the fallout from internet shaming

[mominatrix]

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life
By JON RONSONFEB. 12, 2015
Photo






As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel. There was one about a fellow passenger on the flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport:

“ ‘Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”



Then, during her layover at Heathrow:

“Chilly — cucumber sandwiches — bad teeth. Back in London!”



And on Dec. 20, before the final leg of her trip to Cape Town:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”





She chuckled to herself as she pressed send on this last one, then wandered around Heathrow’s international terminal for half an hour, sporadically checking her phone. No one replied, which didn’t surprise her. She had only 170 Twitter followers.



Sacco boarded the plane. It was an 11-hour flight, so she slept. When the plane landed in Cape Town and was taxiing on the runway, she turned on her phone. Right away, she got a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school: “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.” Sacco looked at it, baffled.

Then another text: “You need to call me immediately.” It was from her best friend, Hannah. Then her phone exploded with more texts and alerts. And then it rang. It was Hannah. “You’re the No. 1 worldwide trend on Twitter right now,” she said.

Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @justinesacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @justinesacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever.” And then one from her employer, IAC, the corporate owner of The Daily Beast, OKCupid and Vimeo: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.” The anger soon turned to excitement: “All I want for Christmas is to see @justinesacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail” and “Oh man, @justinesacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands” and “We are about to watch this @justinesacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”

The furor over Sacco’s tweet had become not just an ideological crusade against her perceived bigotry but also a form of idle entertainment. Her complete ignorance of her predicament for those 11 hours lent the episode both dramatic irony and a pleasing narrative arc. 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. Can’t look away. Can’t leave” and “Right, is there no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, Twitter! I’d like pictures #HasJustineLandedYet.”



A Twitter user did indeed go to the airport to tweet her arrival. He took her photograph and posted it online. “Yup,” he wrote, “@justinesacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town International. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.”

By the time Sacco had touched down, tens of thousands of angry tweets had been sent in response to her joke. Hannah, meanwhile, frantically deleted her friend’s tweet and her account — Sacco didn’t want to look — but it was far too late. “Sorry @justinesacco,” wrote one Twitter user, “your tweet lives on forever.”

In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it. The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

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. Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

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. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.




One person I met was Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who posed for a photograph while mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. Stone had stood next to the sign, which asks for “Silence and Respect,” pretending to scream and flip the bird. She and her co-worker Jamie, who posted the picture on Facebook, had a running joke about disobeying signs — smoking in front of No Smoking signs, for example — and documenting it. But shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead. Worse, Jamie didn’t realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public.


Four weeks later, Stone and Jamie were out celebrating Jamie’s birthday when their phones started vibrating repeatedly. Someone had found the photo and brought it to the attention of hordes of online strangers. Soon there was a wildly popular “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page. The next morning, there were news cameras outside her home; when she showed up to her job, at a program for developmentally disabled adults, she was told to hand over her keys. (“After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client,” read one of the thousands of Facebook messages denouncing her. “Woman needs help.”) She barely left home for the year that followed, racked by PTSD, depression and insomnia. “I didn’t want to be seen by anyone,” she told me last March at her home in Plymouth, Mass. “I didn’t want people looking at me.”

Instead, Stone spent her days online, watching others just like her get turned upon. In particular she felt for “that girl at Halloween who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim. I felt so terrible for her.” She meant Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, who posted a photo of herself in her Halloween costume on Twitter. Lynch wore a running outfit and had smeared her face, arms and legs with fake blood. After an actual victim of the Boston Marathon bombing tweeted at her, “You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died,” people unearthed Lynch’s personal information and sent her and her friends threatening messages. Lynch was reportedly let go from her job as well.





I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif., when a stupid joke popped into his head. It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles. He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me. “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle. . . . It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”

Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph. He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture. It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming.

The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it. She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. Two days later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired.

“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” he told me. (Like Stone and Sacco, he had never before talked on the record about what happened to him. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further damaging his career.) “I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears, but” — he paused — “when I got in the car with my wife I just. . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”





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. Someone tweeted Richards’s home address along with a photograph of a beheaded woman with duct tape over her mouth. Fearing for her life, she left her home, sleeping on friends’ couches for the remainder of the year.

Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone had launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if Richards was fired. The next day she was publicly let go.

“I cried a lot during this time, journaled and escaped by watching movies,” she later said to me in an email. “SendGrid threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”






Late one afternoon last year, I met Justine Sacco in New York, at a restaurant in Chelsea called Cookshop. Dressed in rather chic business attire, Sacco ordered a glass of white wine. Just three weeks had passed since her trip to Africa, and she was still a person of interest to the media. Websites had already ransacked her Twitter feed for more horrors. (For example, “I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night,” from 2012, was unearthed by BuzzFeed in the article “16 Tweets Justine Sacco Regrets.”) A New York Post photographer had been following her to the gym.

“Only an insane person would think that white people don’t get AIDS,” she told me. It was about the first thing she said to me when we sat down.

Sacco had been three hours or so into her flight when retweets of her joke began to overwhelm my Twitter feed. I could understand why some people found it offensive. Read literally, she said that white people don’t get AIDS, but it seems doubtful many interpreted it that way. More likely it was her apparently gleeful flaunting of her privilege that angered people. 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. Sacco, like Stone, had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?

“To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.” (She would later write me an email to elaborate on this point. “Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. 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.”)



I would be the only person she spoke to on the record about what happened to her, she said. It was just too harrowing — and “as a publicist,” inadvisable — but she felt it was necessary, to show how “crazy” her situation was, how her punishment simply didn’t fit the crime.

“I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours,” she told me. “It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are.” She released an apology statement and cut short her vacation. Workers were threatening to strike at the hotels she had booked if she showed up. She was told no one could guarantee her safety.

Her extended family in South Africa were African National Congress supporters — the party of Nelson Mandela. They were longtime activists for racial equality. When Justine arrived at the family home from the airport, one of the first things her aunt said to her was: “This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.”

As she told me this, Sacco started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to improve the mood. I told her that “sometimes, things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense.”

“Wow,” she said. She dried her eyes. “Of all the things I could have been in society’s collective consciousness, it never struck me that I’d end up a brutal nadir.”

She glanced at her watch. It was nearly 6 p.m. The reason she wanted to meet me at this restaurant, and that she was wearing her work clothes, was that it was only a few blocks away from her office. At 6, she was due in there to clean out her desk.

“All of a sudden you don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” she said. “If I don’t start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself.”

The restaurant’s manager approached our table. She sat down next to Sacco, fixed her with a look and said something in such a low volume I couldn’t hear it, only Sacco’s reply: “Oh, you think I’m going to be grateful for this?”

We agreed to meet again, but not for several months. She was determined to prove that she could turn her life around. “I can’t just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself,” she said. “I’m going to come back.”

After she left, Sacco later told me, she got only as far as the lobby of her office building before she broke down crying.






A few days after meeting Sacco, I took a trip up to the Massachusetts Archives in Boston. I wanted to learn about the last era of American history when public shaming was a common form of punishment, so I was seeking out court transcripts from the 18th and early 19th centuries. I had assumed that the demise of public punishments was caused by the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual, I thought, because a person in the stocks could just lose himself or herself in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Modernity had diminished shame’s power to shame — or so I assumed.

I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to scroll slowly through the archives. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. I scrolled faster, finally reaching an account of an early Colonial-era shaming.

On July 15, 1742, a woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, had been found “naked in bed with one John Russell.” They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.” Abigail was appealing the ruling, but it wasn’t the whipping itself she wished to avoid. She was begging the judge to let her be whipped early, before the town awoke. “If your honor pleases,” she wrote, “take some pity on me for my dear children who cannot help their unfortunate mother’s failings.”

There was no record as to whether the judge consented to her plea, but I found a number of clips that offered clues as to why she might have requested private punishment. In a sermon, the Rev. Nathan Strong, of Hartford, Conn., entreated his flock to be less exuberant at executions. “Go not to that place of horror with elevated spirits and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there!” Some papers published scathing reviews when public punishments were deemed too lenient by the crowd: “Suppressed remarks . . . were expressed by large numbers,” reported Delaware’s Wilmington Daily Commercial of a disappointing 1873 whipping. “Many were heard to say that the punishment was a farce. . . . Drunken fights and rows followed in rapid succession.”

The movement against public shaming had gained momentum in 1787, when Benjamin Rush, a physician in Philadelphia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote a paper calling for its demise — the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” he wrote. “It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.”


The pillory and whippings were abolished at the federal level in 1839, although Delaware kept the pillory until 1905 and whippings until 1972. An 1867 editorial in The Times excoriated the state for its obstinacy. “If [the convicted person] had previously existing in his bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. . . . The boy of 18 who is whipped at New Castle for larceny is in nine cases out of 10 ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.”

At the archives, I found no evidence that punitive shaming fell out of fashion as a result of newfound anonymity. But I did find plenty of people from centuries past bemoaning the outsize cruelty of the practice, warning that well-meaning people, in a crowd, often take punishment too far.




It’s possible that Sacco’s fate would have been different had an anonymous tip not led a writer named Sam Biddle to the offending tweet. Biddle was then the editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s tech-industry blog. He retweeted it to his 15,000 followers and eventually posted it on Valleywag, accompanied by the headline, “And Now, a Funny Holiday Joke From IAC’s P.R. Boss.”

In January 2014, I received an email from Biddle, explaining his reasoning. “The fact that she was a P.R. chief made it delicious,” he wrote. “It’s satisfying to be able to say, ‘O.K., let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.’ And it did. I’d do it again.” Biddle said he was surprised to see how quickly her life was upended, however. “I never wake up and hope I [get someone fired] that day — and certainly never hope to ruin anyone’s life.” Still, he ended his email by saying that he had a feeling she’d be “fine eventually, if not already.”

He added: “Everyone’s attention span is so short. They’ll be mad about something new today.”





Four months after we first met, Justine Sacco made good on her promise. We met for lunch at a French bistro downtown. I told her what Biddle had said — about how she was probably fine now. I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib, but like everyone who participates in mass online destruction, uninterested in learning that it comes with a cost.

“Well, I’m not fine yet,” Sacco said to me. “I had a great career, and I loved my job, and it was taken away from me, and there was a lot of glory in that. Everybody else was very happy about that.”

Sacco pushed her food around on her plate, and let me in on one of the hidden costs of her experience. “I’m single; so it’s not like I can date, because we Google everyone we might date,” she said. “That’s been taken away from me too.” She was down, but I did notice one positive change in her. When I first met her, she talked about the shame she had brought on her family. But she no longer felt that way. Instead, she said, she just felt personally humiliated.

Biddle was almost right about one thing: Sacco did get a job offer right away. But it was an odd one, from the owner of a Florida yachting company. “He said: ‘I saw what happened to you. I’m fully on your side,’ ” she told me. Sacco knew nothing about yachts, and she questioned his motives. (“Was he a crazy person who thinks white people can’t get AIDS?”) Eventually she turned him down.

After that, she left New York, going as far away as she could, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She flew there alone and got a volunteer job doing P.R. for an NGO working to reduce maternal-mortality rates. “It was fantastic,” she said. She was on her own, and she was working. If she was going to be made to suffer for a joke, she figured she should get something out of it. “I never would have lived in Addis Ababa for a month otherwise,” she told me. She was struck by how different life was there. Rural areas had only intermittent power and no running water or Internet. Even the capital, she said, had few street names or house addresses.

Addis Ababa was great for a month, but she knew going in that she would not be there long. She was a New York City person. Sacco is nervy and sassy and sort of debonair. And so she returned to work at Hot or Not, which had been a popular site for rating strangers’ looks on the pre-social Internet and was reinventing itself as a dating app.



But despite her near invisibility on social media, she was still ridiculed and demonized across the Internet. Biddle wrote a Valleywag post after she returned to the work force: “Sacco, who apparently spent the last month hiding in Ethiopia after infuriating our species with an idiotic AIDS joke, is now a ‘marketing and promotion’ director at Hot or Not.”

“How perfect!” he wrote. “Two lousy has-beens, gunning for a comeback together.”





Sacco felt this couldn’t go on, so six weeks after our lunch, she invited Biddle out for a dinner and drinks. Afterward, she sent me an email. “I think he has some real guilt about the issue,” she wrote. “Not that he’s retracted anything.” (Months later, Biddle would find himself at the wrong end of the Internet shame machine for tweeting a joke of his own: “Bring Back Bullying.” On the one-year anniversary of the Sacco episode, he published a public apology to her on Gawker.)

Recently, I wrote to Sacco to tell her I was putting her story in The Times, and I asked her to meet me one final time to update me on her life. Her response was speedy. “No way.” She explained that she had a new job in communications, though she wouldn’t say where. She said, “Anything that puts the spotlight on me is a negative.”

It was a profound reversal for Sacco. When I first met her, she was desperate to tell the tens of thousands of people who tore her apart how they had wronged her and to repair what remained of her public persona. But perhaps she had now come to understand that her shaming wasn’t really about her at all. Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own — a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.

Jon Ronson is the author of many nonfiction books, including “The Psychopath Test,” “Lost at Sea,” “Them: Adventures With Extremists” and “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” This article is adapted from the book “So You've Been Publicly Shamed,” to be published in March from Riverhead.

www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0

[josieposy]

Geez I remember that story so well. I also remember the famous airport pic when she landed.

I would never wish for anyone's life to be completely ruined by one moment of idiocy. How is it that people still don't get what they put online never truly goes away??

[ijack]

Feb 12, 2015 16:11:49 GMT -5 josieposy said:

Geez I remember that story so well. I also remember the famous airport pic when she landed.

I would never wish for anyone's life to be completely ruined by one moment of idiocy. How is it that people still don't get what they put online never truly goes away??

and how is it that they don't understand that what they're saying is offensive?

[Velar Fricative]

I do think Sacco should have been careful about her joke on Twitter considering her job. I'm not saying her life needed to be ruined for it, but in the age of social media I am not surprised at all that it blew up.

The dongle story is weird though. I had never heard it before this article so perhaps this is a sugarcoated summary of the incident but I think it was shitty of that person to turn around and snap a photo.

The vigilantism can be so extreme though. I have a real problem with that.

[pixy0stix]

Too long.

In any case, I don't think it's bullying to call out people's asshat remarks. HOWEVER, I do think a vast majority of people go too far.

[Skyesthelimit1212]

I have a real problem with what she said, but I also have a real problem with Biddle who kept it going. Yes she made a HUGE mistake, but she has the right to try to get past it and make a living and he kept poking the hornets nest. He's a ass too.

[delawarejen]

I feel like this kind of shaming is going to lead more people to commit suicide.

(Also, I kind of want to delete all my social media accounts and never talk to anyone again.)

[Deleted]

The draw of the going viral and ending up internet famous is pretty strong for some people. They post inflammatory statements thinking people will love them for how witty and clever they are. But there are too many people just chomping at the bit waiting for the next schmuck who posts too much on the internet. Some people will never learn, because their narcissism is too strong.

I do feel kind of bad for this girl. She said some ignorant things, but they definitely weren't worth her life being ruined over.

[eddy]

This is why I am scared of twitter. I like to think I wouldn't ever say something dumb, but man the way things can go viral in a second is terrifying.

[IIOY]

Feb 12, 2015 16:26:08 GMT -5 Skyesthelimit1212 said:

I have a real problem with what she said, but I also have a real problem with Biddle who kept it going. Yes she made a HUGE mistake, but she has the right to try to get past it and make a living and he kept poking the hornets nest. He's a ass too.

Yeah, his determination to keep that story alive was odd.

This article was quite interesting, because the aftermath of these social media transgressions is easy to forget.  Part of me has some sympathy for some of these people, especially that dongle-joke guy.  I've certainly whispered impolite jokes in public settings, and my highly inappropriate sense of humor could easily land me in hot water if I was posting the contents of my head on Twitter or FB rather than here, where most of you know I'm warped.

ITA with Velar Fricative about the terror of online vigilantism.  Occasionally it's a force for good; frequently it's used to target women.

[KateAggie]

Feb 12, 2015 16:26:08 GMT -5 Skyesthelimit1212 said:

I have a real problem with what she said, but I also have a real problem with Biddle who kept it going. Yes she made a HUGE mistake, but she has the right to try to get past it and make a living and he kept poking the hornets nest. He's a ass too.

I agree...he says he didn't wish for her to get fired, but then stokes the fire when she finally gets a new job? He certainly managed to one up her on the dick scale.

[Skyesthelimit1212]

Feb 12, 2015 16:53:38 GMT -5 KateAggie said:

Feb 12, 2015 16:26:08 GMT -5 Skyesthelimit1212 said:

I have a real problem with what she said, but I also have a real problem with Biddle who kept it going. Yes she made a HUGE mistake, but she has the right to try to get past it and make a living and he kept poking the hornets nest. He's a ass too.

I agree...he says he didn't wish for her to get fired, but then stokes the fire when she finally gets a new job? He certainly managed to one up her on the dick scale.

Right, every time she tried to get on with her life Biddle would put something out there.  There has to be some sort of irrational hate on his part for her. 

[borinquen57]

Maybe she's sorry, but the AIDS tweet and the one about having the sex dream with the autistic kid make her look she doesn't have much common sense. Neither of those are funny and frankly, she just sounds like an asshole.

[erbear]

Feb 12, 2015 16:21:38 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

I do think Sacco should have been careful about her joke on Twitter considering her job. I'm not saying her life needed to be ruined for it, but in the age of social media I am not surprised at all that it blew up.

The dongle story is weird though. I had never heard it before this article so perhaps this is a sugarcoated summary of the incident but I think it was shitty of that person to turn around and snap a photo.

The vigilantism can be so extreme though. I have a real problem with that.

Totally agree on all accounts. I am super careful about what I put online because I am a teacher and I feel like I need to be aware that my students and parents could potentially come across my posts. It's part of the job and I'm surprised that she didn't think of that.

And I have made a dongle joke or 15. It's a funny word.

[zelda25]

I'm having all kinds of old person feels about this. The dynamic between Thoughtless Tweeting Attention Whore vs. Horde Awaiting the Opportunity to Pounce is totally like spectators at a gladiator game. Everything about it is gross.

[ttt]

Feb 12, 2015 17:30:46 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

The old advice was never to say anything you wouldn't want to have printed on the front page of the New York Times, which was good advice, but not a serious threat since how likely is it that your assholey remarks will ever be printed on the front page of the New York Times? Ha ha. Not likely. 

Except now, it's entirely possible you can say something on the Internet that will in fact be all over the 'front page' of the Internet. 

SO much this. Why do people feel the need to make public comments in questionable taste with their name and picture attached to it, right there!?? 

The story about the guy with the dongle comment just baffles me. I mean, come on, dongle is a funny word. That woman sounds like a hypersensitive nut to publicly shame him over a stupid joke that he muttered to a coworker (not even broadcasting it to the public on Twitter!). 

[zelda25]

Feb 12, 2015 18:06:37 GMT -5 ttt said:

Feb 12, 2015 17:30:46 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

The old advice was never to say anything you wouldn't want to have printed on the front page of the New York Times, which was good advice, but not a serious threat since how likely is it that your assholey remarks will ever be printed on the front page of the New York Times? Ha ha. Not likely. 

Except now, it's entirely possible you can say something on the Internet that will in fact be all over the 'front page' of the Internet. 

SO much this. Why do people feel the need to make public comments in questionable taste with their name and picture attached to it, right there!?? 

The story about the guy with the dongle comment just baffles me. I mean, come on, dongle is a funny word. That woman sounds like a hypersensitive nut to publicly shame him over a stupid joke that he muttered to a coworker (not even broadcasting it to the public on Twitter!). 

Go down the rabbit hole at your own risk.

[thejackpot]

The dongle joke one is just weird. Why would you go so far over an overheard joke at a conference? She sounds like loads of fun.

[sandsonik]

Feb 12, 2015 17:30:46 GMT -5 @cse1960 said:

The old advice was never to say anything you wouldn't want to have printed on the front page of the New York Times, which was good advice, but not a serious threat since how likely is it that your assholey remarks will ever be printed on the front page of the New York Times? Ha ha. Not likely. 

Except now, it's entirely possible you can say something on the Internet that will in fact be all over the 'front page' of the Internet. 

Or apparently even anything you say to a friend sitting next to you (dongle guy)!

[wise_rita]

I would change my name soooo quick in a situation like this. But maybe that'd be useless if the name change is published in official record along with the old "tarnished" name.

That dongle lady learned a valuable lesson about not sticking your nose where it doesn't belong. I feel the least sorry for her of anyone in this article.

But JFC people can we please cut it out with the death threats? I hope those people are being found/persecuted.

[stealthmom]

Maybe it's my turn for the corner bc the joke about white people not getting aids was the only one I found funny. It's accurate social commentary. It's the kind of thing you'd hear on the daily show. The others are just retreads of tired old stereotypes.

She hit the nail on the head when she said she's not "allowed" to say such things bc she isn't matt stone or jon stewart. when people don't know you and your motivations It's a horrible idea.

[LoveTrains]

I really agree that the punishment far outweighs the crime in these internet shamings. I got very uncomfortable with the hunt to locate names, jobs, and addresses of people that banditted the Boston marathon last year. Those people should not have run as bandits. But they don't deserve to have their lives ruined.

[emilyj]

I am having a hard time caring about these people. No, I do not agree that people's names/addresses/etc. should be hunted down, because that's going way too far. But calling out someone for being an asshole on social media? Meh. If you haven't learned that lesson by now, then that's your issue.

I say this as both a) someone who had a snarky tweet published on a national site, and b) someone who called out a local columnist just today for comparing a high school recruit to Rosa Parks.

[marriedfilingjoint]

I realize I'm pointing out the obvious here but people are so much more awful and vitriolic behind the protection of a computer screen (I'm talking about the shamers taking it too far). And I'm guilty of it, too. I'll call out a blogger on Twitter for saying something shitty (to my 200 followers, whoop) but I would never publicly shame my obnoxious coworker or racist inlaws. I also don't make death threats, so there's that.

[omgzombies]

I feel bad for this woman. Obviously the tweet was ignorant and awful. But as someone who occasionally suffers from foot in mouth disease, I can easily understand someone putting out a tweet that is meant as ironic, with the intention of using humor to point out something that's wrong with society, and having it fail hard.

[marriedfilingjoint]

random tangent: I'm 99% sure I've met Adria Richard. I was flying back from a work trip in Vegas. After my conference was over, my husband flew out to meet me and spend the weekend in Vegas. We weren't seated together because I had booked my flight through my company travel portal. When we got on the plane, I politely asked her if she could switch seats with me or my husband so we could sit together on this 5 hour flight. She said no, which weird, but whatever. BUT THEN she felt super awkward about it and called someone to tell them how packed the flight was and then tried to make small talk with me. I shut that shit down and she sat in awkward silence for 5 hours while I studied for the CPA exam.