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How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

nytimes.com

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

#171

Post by lurcio »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #138

Let's build an Internet. People can connect. They can share their feelings. It'll make the world better place. Had no one seen what mobs of angry people do? This is getting worse, not better. We will see this kind of anger junkie mob mentality explode into real violence. And then the violence will escalate. Good news. We are seeing the end of the nation state. Just like they said. It is being replaced with niche mobs…

The internet has always put me in mind of Dostoievskys under-appreciated story Bobok.

"It may be so, but think of putting it so bluntly into print. In print everything ought to be decorous; there ought to be ideals, while instead of that...

Say it indirectly, at least; that's what you have style for. But no, he doesn't care to do it indirectly. Nowadays humour and a fine style have disappeared, and abuse is accepted as wit. I do not resent it: but God knows I am not enough of a literary man to go out of my mind..."

btw I guess it was a throwaway comment, but.."We are seeing the end of the nation state" Where do you see that? (I see multi-level governance.)

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

#172

Post by darkmighty »

The core problem here is ironically the effectiveness of online media to broadcast personal opinions. An "offensive"/"revolting" message can be spread exponentially quickly with only a small effort by each participant. Add to that the statistical tendency of a small group of people to be extremely offended by certain innocuous messages without the opposing effect: people are usually either offended or simply don't care -- guess what effect always prevails!

To illustrate, if your message randomly spread to cause a response to 100k people, and on average each person dedicates 1 minute on it due to offense/indignation/etc, collectively ~1600 hours or 70 days will be spent on it. If a single person is the target of this effort, it can be disastrous.

I don't think we're going to have any less effective social media in the future (nor should we); neither do I believe in the near term people will be much more enlightened as to collectively avoid strong reactions directed at individuals.

So the only way to be strongly opinionated in public online is through anonymity (or through being a "brand" -- a celebrity, a comic, etc, but not the case for the average person). Major companies (facebook,google,...) fail to see this fundamental aspect of the internet: anonimity is a basic tool. We need the hierarchy where our personal communications are more transparent and the more public they become the more anonymous we can be.

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

#173

Post by matthewmacleod »

Kenji wrote: post #153
matthewmacleod wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it difficult to believe you actually think that – it's not really a self-consistent viewpoint, given that what you describe as 'social justice bullying' is absolutely free speech.

What is a hinderance to freedom of speech is not the bullying itself, but the mindset behind it. If you can't make a foolish joke without having your entire life ruined and getting fired, then yes that is the very definition of lack of freedom of speech. Getting fired for a joke, come on? Action and reaction are completely disproportionate. But worry not, I will absorb the downvotes like a sponge for I know that my c…

I do agree that having one's life ruined over this sort of thing is disproportionate, and that's something worth talking about. But we've got to be careful not to overreact to this sort of thing, which just results in shouting matches.

Let's remember that it's one thing to 'make a foolish joke', and it's another thing to 'make a foolish joke in front of millions of people.' One of the issues here is the lack of understand that people have about the act of publishing, and I think we'd be better focusing on that.

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

#174

Post by nickff »

vertex-four wrote: post #131
Amezarak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> As a thought experiment, imagine Person X said something deemed offensive and society responded in a uniform manner - by constant public humiliation, refusing to do business with them, refusing to even speak to them, etc. I will note that until relatively recently, those who we consider "conservatives" today did exactly that towards "progressives". You try and dare being publicly against segregation and the mistrea…

I would just like to point out that the progressives were the ones who pushed to disenfranchise African-Americans for decades.[1] The conservatives were on the other side, pushing for equal rights; as an example, President Coolidge said "[As president, I am] one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.".[2]

The progressive movement has a horrific history, and I find it puzzling as to why someone would self identify with a movement so steeped in racism and eugenics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_Sta...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge

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

#175

Post by foehp »

jerf wrote: post #122
spikexxx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is deceptive to characterize an online lynch mob as not a "receptive audience". Read the article again... some of the lynch mobs weren't even factually correct about what they mobilized for. The attempt to implicitly pull in the "well, they sorta deserved it defense" fails on the grounds that you're leaving the determination of who deserved it up to a mob . Hi, I'm one of your friendly neighborhood HN libertarians…

It is deceptive to characterize angry comments posted online as a "lynch mob".

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

#176

Post by taylorwc »

j_horvat wrote: post #155
taylorwc wrote: post #62

I think they article would more aptly have been titled, "How One Thoughtless Public Expression of Justine Sacco's Lack of Judgment and Racism Had Consequences." Really hard to feel sympathy for her.

Really? No sympathy? Did you read the article? Obviously what she said was inappropriate but there are very few people that should be dragged through the mud as roughly as she was. Especially over less than 140 characters. Should she have lost her job? Yeah probably being in such a high profile position. But should she be reviled as an truly awful person when her only crime was an ill-conceived tweet? I don't think s…

> it scares me that we are willing to judge and condemn people for so little.

Me too! That's why I try my absolute best to exercise caution and be thoughtful about what I say in a public forum. I don't disagree that the reaction was overkill; but that's the way the world is, even if I think it's wrong.

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

#177

Post by geofft »

golemotron wrote: post #167
geofft wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SJW here. Private communication works well if the problem is specific people behaving badly in private, and public ostracism is, in fact, inappropriate. But usually the goal is to establish a changed social norm, and to combat an existing one, which needs to be done in public; ostracizing an individual is not the goal (and, to be clear, isn't a good thing!). Someone brought up the example of Ben Noordhuis and node.js…

Essentially, your argument is that the ends justify the means, right? Or, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? The issue is that we now know that things blow up in social media so we should adjust our behavior to be ethical. The case of dongle-gate at PyCon is a good example to talk about. We should now understand that attempting local solutions outside of social media is far preferable. Individu…

No, absolutely not, and I'm sad that anyone would think I'm advocating that, because it means I wrote unclearly. My argument is that distasteful but not disallowable means should not scare us off from meaningful ends. Disallowable means are, as always, disallowable.

Here's an example of a disallowable means: come up with trumped-up excuses using forged evidence to fire all the powerful white men on the grounds that once you get rid of them, the people who'll fill in will be (probably) less oppressive. You can probably even come up with data backing that. But it would be completely inappropriate. (Not to mention strategically wrong because it legitimizes a harmful strategy, but it's also inherently wrong even if it weren't strategically wrong.)

My worry is that we'll look at a possible side effect of a means as a threat, as you're portraying things "blowing up", and that will be a chilling effect on change. Whatever the problems are with social media, to use that as an excuse is just that—an excuse, to prop up the current, bad systems.

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

#178

Post by RyanMcGreal »

gumby wrote: post #126

On a tangental meta point: this is a good, solid piece of reportage [1] which is increasingly uncommon. The author talked to a number of people over a long period of time and uncovered subtleties that typically are ignored these days. A particularly nice touch was to use of a relatively recent historical reference from the mid 18th century. Mob justice and public shaming go back millennia and it would have been easy…

> reportage [1]

Not to worry: put the emphasis on the second syllable and it's an English term as well.

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

#179

Post by luckydude »

kefka wrote: post #65
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.

I missed no such point. If you want to be a racist, sexist, or anything else potentially covered by *-ist, do so locally and quietly. If you don't, the mob of internet injustices will hit and will kill your livelihood.

You are assuming that the "mob of internet injustices" make good choices. It's pretty clear that they don't in all cases. As someone else said, that's why we have due process, we're supposed be thoughtful before we get out the torches.
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