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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

#571

Post by sejje »

marcusgarvey wrote: post #316
sejje wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you choose to believe she meant she literally cannot get AIDS? Come on.

My point is, it's natural for her to say afterwards that it was meant ironically now that the backlash has happened. Maybe she's just a jerk who got caught being a jerk.

My point is, either she was saying it ironically or she was saying it seriously. She can't possibly have said it seriously.

Was it a somewhat insensitive joke? Sure. But you can't take the statement at face value.

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

#572

Post by danielweber »

timr wrote: post #257
paulhauggis wrote: post #219

This is the reality of social media. If you offend the wrong person, you will most likely get fired from your job and or get unwanted attention in other parts of your life..all for just expressing an opinion. It's essentially online bullying by people that want to silence you for having an opinion that is different than their own. The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against hi…

Twitter, in particular, is awful. There's no context and very little thought possible in 140 characters. So you either get marketing from corporations, jokes/memes, or full-frontal assaults by the pitchfork-weilding mob, with no effective defense possible in the medium. At least on Facebook you can elucidate your thoughts, defend your opinions, and otherwise make an effort too look like a person who appreciates nuanc…

The thing about Twitter is that everyone is connected to the same party line.

Imagine you are at a party of 100 people, all having their own small conversations in of two to five people. Then imagine someone throws a switch and every single thing said is heard by everyone in the room, but only fleetingly and with no time to imagine the context.

And sometimes Twitter's culture makes it really hard to find context. If someone responds directly to a tweet, you can see that in the conversation, but a manual RT destroys that chain.

The real solution is that we have to recognize that our lizard brains love beating the shit out of people. We've put on a layer of civilization that stops us from doing that in person, but it's just as bad to do it online. Once we recognize that we can be monsters, we can figure out how to stop doing it, or at least do it less.

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

#573

Post by danielweber »

Natsu wrote: post #547
gnopgnip wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would society really be any better off if people aren't held accountable for what they say?

There's a spectrum of 'accountable' between being an unemployable pariah and being totally unaccountable which disorganized mass action cannot be properly calibrated for.

The "Mob" API has exactly one public method: start().

It doesn't return. You can't be sure if it worked.

And, most importantly, you don't have the ability to say "no, no, it started against the wrong person" or "okay, that's enough." It will run at its own speed, maybe finding a new target when the first one is destroyed.

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

#574

Post by danielweber »

vonmoltke wrote: post #299
anon4 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why you keep different online identities that don't point to each other. So you can say the stupid jokes on your "sgt.lonelyheart97" twitter while posting on your prim&proper official account once or twice a year. Someone who really wants to will probably be able to connect the dots after enough digging... somehow. But at that point it's someone with vendetta against you specifically. Or just go and post on…

Two of the women mentioned in this article were doing just that. They posted pictures that the wrong people found offensive, got doxxed, bullied, and fired.

Which article did you read? Everyone in the article was demonstrating their innocence by doing things with their real names, with public profiles describing their place of employment.

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

#575

Post by dominotw »

paganel wrote: post #15
dominotw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Racist jokes are never harmless.

Isn't taking about them freely(Joking included) the first step to addressing the issue?

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

#576

Post by swang »

stolio wrote: post #486
BrainInAJar wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in for example Eich's case how do you pull him aside and say "stop being a dick by donating to hate, and then trying to run a diverse company?"

Just because somebody's idea of diversity is different from yours doesn't make them hateful, it just makes them different. It's ironic that this is lost on people who argue the most loudly for inclusiveness.

Whether or not you agree with Eich getting fired (stepping down) over it is another thing, but donating to a cause whose sole purpose is to prevent a group's right to get married (and reap the tax benefits!) seems pretty hateful. You can get into semantics about what was or wasn't written in religious texts, whatever, still doesn't make it right.

What CamperBob2 said was probably inflammatory but probably also right. If you're against same-sex marriage you're probably on the wrong side of history.

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

#577

Post by CamperBob2 »

latestrevision wrote: post #545
CamperBob2 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't make them "different," it makes them hateful. You're carrying water for some people that will go down in history next to the KKK. Stop it.

I'm really sorry to have to be so direct about this, but it's perspectives like this that are part of the problem. By saying that they're "next to the KKK", you're marking your opposition as not only immoral, but beyond reprieve. If you're willing to simplify the moral landscape to a single line onto which you've placed yourself squarely at the "good" end, you're taking a gravely irresponsible logical shortcut. EDIT:…

By saying that they're "next to the KKK", you're marking your opposition as not only immoral, but beyond reprieve.

Can you elaborate on that? Several prominent racists of the KKK era, including people like Robert Byrd and George Wallace, ultimately renounced their earlier views. Eich is free to do the same whenever he wants. He has not, as far as I'm aware.

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

#578

Post by danielweber »

sharkweek wrote: post #90

I wonder about this a lot - in 15-20 years, political candidates / public figures will have hundreds of things they have said online embarrassing their campaigns/images. Do we all just become more accepting of sarcasm, racism, bad jokes, etc? Is it a step backwards or is it a step forward? I can tell you for a fact I'm sure things on my Twitter account could likely be taken out of context as I can sometimes be a bit…

A lot of the people planning to be politicians are purposefully keeping their current digital life clean.

CJ John Roberts knew from a young age he wanted to be Chief Justice. (Overachiever, but lots of us on HN are overachievers.) He kept his record very clean. He never even got a speeding ticket.

And I totally see understand why: he was aware of how the media pick apart people, and who knows what one tiny thing might spiral out of control.

But it means the CJ, when making ruling about police stops, has never actually experienced something the majority of Americans have, and the Court loses some bit of useful perspective.

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

#580

Post by wutbrodo »

danso wrote: post #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…

> 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

There's an easy solution to this (if one isn't an idiot). If there's a reasonable explanation that doesn't imply bad intentions, just err on the side of that one. The "principle of charity" honestly has pretty much no downside, and pretty huge upside. One of the real shocks I got coming into adulthood was finding out that more people don't act this way. Somewhat tangentially, it also removes a lot of stress from your life: when a service worker fucks up badly, people I'm with are often pretty pissed at them (whether or not they express that directly) while my reaction is "eh shit happens, people make mistakes, why get worked up".

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