Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life • Hacker News Board

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#41

Post by throwawayaway » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:33 PM UTC

moomin wrote: post #27

throwawayaway wrote: post #2

> He noticed ruefully that a few days earlier the woman – her name was Adria Richards – had herself tweeted a stupid penis joke. She’d suggested to a friend that he put socks down his pants to bewilder TSA agents at the airport. Lot of hypocrisy here! Neither person deserved to lose their job, the whole situation seems to have gotten completely out of hand. Funny how even the smallest hint of acknowledgement or respo…

One was a professional context, one wasn't.

i would wager that most people feel a private conversation at a convention is less a professional context than getting on the twitter megaphone, i certainly do.

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#42

Post by jackvalentine » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:33 PM UTC

moomin wrote: post #22

[deleted] wrote: post #9

[deleted]

It's very hard to sympathize with anyone when you're reading someone perform a character assassination on them.

I've deleted what I wrote because of the scary number of upvotes it was gaining. I don't feel like spending the rest of the night trying to defend something about something that is so devisive even if I am on the "popular" side in this particular forum. I didn't write anything profound and it began to feel like cheap point scoring.

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#43

Post by rors » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:33 PM UTC

After reading this I don't like Adria Richards very much. She seems very self involved with a persecution context. However, she is still very much a victim of sexist online culture. Bad people can be victims too.

A man makes a mildly sexist unfunny joke and the result is a woman is unemployed for six months and fears for her safety. That is 'not cool', and ironically only reinforces her and other women's belief that there is a patriarchy out to get them.

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#44

Post by near » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:33 PM UTC

The world is replete with examples of why you should never use your real name with your online identity in any way (although in this case, the guy's employer found out over a photograph; which is even more troubling.)

If there's anyone worse than Adria in this story, it's both Hank's and Adria's former employers. You don't destroy a person's life over a comment or a blackmail threat. But as they say, if corporations are people, then they are clearly sociopaths.

That said, there was this excerpt: "I know you didn’t call for him to be fired. But you must have felt pretty bad." "Not too bad, he's a white male. I'm a black Jewish female."

Followed by this later on, in the same interview: SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if Adria was fired. Hours later, she was publicly let go. "I cried a lot, journaled and escaped by watching movies,"

Her lack of empathy is absolutely staggering. And, "if I had kids, I wouldn't tell jokes"? Seriously?

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#45

Post by zvrba » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:34 PM UTC

So she overhears a private conversation between friends [none of the talk was directed to or being about anybody in particular], tweets a "summary" without context, adds a photo of the people involved, all in order to publicly shame them, while they did nothing wrong.

No sympathy for her.

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#46

Post by Jem » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:34 PM UTC

moomin wrote: post #23

Jem wrote: post #10

I remember when this incident happened. I can't remember what my reaction was at the time (probably a combination of "let's not alienate women in tech further" and "sexual jokes are OK in the right context, and a conf is propably not it") but reading this excerpt - particularly reading about Adria's continued anger(?) at Hank - really shocked me.

Bear in mind that Adria's _still_ getting harassed over this. For Hank it's over.

I get that, and I empathise for Adria, but Hank isn't the perpetrator of the abuse. It's the direction of Adria's anger that shocked me, not that she's angry.

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#47

Post by oracle2025 » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:35 PM UTC

throwawayaway wrote: post #24

oracle2025 wrote: post #19

One interesting aspect that seems to be completely left out of that discussion is the issue of labour protection laws. Firing someone in Europe for some minor issue like that would probably be a major legal issue here.

With enough money in the fired party's bank account, it would be. I think the only difference between Europe and the US in this regard is the amount of money required to get justice.

sounds like a major difference, if a labour law only protects rich people, it is not really in the spirit of an actual "labour law"

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#48

Post by bluehex » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:35 PM UTC

rors wrote: post #43

After reading this I don't like Adria Richards very much. She seems very self involved with a persecution context. However, she is still very much a victim of sexist online culture. Bad people can be victims too. A man makes a mildly sexist unfunny joke and the result is a woman is unemployed for six months and fears for her safety. That is 'not cool', and ironically only reinforces her and other women's belief that…

Was the joke even sexist at all or was it just sexual in nature? Inappropriate sure, but that's a pretty big difference in my book.

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#49

Post by throwawayaway » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:35 PM UTC

oracle2025 wrote: post #47

throwawayaway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With enough money in the fired party's bank account, it would be. I think the only difference between Europe and the US in this regard is the amount of money required to get justice.

sounds like a major difference, if a labour law only protects rich people, it is not really in the spirit of an actual "labour law" https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

my point is rather badly explained, i mean to say that you need quite a lot of money on either continent to fight these type of battles.

Re: Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life

#50

Post by imjoshholloway » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 12:36 PM UTC

Red_Tarsius wrote: post #8

> “Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired. But you must have felt pretty bad.” > “Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s Syndrome a…

What makes me laugh is where she says she's not to blame for what happened to Hank yet she then blames HIM for what happened to her.

If she didn't send the tweet, he wouldn't have got fired. If he didn't get fired, he wouldn't have posted on HN about being fired. If he didn't post on HN then none of this would've happened.

Basically it all stems from her original tweet..

I'm not condoning any of the behaviour but it could've quite easily been handled more maturely. If, instead of turning round, taking a photo and tweeting she'd approached him like an adult (maybe with the conference organisers if she was scared) and said "That's not cool" to him so he could actually apologised to her and none of this would've happened.