How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by Squarel » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #10

fennecfoxen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

So you are not of the opinion that her tweet was rather about privilege?

When you make assumptions about someone based on 1 line, then you may or may not be a bad human being ;)

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

#112

Post by marcusgarvey » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

theorique wrote: post #79

karangoeluw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? She mocked a whole nation, and used a disease that has killed over a million people as a joke in a public forum.

She was being ironic - making fun of herself by pretending to be a ditzy, entitled white girl who though that she could never get AIDS. Unfortunately, in her absence, people took her literally and assumed she was serious.

She has plenty of reason to now explain it as being ironic, but we'll never know if that was her original intent, will we? Her other tweets from the same period strike me immature and mean-spirited.

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

#113

Post by profinger » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

devopsproject wrote: post #53

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

+1

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

#114

Post by fizbin » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

ObviousScience wrote: post #37

karangoeluw wrote: post #3

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.

I don't like the extremism behind the idea that we should fire someone from their job over a off-color joke which is intended for a small audience, but may be overheard accidentally by others. That sort of absolutism of policing thought just doesn't end well, ever. To translate it away from Twitter: imagine you're at a public space, such as a mall, and you happen to be walking by a table of people leaning together ju…

I think if you want to use the appropriate analogy, you have to include that it was fundamentally a public thing to do, even though she believed her audience tiny. Your analogy as presented gets confused because of the social conventions against eavesdropping, even in a public place. A tweet is fundamentally meant to be a broadcast to the world, not just your immediate followers.

Rather, imagine her shouting it out at a mall on a day when the mall is relatively empty. (So that she had reason to believe the audience tiny, but still broadcast it) Unfortunately for analogy-world Justine, a news crew was downstairs shooting B roll for background and she's there clearly visible and audible in the corner of the screen, and the clip got leaked. That's the analogous real-life situation.

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

#115

Post by cheald » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #60

tjic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#116

Post by graeme » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

Amezarak wrote: post #95

spikexxx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over-reaction or not, freedom of speech does not guarantee a receptive audience.

> 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 publ…

I've thought it odd that the discourse over free speech focusses on legal rights.

The idea behind human rights is that they're not government granted, but instead are innate to humans are humans.

The issue is more complicated than "let everyone say what they want to say", but it's also more complicated than "you have a legal right, but nothing beyond that"

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

#117

Post by knodi123 » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

deong wrote: post #55

lbarrow wrote: post #21

How was her life ruined? She lost her job, then got a new one. Her life seems fine.

At least logged into my Google account, if I type "Justine", it suggests "Sacco" as the top completion. It's not all that hyperbolic to say "ruined your life" when your first name is literally a global URI to the (perceived) worst thing you've ever done.

I once created a server-side app that would monitor where certain search terms showed up in google rankings, so you could monitor change over time.

The biggest challenge we faced was that google dramatically changes your search results based on who you are, and where you are.

My point is - Justine Sacco isn't even on the first page of Justines for me. Maybe google just thinks Sacco is the best Justine for you, but it's probably not as bad as a "global uri".

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

#118

Post by ripdog » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

toothbrush wrote: post #33

"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…

A taste of her own medicine. It shouldn't have happened, but at least she only got what she gave.

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

#119

Post by bkirwi » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #26

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 wer…

> Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes.

Sure, but you don't magically make society robust by telling racist jokes. The healthy society comes first; the fact that these jokes no longer sting is just a pleasant side effect.

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

#120

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

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!