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Justine Sacco, Internet Justice, and the Dangers of a Righteous Mob
An anonymous reader writes "So what exactly was the injustice that everyone was fighting against here? There were no pro-Sacco factions, nobody thought her comment was funny, and it became clear early on that her employers were not going to put up with this. It was quite easy for groups to unite against her precisely because it was such an obviously idiotic comment to make. By the time Valleywag had posted her tweet, the damage to her career was already done; there wasn't any 'need' for further action by anyone. The answer is a bit darker – this wasn't really about fairness, it was about entertainment."
Wow, I feel like I understand the issue so well now! Thanks, samzenpus!
Was anyone actually offended by her remark?
Or do people just like being outraged?
And never get another one again. Unless it's PR spokesperson for the KKK.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Was there ever some kind of doubt that this was about watching somebody fuck up and then get hounded mercilessly? Anybody?
People get off on blood sports and mob violence, this is the mostly-legal and really easy flavor.
Is it really too much to ask for the "summary" to actually provide even the tiniest morsel of context?
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Well it's a UDP summary.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Seriously, I read /. regularly, and I have no clue what the hell is going on here from the summary alone. As in, not even a slight clue as to what the problem was originally. Sure, you can post some analysis, but sum up what happened up to this point for people who really haven't heard the original story.
Companies need to stop coddling rich morons from overpriced schools and instead hire talented working class people who can actually get the job done.
For those who didn't RTFA, her tweet said:
"Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"
I thought it was intended to be darkly ironic, reflecting an awareness of the privileges that the poor in africa don't have. It was an ugly truth, but censoring her for saying it doesn't help anyone except people who would rather pretend that aids in africa isn't a problem that lines up with race and economic status. She wasn't saying that aids is a disease for black people, she was saying that too many black people don't have access to the resources to protect themselves.
Compare this to the Duck Dynasty thing where the guy really had no sense of irony, the surface meaning of his words was the intended meaning.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's something anyone who grew up in a small town understands: when you do something stupid in public, everybody will know about it. In a big city, if you make a fool of yourself at a bar, you'll be the laughingstock of the patrons for a couple weeks until someone else comes along. You'll be the butt of jokes from your friends for a while. But the world at large will be pretty much oblivious. In a small town it's different. Everyone in town will know someone who was there, and what would've been a miniscule fraction of the big city will be 90% of the small town. But it'll still mostly be shrugged off, because again everyone in town's been there. Anyone who rags on you too badly will have their own foray into foolishness brought up and bandied about again, and they'll shut up and let it drop. And individually you learn early on what kinds of things will merely make you look foolish vs. what things will cause serious town-wide outrage, and you avoid doing the latter kind.
The Internet is more the small town than the big city. People assume that nobody will find out what they said or did in public, but the anonymity of the big city just isn't there. And the person in question is what makes a lot of these things such a big deal. We don't see a big flap over the thousands of stupid, racist, bigoted comments ordinary people make every day. In this case though, as with the "Duck Dynasty" case, it's not an ordinary person. It's someone who ought to know that their comments are being broadcast to a much larger audience, and who ought to know how those comments are going to be taken. And they go ahead and make them anyway. That's what makes these things go viral like they do.
Ms. Sacco deserved everything she got. Nothing more, nothing less. If you do something so overwhelmingly and obviously stupid as what she did, and then compounded that stupidity by getting on a plane and going offline for several hours, what do you expect is going to happen? The author of the article is just trying to twist this sordid tale into some kind of cautionary example of the excesses of "internet justice." Meanwhile, kids are killing themselves because they're being bullied for doing nothing other than being themselves. Where's the author's outrage over that? Ms. Sacco neither has the excuse of being a child, nor the defense of having done nothing to offend. If you do something so stupid that NOBODY is willing to defend it, then why should she not suffer the consequences? One should also consider that the kind of people who would even entertain making such offensive remarks in a public forum are not the kind of people who are so easily shamed. They tend to be sociopaths who end up hardening their self-image in response to the outrage. Don't weep for the likes of her.
Wow. I have mod points and want to use them all to negatively mod the "summary" to "Incoherent".
The point of her being fired has nothing to do with public outrage, hysteria, infotainment.
This person is a highly paid corporate PR professional and her tweet showed that she is not that good at her job after all, thus being fired. My wife is a PR professional who would never make such as stupid mistake, because she's a professional to the core at all times.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Unless of course you want to work for a company that agrees with whatever you said. Even if they are not openly racist, after the initial drama dies down there are plenty of companies that have management who buy into the idea that such things are liberal-pc-whatever in nature and thus hiring such a person is a quiet 'screw you' to a culture they don't approve of.
Or maybe its just that the majority of twitter users come from Europe or North America.
Sounds like the 1% has their own kind of epidemic going around
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