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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

#181

Post by lambda »

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…

I wouldn't say that HN "is" a bunch of MRA losers; HN is a big place, and there are a lot of different types of people on it.

But there are a bunch of MRA losers on HN. How many, it's hard to tell; maybe a few that are very vocal, maybe a few with many sockpuppets, maybe a lot. If you ever get involved in a thread about any issue about women in technology, programs for encouraging women in technology, or the like, you will see them come out of the woodwork (and such threads will frequently drop off the front page as the long comment threads trigger HN's algorithm that try to discourage flamewar topics).

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

#182

Post by jerf »

foehp wrote: post #175
jerf wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Scale matters. And it has real-world effects... people get fired over this sort of thing, among other things.

The only thing preventing the lynch mob from doing what things the physical lynch mobs used to do is simple, sheer lack of physical proximity, so A: I consider it a valid use of the term and B: It should not be viewed by any sane person as a normal and healthy social correction mechanism, it should be condemned by all. It is still dangerous, and if everyone acts like it's no big deal or even a good idea, it will get worse, until the lynch mobs do do what lynch mobs used to do.

And I mean that 100% fully literally, with absolutely no exaggeration whatsoever. In the real world, the line between "dozens of death threats", which we've already handily reached, and "an actual attempt on your life" is very thin. As easy as it may be to tell others not to worry, if you personally were betting your life on that line, you would not be happy; it is not to be relied upon. There are crazy people out there. Failure to take that into account while passively accepting that online lynch mobs are OK is just stupid.

This stuff isn't a joke. It's one of the foundational bricks between having a civilization and not having one. It is unwise to be so lackadaisical about it, if you like living in a civilization.

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

#183

Post by celticninja »

spain wrote: post #166

Interesting article, though I wonder why the title here on Hacker News is "How One Stupid Tweet Ruined Justine Sacco's Life" whereas the title on the actual article is "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life."

clickbait headline i assume.

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

#184

Post by j2kun »

vertex-four wrote: post #107
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…

> you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online If you published something similarly obnoxious in a newspaper before the Internet, I'm sure you'd get a similarly angry response from some people, and quite possibly have someone harass you in person if they knew where to find you. If you stood on top of a soap box and shouted offensive crap at the public, you might have stuff…

But it's still niche media manipulating the voice and attention of the masses, as illustrated by the article. There is so much bigotry and racism that goes unnoticed in the depths of comment boards and bad blogs. Why aren't the masses also voicing about any of this? Because they aren't speaking briefly enough to be easily criticizable.

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

#185

Post by shanusmagnus »

vertex-four wrote: post #107
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…

> you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online If you published something similarly obnoxious in a newspaper before the Internet, I'm sure you'd get a similarly angry response from some people, and quite possibly have someone harass you in person if they knew where to find you. If you stood on top of a soap box and shouted offensive crap at the public, you might have stuff…

You're missing a crucial point: whatever an average person does lasts forever. It used to be that you had to be somebody notable before this happened, which meant you had a recompense -- you were already famous for some reason. Now, the average shit you might say at the bar to your friends can mark you for all eternity. That's something unheralded in the history of communication, and it's horrifying.

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

#186

Post by vertex-four »

nickff wrote: post #174
vertex-four wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Mainly because "progressivism" as the term is used today has little to do with what it was about in the past? Most movements have had huge changes over the past hundred years.

It wasn't exactly conservatism which brought us back to the point we're at now from there, was it? It seems as if it were a different movement entirely from the late 1800s progressives and the conservative movement.

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

#187

Post by valgaze »

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…

It's b/c it's the NYTimes-- they actually do reporting & journalism.

There's seems to be a lot of piggybacking/freeloading off of original reporting. I was involved with a project that got a big splashy NYTimes write up and it was astonishing in the coming days to see how many joker press outlets basically crimped off the Times' original reporting. They'd include a link and all that but they'd lift the juciest quotes/content and the only thing they'd contribute was some usually sassy commentary.

Here's a really vivid example-- great write up about Target detecting a pregnancy from purchase data: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

It's a great little news nugget- provocative, interesting, yadda yadda.

And then before you know it, all these "summary"/"reaction" stories get published which didn't exactly contribute much or move the ball down the field:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

http://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-s...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102859/How-Target-k...

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-t...

I'm not sure if this is a real problem or not, but it seems kind of lame that those other groups get to sit on their cans and pontificate while others get out of their offices.

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

#188

Post by celticninja »

geofft wrote: post #177
golemotron wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

but really what we see with these crusades by SJW's is just an opportunity for bullying, usually by people who were once bullied and now want to get their own back. A lot of it is bandwagon jumping by the majority of people, who may or may not have a dog int he fight, but just want to cause a fuss. It is these people that call the employers, DDOS employers websites etc and then everyone lumps them all together as SJW's, giving everyone a bad rep.

Doing things quietly would bring about better change, not chnage through fear (as it is now) but change through education. Explain to eople why they are wrong, get them to conciously change their behaviour as opposed to reactively change it to protect themselves and not because of an understanding of where they went wrong.

Reasd the article and everyone involved still thinks that what they said was a joke and was blown out of all proportion. No minds were changed here, people just batten down the hatches to protect themselves and their families.

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

#189

Post by wallyhs »

jim_greco wrote: post #105

1) It's an offensive tweet. Whether you intend something to be offensive or not doesn't make it any less offensive. 2) It's very easy to pass off casual racism as a joke or a misunderstanding of the medium after it blows up in your face.

You can't control what other people find offensive, and you can't avoid offending other people. You can control your own reaction to what you find offensive.

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

#190

Post by jbrooksuk »

chris_wot wrote: post #146
EvanKelly wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really understanding how the wikipedia community operates, why were you irritated by the signature and how was writing the comments such an irreconcilable wrong? Were they inappropriate comments?

The comments weren't awful. It was really a bad judgement call because it violated the principle "don't be disruptive to make a point", which I really didn't consider very clearly before doing it. The reason I was annoyed about it was because signatures are the way you see who is saying something in a conversation thread. Back then you'd click on the person's username and get easy access to their pages, talk page, bl…

Were you not in a position to edit his signature, or get it edited? You jumped the gun.
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