According to his wikipedia article he also is releasing a book called "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" on March 2015.
    • hullo 12y ago
      It also mentions that at the end of the linked article. This is an adapted excerpt from the book (unsurprisingly).
  • zimbu668 12y ago
    He also has an awesome story about his parents on This American Life(http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/214/transcript http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/214/t...) even though he (and they) are Welsh.
• mootothemax 12y ago
  As dislikable as the tweet's content is, it's truly frightening how quickly an incredibly large pitchforks-and-torches mob can come to life via the internet.
  • efaref 12y ago
    The tweet is clearly a quip about western white privilege. Her tweet caused no harm, but the blithering mass of bullying social justice warriors continually ruins lives.
  • maaaats 12y ago
    > As dislikable as the tweet's content is Did you read the article? By thinking for a few seconds, the point of the tweet is obviously not racist. Not a smart tweet, in retrospect, but. Here's her explanation from the article: > I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal. (...) Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.
    • mcphage 12y ago
      > Did you read the article? By thinking for a few seconds, the point of the tweet is obviously not racist. Honestly, does it even matter? Say it was a racist tweet, and she was a racist. Does that mean she deserved what happened to her? Definitely not.
      • sofal 12y ago
        It matters because making an offhand joke parodying a stupid person is something that we've all done. This example shows that if you make a little parody joke like that in the wrong medium, your life could permanently pivot 180 degrees for the worst.
        • mcphage 12y ago
          > This example shows that if you make a little parody joke like that in the wrong medium, your life could permanently pivot 180 degrees for the worst. Definitely. But my point was, whether it was racist or not, her life pivoted for the worse—and whether it was racist or not, she didn't deserve what happened to her.
• kefka 12y ago
  So far, what I see is: "Don't use Twitter." And on the smaller side is "Don't upload shit to social media."
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • fennecfoxen 12y ago
    You missed the bigger point, then: Mob justice is a barbaric and ugly thing; stop patting yourself on the back and thinking you're a good person for being a part of it.
    • paganel 12y ago
      This is not about justice, it's about a bad human being getting what she deserved. When you're an open racist you are a bad human being.
      • VikingCoder 12y ago
        "bad human being." I'm sorry, but none of us are capable of judging the entirety of a human being as "bad" or not, based on a few of their tweets. Cast the first stone, and all of that.
      • fennecfoxen 12y ago
        > This is not about justice, it's about a bad human being getting what she deserved. ... I'm sorry, I thought we were using the English language here and that we had a seven-letter Latin-derived word that we generally used to describe the situation of "[person] getting what [he/she] deserved". Perhaps I erred. Entschuldigung; tut mir leid. But regardless, even accepting the (modestly tendentious) assertion that this is about a Bad Human Being, angry mobs following the Outrage Of The Moment and out for blood are hideous and disgusting phenomena themselves at the best of times. The modern justice system was largely invented to counter these barbarous shortcomings, which is why we have nice things like presumption of innocence, rights of the accused, impartial trials, the notion of the finitude of one's debt to society, et cetera.
• karangoeluw 12y ago
  How is she is victim here? How is Twitter bad here? She made two racist comments in 1 tweet on her own will. That is not something that should be taken lightly, no matter what the platform. EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not commenting on whether firing her was fair or not, but rather how her completely intentional tweets makes Twitter the bad guy.
  • dominotw 12y ago
    It looked like a harmless joke to me. wtf is wrong with ppl.
    • paganel 12y ago
      Racist jokes are never harmless.
      • Pinatubo 12y ago
        Please elaborate on the harm caused by her tweet. Edit: Maybe I'm not being clear. What I mean is can you point to any harm done by her tweet besides hurt feelings?
        • paganel 12y ago
          Being publicly racist harms people towards which said racism is directed at. I honestly thought that was an established truth.
          • efaref 12y ago
            Except she wasn't being racist, she was being sarcastic about racism. And in any case, no crime deserves the horrific public shaming she got.
      • rblstr 12y ago
        Please point out the racism in her satire-laden joke about how america perceives the rest of the world? Am I the only one that "got" what she was saying?
• steven777400 12y ago
  Articles like this lend credence to the occasionally heard wisdom "Don't post anything personal on the internet, ever." I tell people I think that society is moving beyond digging into people's lives for little infractions, since with so much social media, everyone is guilty, but apparently that's not true. Or at least, not true yet.
• danso 12y ago
  I'd like to think that as the world gets more saturated in constant social media and sharing, that we'd have a higher tolerance for things...in this case, a joke that if a person told it to you, with the right tone of voice, it'd be funny...imagine Louis CK making that quip. But no, I doubt it...I think it's more a physical limitation of our brains...we just don't have the brain system designed to adequately consider all the context of all the messages we might consume in day...It's just easier to assume that a 140-character message really is an adequate reflection of someone who we have never met, and who we would have never been exposed to before the Internet. And it feels good to pat yourself on the back as you think, "Jeez, I can't believe such racist people still exist" To paraphrase the famous comic from the New Yorker, "On the Internet, no one knows that you have nuance"
  • natural219 12y ago
    The problem is compounded in that not only are people easily offended, savvy organizations (cough Gawker) have monetized being offended. So not only are our limited monkey brains quick to be insulted, there are now people whose job it is to find the Maximally Offensive Tweets of the day, which only compounds the problem.
    • twoodfin 12y ago
      Plus, for some reasonably large percentage of the populace, being righteously outraged is a pleasurable experience. In 1984, the inhabitants of Airstrip One needed nagging from the telescreen to do their morning calisthenics, but even Winston could get worked up for the Two Minute Hate.
  • pilsetnieks 12y ago
    Poe's Law: Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.
  • aptwebapps 12y ago
    It may take more than saturation in social media. I think it will take time. Eventually everyone's Bacon distance to someone who got shamed or similarly mistreated will be small enough that maybe there'll be enough awareness to prevent most occurrences.
• lbarrow 12y ago
  How was her life ruined? She lost her job, then got a new one. Her life seems fine.
  • mynameisvlad 12y ago
    Did you even read the article? - She was jobless for a period of time, and there's a lot of stress that comes with that. - Her family seemed to be set on disowning her for tarnishing their name. - She can't date without someone Googling her and most likely being turned off by what they find.
    • venomsnake 12y ago
      Turned off by what? A tweet ... unless for couple of million participants in the oppression olympics, for the sane people having said or done something offensive is not a big deal.
      • mynameisvlad 12y ago
        If so many people were offended on the internet, is it that big of a stretch that people in real life might be turned off too? Just because you or I don't think it's a big deal does not mean that others might share the same opinion. I could easily see how someone might be turned off, especially before actually meeting the person.
        • venomsnake 12y ago
          Actually yes. Internet is not real and is the place where everyone overreacts. As long as she is above the hot/crazy line, she won't be turned down dating for such a petty "offence"
          • mynameisvlad 12y ago
            You do realize that a concept in HIMYM does not accurately apply in real life, right?
• jstalin 12y ago
  If I say something stupid to a group of friends, usually they'll tell me it's stupid or I said something wrong, and everyone moves on. If I say something stupid on twitter, it's literally archived forever. Another reason I'm glad I've disconnected from all social media. I'll keep my stupid, non-politically correct jokes in my own head.
  • jgalt212 12y ago
    It's for that exact reason, I never post to Twitter. However, I consume a lot there. And as a consumer of various Twitter Feeds, I have to say I am pretty happy with the product.
  • ghaff 12y ago
    There is this idea of self-censorship before you post something public--which Twitter is. That said, I'm not unhappy that there was no Twitter when I was a young twenty-something. I have no doubt I would have posted things that I'm glad I didn't have the opportunity to.
  • celticninja 12y ago
    set up a twitter account and dont link it to your real name. sign up through a vpn, say waht you want and dont worry about it. unless what you say is actually illegal no one can really track you down without getting your login IP address from twitter. People get tracked down because they link it to their PSN/XBOX/FB account or reuse usernames between twitter and somewhere else they have left personal details. I have a twitter accout that I set up through TOR and a VPN. I use a username I have never used elsewhere. I dont post anything controversial but I would be pretty happy that I could not be traced without someone obtaining a court order requiring twitter to hand over my IP address, even then it would point to a VPN that (supposedly) does not keep logs.
    • Nicholas_C 12y ago
      Do you not interact with friends on Twitter? Not having that takes a lot of the fun out of Twitter.
• mc32 12y ago
  Two things: Don't be too clever. People trip over themselves to feel offended. Two, you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online. Not being malicious -just obnoxious. Yes all the tweets quoted in the article were obnoxious and leveraged stereotypes but I don't think people should be flogged for being like that. I remember all the obnoxious Polish jokes growing up. They were terrible. But I don't agree that they should be censored. Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes. It's like with friendships. With good friends you can nettle them; say terrible things and we know that's it's all in good fun, a ritual of sorts. With so so friends you don't make bad jokes because the friendship is too fragile. It's a sign of an immature or fragile society when bad jokes upset the cart. Edit. An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.
  • spikexxx 12y ago
    Over-reaction or not, freedom of speech does not guarantee a receptive audience.
    • mc32 12y ago
      It doesn't but one should expect some maturity from society. I think it'll take a generation maybe less but people will learn and understand it as an extension of self albeit diffused.
    • Amezarak 12y ago
      > Over-reaction or not, freedom of speech does not guarantee a receptive audience. That's so. But if society frequently inflicts severe extralegal punishment for unpopular speech, then you don't really have free speech. You just have First Amendment rights. They aren't the same thing. As a thought experiment, imagine Person X said something deemed offensive and society responded in a uniform manner - by constant public humiliation, refusing to do business with them, refusing to even speak to them, etc. All this is well within our legal rights (with maybe some exceptions) but life for such a person would be very difficult, if not impossible - they'd probably end up starving in the streets. That's not a very free society even if there are no legal consequences whatsoever for any speech. I think it's very important to affirm that even if someone says something offensive that the response should be measured.
• toothbrush 12y ago
  "The woman who took the photograph, Adria Richards, soon felt the wrath of the crowd herself. The man responsible for the dongle joke had posted about losing his job on Hacker News, an online forum popular with developers. This led to a backlash from the other end of the political spectrum. So-called men’s rights activists and anonymous trolls bombarded Richards with death threats on Twitter and Facebook." Wow, this almost makes it sound as if HN is a bunch of MRA losers :( A pity it's so sloppily worded (unless it's true, in which case, ugh).
  • dgabriel 12y ago
    Um, sometimes? HN is big, and there are crossover populations.
  • fizbin 12y ago
    I don't think HN is a bunch of MRA losers, but it's certainly closely connected to places that are. (as in, lots of people participate in HN who also participate in places that could be characterized as such) So I'd say it's MRA-loserville-adjacent.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  • potatolicious 12y ago
    HN isn't completely made up of MRA types, but if you've been noticing there are a lot of them here (along with your more typical "SJWs out to get us" types). HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago. Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind. There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.
    • ForHackernews 12y ago
      > There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn. Please tell me where? I've noticed the same irritating trends here. At this rate, I might just go back to Slashdot.
• doughj3 12y ago
  Another relevant instance from last Summer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869644
• devopsproject 12y ago
  It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt - mark twain
  • profinger 12y ago
    +1
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• steven2012 12y ago
  Except for Facebook and LinkedIn, I haven't used my real name and any personally identifiable information on the Internet in 20 years, since I realized that everything I wrote on Usenet would be there forever. There is no value with having the things I say potentially used against me for the rest of my life.
  • jstalin 12y ago
    Same here. I rotate my online username on forums and online comment systems every few months: https://fakena.me https://fakena.me.
    • mcphage 12y ago
      > I rotate my online username on forums and online comment systems every few months You might want to rotate your current one a little sooner ;-)
      • jstalin 12y ago
        Touché!
  • ashark 12y ago
    I do think it's a bit odd it's considered obvious that children should avoid putting any information online that could reveal their real identity/location/et c., but when people turn 18 it's suddenly not eyebrow-raising for them to have a bunch of social media accounts and such under their real names. Mind you, such caution used to be common sense behavior for everyone. Then Facebook[1] happened. The second Eternal September. It also seems to have become common for professionals to promote themselves under their real names without keeping separate, anonymous accounts for non-business activities. When it goes well they're growth-hacking (puke) their careers, using all their twitter followers and likes and GitHub projects or whatever to market themselves and/or their services and/or products they're paid to sell. When it goes poorly we get stories like this. Live by the sword, die by the sword. (I don't know that that applies in this case, but it has in others) The situation in the article is really shitty, of course, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm just puzzled that throwing your real name on every corner of the Internet stopped drawing derision and advice to cut it out, at some point. It's why the calls for reducing online anonymity to end online harassment by strangers strike me as such a strange approach—the absolutely undisputed solution used to be more anonymity! It's a major cultural shift from the very recent past, but I don't see it brought up very often. [1] Not just Facebook, obviously, but the timing fits.
• taylorwc 12y ago
  I think they article would more aptly have been titled, "How One Thoughtless Public Expression of Justine Sacco's Lack of Judgment and Racism Had Consequences." Really hard to feel sympathy for her.
  • theorique 12y ago
    How about, "one ironic joke, and then a long flight where she could not communicate that she was being ironic, cost Justine Sacco a lot". She wasn't being racist, she was lampooning American insularity. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't get that it was a joke, and/or didn't get the joke, and she paid the price.
    • taylorwc 12y ago
      Even if one were to give her the benefit of the doubt on whether or not her tweets express racist sentiment, there's still a stupendous lack of judgment on her part. She's saying things publicly, associated with her name. Anyone who expresses something in that fashion should be fully prepared to deal with backlash. She should have the right to express her views, even if they are unpopular--and she should be willing to handle the consequences.
      • theorique 12y ago
        Perhaps, but in this case, the consequences were really disproportionate to the "crime". Here's what "should" have happened: <sacco>: <original tweet> <public>: Hey, that's really racist. <sacco>: Oh, I didn't mean it that way - I'm making fun of American insularity. <public>: OK, I still don't like it, but I get what you meant now.
        • taylorwc 12y ago
          I agree with you that there was an overreaction. But that's a risk each of us runs when we publish something via a public medium. Any time I want to publish something, whether it's a private SMS, a tweet, a comment on HN, or something else, I'm obliged to consider its content, and make a judgment call on whether it's appropriate. If I'm wrong, I have to deal with it.
• klenwell 12y ago
  I like to think of self-righteousness as a drug. A subtle but lingering high. I know I get off on it from time to time. Post anything online and there's a chance you'll be someone's next fix.
  • metaphorm 12y ago
    I think this is very well stated and I'd like to see this idea presented more frequently in dialogue surrounding internet zealotry. Simply put, a great deal of what drives the extremist behavior on the internet is straight up narcissism. The people participating in pile-on internet bullying campaigns feel good about themselves when they do so, and receive praise (from the internet mob that they have aligned with) for doing so.
• malkia 12y ago
  Wondering why no one came up with "I'm Justine Sacco"
• sharkweek 12y ago
  I wonder about this a lot - in 15-20 years, political candidates / public figures will have hundreds of things they have said online embarrassing their campaigns/images. Do we all just become more accepting of sarcasm, racism, bad jokes, etc? Is it a step backwards or is it a step forward? I can tell you for a fact I'm sure things on my Twitter account could likely be taken out of context as I can sometimes be a bit of a "Larry David" with my public observations that I can't help but share.
  • mercurial 12y ago
    Public figures can afford "online reputation management" firms.
  • danielweber 12y ago
    A lot of the people planning to be politicians are purposefully keeping their current digital life clean. CJ John Roberts knew from a young age he wanted to be Chief Justice. (Overachiever, but lots of us on HN are overachievers.) He kept his record very clean. He never even got a speeding ticket. And I totally see understand why: he was aware of how the media pick apart people, and who knows what one tiny thing might spiral out of control. But it means the CJ, when making ruling about police stops, has never actually experienced something the majority of Americans have, and the Court loses some bit of useful perspective.
• swamp40 12y ago
  Cool scrolling visual effect with those birds in the top illustration. Wonder if it was intentional?
• jonifico 12y ago
  I actually thought it was funny. If you get offended by a thing that's so over the top it just can't be taken seriously, you sir are an absolute moron. Hate how people are just looking to get excuses to get offended and show off their 'righteousness' at the expense of other people. Point is: It's a joke. Learn the difference.
  • carlyahood 12y ago
    "It's a prank bro! It's just a prank! Calm down!" Offensive people who do offensive things and then defend them saying 'it was just a joke, bro!'
  • bighi 12y ago
    But it's not that over the top. There are A LOT of people that would say the "I'm white" comment and MEAN IT. It's not obviously over the top. Once I saw a T-Shirt in tshirthell.com that said something like "arrest black babies before they become criminals". I don't remember the exact words. THAT is obviously and ridiculously over the top.
  • fit2rule 12y ago
    I don't think anyone got truly offended, just that they saw an opportunity to do something interesting with Twitter - which is mostly a very mundane activity - and went with it. An opportunity to rally the pitchfork brigade can feel very empowering to people who spend a majority of their time 'socializing' with a facile society such as Twitter provides. If you ask me, the root cause of this cannibalistic mob desire is, fundamentally, dire loneliness. When can you get 15,000 people to hate something you've decided is worth hating, its quite a buzz.
  • mercurial 12y ago
    > If you get offended by a thing that's so over the top it just can't be taken seriously, you sir are an absolute moron. I gather many youtube commenters have a Twitter account and an attitude.
  • MichaelGG 12y ago
    He explains his viewpoint: "Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized." This is delusional slacktivism. Overthrowing power structures and hierarchies by retweeting. How more delusional can you get? OTOH, if you've got a PR job or a shitty position where you'd get fired for saying such stuff, you really ought to be ever so careful. Why are people posting this stuff with their real names attached? Unless you've got FU money or are in a career track that's mostly immune to this kind of harassment, just use a separate personal account. FFS, does anyone think the general public wants your tweets?
• ll123 12y ago
  Regardless of your political orientation, you should think twice before cheerleading mob justice. If you think mob justice is good and if you think "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" then you're just saying unpopular speech is always bad and wrong. Once the mob turns against your political beliefs then one day you might be the one getting attacked and fired.
  • spb 12y ago
    Pretty sure there's a pg essay on this. "Unpopular speech is not necessarily bad and wrong" is pretty much, like, the Official Opinion of Hacker News.
• gadders 12y ago
  I think some people don't feel fully validated or had a complete day unless they have found something online to be outraged about.
  • to3m 12y ago
    This has long been the raison d'etre of downmarket UK newspapers The Daily Mail and The Daily Express.
    • gadders 12y ago
      A fair point. Also Comment is Free in the Guardian.
• jim_greco 12y ago
  1) It's an offensive tweet. Whether you intend something to be offensive or not doesn't make it any less offensive. 2) It's very easy to pass off casual racism as a joke or a misunderstanding of the medium after it blows up in your face.
  • giarc 12y ago
    I totally agree. I was also surprised to see the author of the article defend the tweet as well. >But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Her comments that followed seemed to agree with your second point.
  • teraflop 12y ago
    Even if we were to take the offensiveness of the tweet as a given, the reaction seems insanely disproportionate. It's great to push back against casual racism, but I don't think anything is gained by turning it into a lottery where any given tweet has a one-in-a-million chance of provoking a national-scale, life-destroying burst of outrage, and the rest are ignored.
  • wallyhs 12y ago
    You can't control what other people find offensive, and you can't avoid offending other people. You can control your own reaction to what you find offensive.
    • jim_greco 12y ago
      That's a very simple way to look at human interactions and it doesn't give you a licensce to go around saying whatever you want.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  • ianamartin 12y ago
    In my experience, the people who find these things the most offensive are the people the barb is pointed at. Privileged white people--who have nothing better to do than run around worrying about what other people are thinking out loud, trying hard to make sure that the whole world is protected from harmful speech, but who do nothing about actually solving things like the AIDs problem in Africa--are exactly the target of these kinds of comments. These comments call out and critique the people who only care about Africans when someone says something that can possibly be interpreted to be offensive to them. Of course, privileged white people then use the alleged racism as a shield to hide their own hypocrisy behind and make blanket statements to the effect that there is some universal, writ-in-stone definition of what's offensive. Now that the mob has doled out justice and protected all the Africans from a menace like Saccio, they go back to Whole Foods after their yoga classes and continue right on not giving a damn about how shitty things are in Africa. If you find that tweet offensive, perhaps you should pause for a moment and consider that maybe, just maybe, it feels that way to you because you were the intended target.
• chris_wot 12y ago
  When I was on Wikipedia as an admin, someone modified their signature to point to a user who didn't exist. I was pretty pissed off about this, and so I went to the admins noticeboard I'd setup not really that long ago to ask someone to resolve the issue. This is where I did something particularly dumb. I created the account to the non-existent user and posted a few comments on it - then quickly switched back to my Ta bu Shi da Yu account to say what I'd done and explain the impact it was likely to have. It was a bad, bad judgement call. I got such a massive lynching that I seriously regretted what I'd done - but there was no way of undoing it. Eventually, I started getting depressed - I mean, my entire reputation was in tatters. None of the work I'd done - not the hours and hours of fighting trolls, extensive article writing, innovative strategies for dealing with referencing or organizing the admins via the board, nor the work on featured article candidates, peer review, articles for deletion, vandalism fighting, meeting up with Sydney people interested in Wikipedia, made any difference at all. I left the project and asked to be desysopped. About a year or so later, I created an account Tbsdy lives and tried again. I managed to get my admin status re established (I readily admitted it was a bad judgement call), but still I was told I'd left "under a cloud", by none other than Brad Fitzpatrick - their legal counsel. What's the moral of this? Online communities suck. If you make even one minor error in judgment, be prepared to be lynched. If you get depressed, just exit at this point and don't look back. It's not worth it. It doesn't matter how much time you put into a project - you're going to get judged, and you'll never make your way back. If you don't think it can't happen, then ask Ben Noordrius how he felt when Bryan Cantrell called him an arsehole and said he should have been fired because he reverted a personal pronoun. That did the Node.js community a lot of good now, didn't it?
  • EvanKelly 12y ago
    Not really understanding how the wikipedia community operates, why were you irritated by the signature and how was writing the comments such an irreconcilable wrong? Were they inappropriate comments?
    • chris_wot 12y ago
      The comments weren't awful. It was really a bad judgement call because it violated the principle "don't be disruptive to make a point", which I really didn't consider very clearly before doing it. The reason I was annoyed about it was because signatures are the way you see who is saying something in a conversation thread. Back then you'd click on the person's username and get easy access to their pages, talk page, block links, contributions, etc. it also made it really hard to see what they had contributed. I was also concerned that someone would go what I in essence did - which was a really dumb move on my part, like I say.
• facepalm 12y ago
  I feel a bit more relaxed now that I have received many rejections to job applications. Since people won't hire me anyway, might as well be outspoken about my opinions. Before I really struggled with the issue. It goes against my values to shut up, but I know it is probably wiser to do so.
• Karunamon 12y ago
  This is the world brought to you by SJW's. Wait a moment before reaching for the down arrow and let me explain. Can you really expect any other outcome in which a culture is perpetuated that directly mocks any instance of something possibly offensive being taken as humorous? Indeed, the expectation seems to be that humor that could be insensitive is not allowed. This kind of thing, someone who holds no nasty views whatsoever being flattened by the internet hate machine, is directly enabled by the SJW mob culture, because in that culture, there is no difference between making an insensitive joke and being insensitive. There is no difference between making a $ist joke and being a $ist. And $ists are fair game for shaming, for getting fired, for every kind of pseudo-hatred on a level that makes 1984's two minutes hate seem like a mild look of disapproval. The tweet in question is: "Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!" Yup. No way the usual suspects are going to demonize that. Think about that. Think about if that's a world you really want to live in. -4 in record time, not a single reply. Thanks folks, you're great. Would love to talk if someone would bother to explain how this analysis is wrong, though!
• gumby 12y ago
  On a tangental meta point: this is a good, solid piece of reportage [1] which is increasingly uncommon. The author talked to a number of people over a long period of time and uncovered subtleties that typically are ignored these days. A particularly nice touch was to use of a relatively recent historical reference from the mid 18th century. Mob justice and public shaming go back millennia and it would have been easy to pull out a roman or biblical reference. But he found one that actually focussed on the victimhood of the transgressor. Lovely. (Sorry to use a French term; I'm not intending to be pretentious, it's just that the term "journalism" has been debased to the point where it is now casually used to refer to advertising).
  • justincormack 12y ago
    Apparently he is about to publish a book about public shaming, so this article was pulled out of a broader set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Ronson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Ronson
  • RyanMcGreal 12y ago
    > reportage [1] Not to worry: put the emphasis on the second syllable and it's an English term as well.
    • tjradcliffe 12y ago
      Every word is an English word. "Pukka sushi compadre" is an English sentence. Even my spell-checker mostly agrees. The word origins are Hindi, Japanese and Spanish, respectively. England gave up her empire, but kept all the words.
  • valgaze 12y ago
    It's b/c it's the NYTimes-- they actually do reporting & journalism. There's seems to be a lot of piggybacking/freeloading off of original reporting. I was involved with a project that got a big splashy NYTimes write up and it was astonishing in the coming days to see how many joker press outlets basically crimped off the Times' original reporting. They'd include a link and all that but they'd lift the juciest quotes/content and the only thing they'd contribute was some usually sassy commentary. Here's a really vivid example-- great write up about Target detecting a pregnancy from purchase data: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... It's a great little news nugget- provocative, interesting, yadda yadda. And then before you know it, all these "summary"/"reaction" stories get published which didn't exactly contribute much or move the ball down the field: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe... http://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-school-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-parents/ http://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-s... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102859/How-Target-knows-shoppers-pregnant--figured-teen-father-did.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102859/How-Target-k... http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-target-exposed-a-teen-girls-pregnancy-2012-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-t... I'm not sure if this is a real problem or not, but it seems kind of lame that those other groups get to sit on their cans and pontificate while others get out of their offices.
• ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  The article cites the destruction of self-respect as being in some ways worse than a punishment of death. I could argue that those that participate in this sort of public shaming have a lack of self-respect and seek the thrill of dragging everyone else down to their level. Sadly, there will never be a lack of self-confidence, which means that there will never be a shortage of these sorts of things happening. I wish humanity was better than this.
  • spb 12y ago
    > I could argue that those that participate in this sort of public shaming have a lack of self-respect and seek the thrill of dragging everyone else down to their level. I think this idea is well-reflected in the movie Precious, when Precious's mother is put on the spot for abusing Precious and is forced to confront her motivations: > Mary Lee Johnston: But, those... those things she told you I did to her? Who... who... who else was going to love me? Who else was going to touch me? Who else was going to make me feel good about myself?
• Kenji 12y ago
  Stuff like that is analogous to threatening or killing cartoonists who mock Muhammad (that is, insanely extreme reactions to relatively innocuous actions). We just happen to agree with these cartoons, therefore we take the side of the cartoonists. The mindset described in this article (social justice bullying) is as much a hinderance to free speech as islamic extremism. But we are blind to it.
  • matthewmacleod 12y ago
    I find it difficult to believe you actually think that – it's not really a self-consistent viewpoint, given that what you describe as 'social justice bullying' is absolutely free speech.
    • Kenji 12y ago
      What is a hinderance to freedom of speech is not the bullying itself, but the mindset behind it. If you can't make a foolish joke without having your entire life ruined and getting fired, then yes that is the very definition of lack of freedom of speech. Getting fired for a joke, come on? Action and reaction are completely disproportionate. But worry not, I will absorb the downvotes like a sponge for I know that my common sense has not gone missing yet.
      • matthewmacleod 12y ago
        I do agree that having one's life ruined over this sort of thing is disproportionate, and that's something worth talking about. But we've got to be careful not to overreact to this sort of thing, which just results in shouting matches. Let's remember that it's one thing to 'make a foolish joke', and it's another thing to 'make a foolish joke in front of millions of people.' One of the issues here is the lack of understand that people have about the act of publishing, and I think we'd be better focusing on that.
      • notahacker 12y ago
        As over the top as the internet lynch mob might have been, I don't think a private company opting to fire a PR director for badly misjudging a public communication falls into the same category as making blasphemy a capital crime.
• golemotron 12y ago
  I think that public shaming can be laid directly at the feet of Social Justice. It would be great if people who want to make things better for minorities chose a different tactic - private communication rather than public ostracism.
  • geofft 12y ago
    SJW here. Private communication works well if the problem is specific people behaving badly in private, and public ostracism is, in fact, inappropriate. But usually the goal is to establish a changed social norm, and to combat an existing one, which needs to be done in public; ostracizing an individual is not the goal (and, to be clear, isn't a good thing!). Someone brought up the example of Ben Noordhuis and node.js elsewhere in this thread. Assuming for the sake of argument that Ben's behavior was something that you didn't want in the world, it's not enough to message him in private and say "Hey, this was wrong for these reasons." That gets you change within the node community (well, provided it's Ben acting), but not anywhere else. Meanwhile, if you object in public and write a blog post about it... do you think io.js is going to risk rejecting a pull request about gendered pronouns now? Or any other equally large, somewhat-overlapping language community? I would definitely agree with the criticism that the blog post should have tried harder not to look like an attack on Ben as a person. But it reads to me like it wasn't the intention; it was an attack on anyone who acts in the same way.
    • golemotron 12y ago
      Essentially, your argument is that the ends justify the means, right? Or, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? The issue is that we now know that things blow up in social media so we should adjust our behavior to be ethical. The case of dongle-gate at PyCon is a good example to talk about. We should now understand that attempting local solutions outside of social media is far preferable. Individuals (on either side of an issue) should not be cannon fodder for social causes. Inviting/creating that sort of public ostracism is extremely irresponsible. I hope that we (collectively) are learning that lesson. Maybe protecting individuals from social media attacks can be seen as a social justice cause? The most vulnerable minority is the minority of one.
• DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  Let's build an Internet. People can connect. They can share their feelings. It'll make the world better place. Had no one seen what mobs of angry people do? This is getting worse, not better. We will see this kind of anger junkie mob mentality explode into real violence. And then the violence will escalate. Good news. We are seeing the end of the nation state. Just like they said. It is being replaced with niche mobs of worldwide scope.
  • lurcio 12y ago
    The internet has always put me in mind of Dostoievskys under-appreciated story Bobok. "It may be so, but think of putting it so bluntly into print. In print everything ought to be decorous; there ought to be ideals, while instead of that... Say it indirectly, at least; that's what you have style for. But no, he doesn't care to do it indirectly. Nowadays humour and a fine style have disappeared, and abuse is accepted as wit. I do not resent it: but God knows I am not enough of a literary man to go out of my mind..." btw I guess it was a throwaway comment, but.."We are seeing the end of the nation state" Where do you see that? (I see multi-level governance.)
    • DanielBMarkham 12y ago
      The state, by definition, is the group that has the monopoly on the use of force. If I see a crime taking place, after deciding whether it is appropriate or not for me to intervene, my next step is to contact the state. I trust the state to take corrective measures: arresting the person, perhaps imprisoning them, perhaps killing them. I also trust them to use force (sometimes lethal force) in maintaining social order. But on the net, I am only limited by my degree of outrage. Somebody does something stupid -- then each additional commenter takes it on themselves to "up the ante" and make the stupid person pay. Right now we're just ruining people's lives (!). But as we start seeing these lynch mobs physically start acting out, then the state will no longer have the monopoly on force. Whether or not that's an existential question depends on your comfort level with chaos, I imagine. Whatever your personal view, the state as we know it in many cases will no longer exist.
• FD3SA 12y ago
  Humans are sexually dimorphic primates. Primates form status hierarchies spontaneously. Status is zero sum. Higher status males mate with the majority of females. Low status males do not reproduce at all. We are descendants of 40% of males and 80% of females. As religious and legally enforced monogamy decline across all societies, we will see increasingly vicious status wars across all human societies. This writer is double dipping for his status points, as not only did he specialize in attacking the status of others, but is now acting as the merciful lord who has chosen to forgive those sinful peasants. Clever. Monogamy was an aberration and an affront to nature, because it forced average females to mate with average males, robbing them of their desire for the highest status male's genetic material. In the past, male resource provisioning was important, but the state has nullified that variable by providing for all. Status reigns supreme. Defend yours at all costs. Oh, and the best defense is a great offense. Ah homo sapiens...such a fascinating species.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • SafariDevelop 12y ago
    Uhh, what is the connection here? And how are you so sure that status wars did not happen as much, if only in different forms, during the days of "enforced monogamy"?
    • FD3SA 12y ago
      My mistake, I should have been more clear. The current "political correctness" paradigm along with all of its associated hate mobs is a ferocious status competition as a result of the unmet sexual and pair-bonding needs of singles. Single males and females are different, in that females hold out for the absolute highest status man for as long as possible, whereas males try to poach any female who meets their minimum fertility requirements. Both end up frustrated as dimorphic sexes have different sexual optimization strategies which are impossible to satisfy simultaneously. What's important to note is the psychological state of singleness, and its resulting anxiety, is far more damaging than the actual lack of intercourse. In the past, religious and social institutions attempted to prevent this by encouraging early marriage and enforcing it with strict penalties. In the past few decades, all of this has changed rapidly along with the development of effective contraception. This confluence of factors has thus lead to fiercer competition for each sex as they double down on their strategies, both of which involve status as the main currency. Males attempt to hoard status, and females attempt to attract it. As such, we see far more ruthless status posturing and attacking, of which this article lists many examples. I did not believe my comments to be controversial, as any cursory glance of the relevant scientific literature will reveal the mundane facts I've stated. However, it appears my statements trigger an immune response in a group of HN readers, for reasons that I can only guess involve discomfort with the somewhat disturbing reality of man's evolutionary origins and predispositions. I commend you for asking a question rather than reflexively recoiling in disgust. I do believe we will have to confront our natures eventually. Running from the mirror rarely works long term.
• ffn 12y ago
  Social media has taken the power formerly belonging only to politicians and famous actors and distributed it statistically over the masses. For normal people suddenly getting famous over something is a lot like electrons in a lower orbit jumping to a higher one - it's completely based on chance (incidentally, there is also a sort of uncertainty principle for social media: if you know what you're saying, then you don't know how famous you are becoming, and if you know how famous you're becoming, you don't know what you're saying). So anytime you say something on social media, you run the risk of getting infamous over something really dumb. This is all the more reason to learn to talk to one's friends using email, phone, real-life communication, or other "defunct" methods of interaction such as AIM, and use social media only professionally. If you think about it, this rather makes sense. Why should centralized agencies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google determine how I interact with my personal friends?
• goblin89 12y ago
  “This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.” (Late D. F. Wallace, Infinite Jest)
• spain 12y ago
  Interesting article, though I wonder why the title here on Hacker News is "How One Stupid Tweet Ruined Justine Sacco's Life" whereas the title on the actual article is "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life."
  • celticninja 12y ago
    clickbait headline i assume.
  • latestrevision 12y ago
    It looks like the title was originally the former; probably a late change by a copyeditor.
  • dang 12y ago
    NYT likes to tinker with titles. They don't change the urls as often, so if you look at the url you'll sometimes see the original title.
• will_brown 12y ago
  In addition to the research of 18-19th century public shaming, it would have been insightful to look at Court Opinions from early Freedom of Speech cases. Believe it or not this mob response is exactly what is meant to keep speech in check, of course the Court's verbiage is not mob rule, rather "the market place of ideas." The law only cares about the Government not prohibiting speech, otherwise the Court's generally expect the speech itself to be accepted/promoted or rejected in the market place of ideas. One example of accounting for ones words which didn't rise to the level of Court Ordered public shaming, is Lincoln's ridiculing local politicians through anonymous letters. On one occasion when Lincoln's true identity was found out, Lincoln was challenged to a dual. Lincoln himself did not want to dual, and was lucky enough that on the day of the dual the dual was cancelled. From that point forward Lincoln never wrote a critical letter of anyone, and made it a point never to criticize anyone for anything. This is a story that is more fully described in How to Win Friends and Influence People.
• darkmighty 12y ago
  The core problem here is ironically the effectiveness of online media to broadcast personal opinions. An "offensive"/"revolting" message can be spread exponentially quickly with only a small effort by each participant. Add to that the statistical tendency of a small group of people to be extremely offended by certain innocuous messages without the opposing effect: people are usually either offended or simply don't care -- guess what effect always prevails! To illustrate, if your message randomly spread to cause a response to 100k people, and on average each person dedicates 1 minute on it due to offense/indignation/etc, collectively ~1600 hours or 70 days will be spent on it. If a single person is the target of this effort, it can be disastrous. I don't think we're going to have any less effective social media in the future (nor should we); neither do I believe in the near term people will be much more enlightened as to collectively avoid strong reactions directed at individuals. So the only way to be strongly opinionated in public online is through anonymity (or through being a "brand" -- a celebrity, a comic, etc, but not the case for the average person). Major companies (facebook,google,...) fail to see this fundamental aspect of the internet: anonimity is a basic tool. We need the hierarchy where our personal communications are more transparent and the more public they become the more anonymous we can be.
• freeasinfree 12y ago
  Comedians say much worse on a daily basis and rarely catch any flack. Are regular people not allowed to make jokes?
  • bhayden 12y ago
    That is my issue with this. Daniel Tosh makes sexist, racist, and rape jokes on a daily basis and people at large aren't up in arms threatening to strike if he visits their workplace. To me this says these psuedo-activists care more about picking on an easy target than actually preventing hurtful speech. Not to mention the hypocrisy of many of those tweets when they call her a bitch, or send her death threats.
    • icebraining 12y ago
      I'll let another comedian, George Carlin, explain: There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those words in and of themselves. They’re only words. It’s the context that counts. It’s the user. It’s the intention behind the words that makes them good or bad. The words are completely neutral. The words are innocent. I get tired of people talking about bad words and bad language. Bullshit! It’s the context that makes them good or bad. The context. That makes them good or bad. For instance, you take the word “Nigger.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with the word “Nigger” in and of itself. It’s the racist asshole who’s using it that you ought to be concerned about. We don’t care when Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy say it. Why? Because we know they’re not racist. They’re Niggers! Context. Context. We don’t mind their context because we know they’re black. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pksx_IAHDE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pksx_IAHDE In this case, people know the context of Daniel Tosh's words, therefore they don't mind. They minded here, because a Tweet has no context.
    • A_COMPUTER 12y ago
      It's the same reason that SF gentrification articles come in waves on HN. There is a cause du jour, and it only lasts a little while until the new one.
  • jdminhbg 12y ago
    Comedians have a social context for their jokes -- the presumption of anyone looking at the content of what they say is to look for a second or ironic meaning first. Justine is just a normal person, so the presumption of the mob is that the literal meaning of what she says is what she meant to communicate. There are a lot of people who are hungry enough to signal how righteous they are to their peers that they'll immediately jump to the least-charitable interpretation of anything anyone says, and Justine was their target for 24 hours.
• rebootthesystem 12y ago
  Legal liability would put an end to this. Imagine this: Someone says something unfortunate or offensive at a crowded street corner. Another person hears it and launches into a righteous indignation frenzy. I'll call him the Lead Bully. He stirrs up others. Very soon this turns into a physical attack and the speaker ends up in the hospital with serious injuries. In this case anyone would easily conclude that the Lead Bully and a number of others should be brought to justice and suffer financial damage for their transgressions. Well, a lot of these online attacks are not far from my hypothetical scenario. They are launched and stoked by a Lead Bully and stoked by them and perhaps a small group of friends and followers. These attacks result in serious and significant damage spanning from physical and emotional to financial. According to the article, in Justine Sacco's case the Lead Bully was Sam Biddle, editor of Valleywag. This person single-handedly unleashed the hordes on Sacco. Given his position and following it is impossible to imagine he did not understand the potential consequences of his actions. He ruined this woman's life and quite possibly scarred her for a long time, if not for life. Much like the street corner beating scenario, he ought to be liable for his decision to affect someone's life. He had at least two choices in front of him. He took the one he knew would stirr-up a hornet's nest. The case of the guys at the tech conference is similar. Adria Richards decided to be the Lead Bully and, as a consequence, cost a father of three kids his job and caused much pain. I happen to also have three kids. If you are single you have no idea what that man felt at that moment. You can guess, but you can't know. It's horrible. Did these people say stupid things? Probably. The way to deal with them isn't to ruin their lives. In most cases at a street corner they would be ignored. When I was younger a mentor said something to me that stuck. He said: Having freedom and being free does not mean having freadom or being free from the responsibility for your actions or what you say. This cuts both ways. The person who utters or tweets a potentially insensitive remark deserves to be responsible for what they said IN PROPORTION to the nature, degree and context of the statements. The people choosing to eviscerate them using social media ought to also be responsible in proportion to the consequences of their actions. That would be just and fair all around. Think before you act.
  • EdiX 12y ago
    > in Justine Sacco's case the Lead Bully was Sam Biddle You'd be surprised to find out just how many times the Lead Bully turns out to be Sam Biddle.
• infinite8s 12y ago
  I believe people are fundamentally unable to comprehend the impact of having anything they do or say available to anybody in the world to witness and critique (probably a reflection of Dunbar's number - as social primates, we've been limited to small social non-anonymous circles for the majority of our evolution). The issue is that up until the development of the internet (and particularly the social internet), most people weren't subject to this degree of anonynous public exposure. Before twitter and facebook, news outlets were the only exposure, and because of scalability issues, they typically only targeted 'noteworthy' individuals to catch them off guard. So those people learned to hide behind PR individuals, and carefully guard their words and actions when in the public eye.
• Mithaldu 12y ago
  As a german i have to ask: Why do people get fired over things like this? Are american worker employee protection laws so weak that there is no recourse whatsoever for them?
  • rihegher 12y ago
    French guy here, had the same thought
  • lfam 12y ago
    You're correct, there are basically no worker protections in America. The euphemistic term is "right-to-work", which means that you can be fired for any reason whatsoever.
  • ashark 12y ago
    Here's how worker protection laws work in the U.S. 1) For any given case, yeah, there's probably no protection. This is because we love freedom. No, really. Well, if you can get an honest answer from politicians and CEOs that's not the reason, but to the average "man on the street" who's against stronger worker protections, that's the reason. That or unemployment scaremongering. Really. 2) On the off chance that there is a law, and you know there is, can you afford to be without work and to pay lawyers long enough to fight to have it enforced? Do you even know where to begin? If not, nothing happens. (think minimum wage workers) 3) Is it worth even a small risk of a de facto blacklisting in your industry, permanently limiting your future employment options (and therefore how much you earn)? If not, nothing happens. This is related to the "everyone Googles you these days" thing mentioned in the article. (professionals, skilled trades) In the end it's riskier for to individuals, on average, to fight these things than it is for businesses to break the law, so little is ever done. That's assuming there was even a law to be broken. Collective action (class action lawsuits, for example) can help but is nearly impossible to organize effectively without unions, which we've been successfully convinced to hate on principle. Every so often there's a lawsuit, businesses are slapped with fine that's a rounding error in their account books, everything goes on as normal.
  • metaphorm 12y ago
    yes, American worker protection laws are incredibly weak. Most employment in America is "at will" meaning you can be fired for any reason at any time, and similarly can quit for any reason at any time. Very few things count as legally protected classes. Its generally limited to race, religion, and gender. Even then the fired worker would have to prove that they were fired because of their membership in a protected class and not for some different reason. This means, at minimum, a lawsuit and I'm sure you can imagine how lopsided lawsuits between well funded corporations and your average private citizen are.
• rihegher 12y ago
  French guy here. This article only speak about employees in american company getting fired about some data shared on the web. But I would be curious to know what happened to people who faced the same situation working in continental european companies. It would be surprising if people would lost their jobs so easily. Either because I think it's culturally better accepted for private people (I mean not public figures) to have unappropriate expressions publicly, plus the law don't allow companies (at least in France) to fire someone on a basis of only one unappropriate expression not even targeting another employee or customer of this company.
  • pervycreeper 12y ago
    This is interesting. I wonder where the line is drawn, though (surely there are some ways to get fired by saying something in Europe). I believe that it will soon become necessary for some sort of online bill of rights which protects one's identit(y,ies) and privacy.
    • rihegher 12y ago
      I'll reply only in regards of french law here but be aware I'm no lawyer. The basis is the following. You can fire someone for repeatedly public attacks targeting another employee, or a client. Then if the fired employee thing you're wrong then a kind of court dedicated to work legislation will decide if you have enough element to have him fired or not.
  • wyager 12y ago
    >Either because I think it's culturally better accepted for private people (I mean not public figures) to have unappropriate expressions publicly Based on my (admittedly very limited) experience with French culture, this is definitely the most important difference. America has become extremely politically correct. People in France are much more relaxed about saying things Americans might construe as offensive. In particular, Americans tend to be much more wary of speaking about perceived victim groups (certain racial groups, homosexuals, etc.).
    • 12y ago
• 6stringmerc 12y ago
  Instead, she said, she just felt personally humiliated. Well, if I'm wearing a Nike hat, Nike t-shirt, Nike running pants, Nike shoes, and a Nike employee badge and make a joke in poor taste at a bar / mall / airport / etc, and the crowd turns to look at me with contempt for the humor in poor taste, it might reflect bad on Nike. The personal humiliation part is being called out in public on making a bad joke. She wasn't just personally humiliated, she was professionally humiliated. Job in PR = maybe know about PR...at least the "Do's and Don'ts" for survival. It happens, which is why I suppose my Dad taught me early on that if I make a joke at the expense of somebody who is bigger, stronger, and angrier at the world than me, they might punch me out. Can happen in a bar, a grocery store, a parking lot, a motel lobby...it's life. That seems to apply to the internet as well, albeit with some caveats...never let your private thoughts wave around a company banner...
• paulhauggis 12y ago
  This is the reality of social media. If you offend the wrong person, you will most likely get fired from your job and or get unwanted attention in other parts of your life..all for just expressing an opinion. It's essentially online bullying by people that want to silence you for having an opinion that is different than their own. The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit. I see this especially in many of the open source and tech communities, which is why I no longer contribute. I also don't post anything political on my Facebook account. A future employer may look at this and judge me before I'm even hired..and decide not to hire me. Just looking at my list of friends, most people don't seem to realize that this may be a problem. The same power that gives special interest groups and individuals the ability to launch campaigns to get people fired gives companies the power to not hire you based on your lifestyle or personal beliefs.
  • gearoidoc 12y ago
    Replace "offend the wrong person" with "do something really f*cking stupid" - which is what she did - and the outcome seems fair. No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions.
    • andybak 12y ago
      Fair? Do you really think so? If so you terrify me. I've done plenty of really f*cking stupid things in my time. I'm very thankful most of them were offline or pre-internet.
      • gearoidoc 12y ago
        You're terrified by the idea that someone should be fired for gross unprofessionalism? To repeat: she did not deserve ANY bullying or harassment whatsoever. Did you experience consequences of the stupid actions you've taken?
        • andybak 12y ago
• gear54rus 12y ago
  That may sound hateful or angry or whatever, but here goes... > I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere. Is this really what we've come to? We have all this technological progress so you could stalk someone you're butthurt over and try to get at them? > Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received So that others who have nothing better to do could pile on this? > Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. Wake up! Who ever gave a damn about some tweet? Be it corrupt mega-corp or a media figure. > I didn’t want people looking at me Well, now that's a cool story you better tell everyone on twitter :) > The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance Ah, nothing like snooping in on the conversation that isn't meant for your damn ears and then getting all butthurt about it. > <Story about people who can't take the, admittedly, offensive joke, a person who's not smart enough to not crack that joke on the net> It's not the tweet that is stupid, it's people using the platform in such ways and maybe even the platform itself. Come on, we can do better than that after all this time. TL;DR She got exactly what she deserved in this context, but that doesn't mean that community is some righteous force - quite the contrary, it's simply poisonous.
  • protomyth 12y ago
    "justice were being democratized" = mob rule same as it ever was, now with a lot less effort from the mob
    • gear54rus 12y ago
      I'd say for a mob it may even be understandable (if you decided to roll with us, you're in for a full trip), we are talking about deeds after all, not empty words. Here, it's just ridiculous.
      • protomyth 12y ago
        But the empty words now result in people being fired and blacklisted, with as little effort as writing a sentence or a retweet. The mob doesn't even have to be in the same ballpark as truth. The worse thing is these things are picked up by newspapers trying to tap into social and making them "the official record".
• moron4hire 12y ago
  Was it really just one stupid tweet? It looks like a lot more than one to me.
• Kalium 12y ago
  This is call-out culture at work. There is no room for error, no tolerance for people who do not agree with you 110%. To make any mistake or disagree with The Group is cause for expulsion and lynching.
• interesting_guy 12y ago
  she desrved 70% of it
• marcusgarvey 12y ago
  The term "public shaming" doesn't feel quite right for describing a response to what someone chose to do in public, of their own free will, in forums that are meant for dialogue. "Negative reaction" or "backlash" or might be better.
• keepkalm 12y ago
  It seems like more than just one stupid tweet.
• q2 12y ago
  A bit off-topic but following similarity is noteworthy: From this article: >>> They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.” This was year 1742. From the web (http://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/raif-badawi-to-be-publicly-flogged-every-week-for-months-after-insulting-islam/story-fnh81ifq-1227185842850 http://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/raif-badawi-to-be-p...) >>>HE IS brought before the crowd and whipped relentlessly 50 times with a long, hard cane. This is year 2015. But you can notice the similarity in punishments. We need to understand that society in every country evolves over time at its own pace. This evolution can take centuries of time in some cases because societies has to understand and readjust peacefully as much as they can. I guess American political leadership needs to understand and remember these parts of their history before pointing out and shaming/preaching other countries on human rights,intolerance...etc.
• joesmo 12y ago
  Our culture, or lack thereof, is just unbelievable. If a comedian had made that joke, it likely would have been no problem for him (there would still have been some outrage no doubt), but people assume everything is so serious, even when there is no logical reason to assume so. What infuriates me is that the masses let idiots deny climate change and talk about how vaccines will give you autism without shaming them, yet they destroy people's lives for posting, let's face it, a funny joke. If you want to shame someone for being a scumbag, there are plenty of targets but no one is doing it. If you want to shame someone because you failed to understand the meaning of her statement, however, that seems to be the zeitgeist. Why go after a real target when there are innocent people out there who really cannot defend themselves and whose misery you can really revel in? The irony of the story of the woman who took the picture of the guy telling the joke and then got shamed herself is quite delicious in many ways. Posting anything on the Internet, whether it's public or not (or rather, you think it's public or not) that you wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with the whole world is just stupid. Maybe people will realize this at some point. Hell, I'm worried about my home NAS that's not connected to the outside world, is behind two firewalls, and is encrypted. Of course, if it's that sensitive, it doesn't belong in any digital form.
• ElComradio 12y ago
  I would encourage anyone against these lynch mob driven decisions to investigate the companies IAC owns and if possible cease doing business with them, and to let them know why. In particular, OKCupid is in their portfolio.
  • jgh 12y ago
    Care to elaborate?
• S_A_P 12y ago
  The only people that can get away with a tweet like that are stand up comedians. The tweet in the article sounds almost verbatim what a comedian like Amy Schumer would say on stage.I guess it is a reality of social media. I dont know that I have ever felt compelled to police social media. Sure it takes so little investment to involve yourself in some drama that in real life would require more work, and most peoples sense of shame prevents them from partaking in. I almost wonder if the best way to handle a scenario like this is to go FULL TROLL MODE and up the ante. Blow out your own credibility so that people realize they are wasting their energy on nonsense.
• mkhalil 12y ago
  I don't wish to comment on how sensitive people get. The masses have spoken, and there is nothing she could of done except face that fact and deal with it responsibly. I do have a problem with one getting fired over a joke - debatable how "funny" it is - on a personal Twitter account. Would a tenured professor be fired over it? Nah....
• stevebot 12y ago
  weird to think about, but what if the scenario had been different and her account was hacked? How would it have gone, would there have been any vindication or recovery or would she have ended up in the same boat?
• waylandsmithers 12y ago
  The sad thing is the history of America is sprinkled with a few stories of angry armed mobs of people storming jails, overpowering the guards, and physically freeing people whom the public believed had been wrongfully imprisoned. That took balls. Now, mob justice is used to tear people down for writing some quip in poor taste. What a shame. I've actually given a lot of thought to things like this, having worked with someone whom I despised due to a complete lack of tact and decorum. Despite the fact that I would never ever want to work with or be associated with this person again in any way, he still has the right to earn a living and contribute his skills to society. In fact, I would argue that most if not all the people he has offended over the years would not actually feel good about "justice" being served if he were fired and/or out of work. This is also why I've never had twitter, never will, and only use facebook passively. There is no upside; anything you say can and will be used against you. If you're a band announcing a tour date, or a food truck sharing your location, sure, but if you are trying to be a commentator or funny guy to gain a following, it will probably just blow up in your face like this eventually. The good news is that you don't have to use twitter. This is only a problem if you allow it to be one for you. There are plenty of other effective means of communication.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• swatow 12y ago
  I see a lot of hypocrisy from the left on this issue. When their mobs attack someone, they say that if you express an opinion, other people have the right to criticize you for it. But when the left are attacked by mobs, they describe the actions of the mobs as harassment, and either get the law involved, eg through restraining orders, or lobby for more laws. The ambiguous nature of these laws, both existing and proposed, encourage this double standard.
• hyperion2010 12y ago
  The funny thing is that taken literally the tweet is actually incredibly damning of the inequality between access to treatment for blacks and whites. White people DONT get fully blown AIDS because they have access to therapy. The fact that the twitter community can't even distinguish between HIV and AIDS is revealing of how hard they are projecting when they react to 140 characters or less. The reaction reveals a thousand times more about the ignorance and hate of online communities than anything about the individual they are responding to.
• hashberry 12y ago
  Ever notice how most "Social Justice Warriors" are women who love to stir up drama? As the NYTimes article states, this incident was highly entertaining to many people.
• jqm 12y ago
  "As Sacco’s flight traversed the length of Africa, a hashtag began to trend worldwide: #HasJustineLandedYet. “Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet." Who are these people? Really nothing better to do than that? I just don't understand.