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How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

nytimes.com

11–20 of 596 posts

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#11

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.

It looked like a harmless joke to me. wtf is wrong with ppl.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#14

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.

She's a victim because the consequences were completely out of proportion to her transgression.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#15

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.

It looked like a harmless joke to me. wtf is wrong with ppl.

Racist jokes are never harmless.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#16

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.

It looked like a harmless joke to me. wtf is wrong with ppl.

People get offended, you might think that's right, wrong or whatever but it happens. And you certainly wouldn't make that joke outside of your close circle of friends.

Mob justice mentality certainly sucks though, imagine someone simply inspects one of your tweets, rewrites it and posts it somewhere and says "hey this person's racist, call their employer #{employer-number}".

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#17
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"

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looked like a harmless joke to me. wtf is wrong with ppl.

Racist jokes are never harmless.

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?

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#19

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.

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.

Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

#20
post #2

So far, what I see is: "Don't use Twitter." And on the smaller side is "Don't upload shit to social media."

This type of mass shaming existed before twitter. The Steve Bartman incident[0] comes to mind. The difference appears to be that it used to only be possible for such things to snowball when the media or a celebrity pushed the issue into the spotlight. Nowadays, twitter allows for quick and easy mass shaming by anyone and everyone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bartman_incident

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