How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

In an open and democratic society, free speech is a value that is foundationally the core value that underpins everything. Free speech is there to protect the offensive and inappropriate... not civil discourse.

Supporting an environment where it's acceptable to respond to some perceived slight (which changes over time) with an crazy overreacting mob isn't OK in an open society ever. You're very sensitive to racist statements... how do you feel 10 years from when the "offensive statement of the day" is an anti-war statement? Or a statement offensive to a particular religious doctrine?

History is littered with people who do awful things while believing that they are righteous. Nobody in colonial Massachusetts was pro-witch. Nobody in 1950 America was pro-communist.

But if you value what freedom of speech provides—an open marketplace of ideas, socialization between those of different values and opinions without fear of violence—you should practice and encourage tolerance and equanimity, regardless of what the laws about speech are.

Angry mobs petitioning people to be fired from their jobs for bad jokes or unfavorable political donations don't violate the First Amendment, but they certainly discourage speaking freely.

He bowed out of that after 6 months, as I recall.

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?

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.