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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

#121

Post by MrLeap »

ForHackernews wrote: post #91
potatolicious wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't completely made up of MRA types, but if you've been noticing there are a lot of them here (along with your more typical "SJWs out to get us" types). HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago. Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind. There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW c…

> There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn. Please tell me where? I've noticed the same irritating trends here. At this rate, I might just go back to Slashdot.

What's the new URL for slashdot? The old one seems to point to a blog for Dice these days.

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

#122

Post by jerf »

spikexxx wrote: post #67
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…

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, and everyone take note, I'm about to defend government here. If someone does something seriously deserving of that level of opprobrium, firings, and social tarring-and-feathering, they deserve the protections that government processes can bring to bear to try to do our best to make sure that we only fire the big guns at people who, to the best of our knowledge, have been determined to deserve it by processes with a longstanding historical pedigree and centuries of back-and-forth tuning. There's a reason we have trials and such, a deep and important one.

Do not be so hurried to give up that social standard because, let's not mince words here, you're playacting at being offended because that's what your social group expects. Let's not pretend that anybody was actually offended at the statement of someone with 170 twitter followers, and if anybody really, truly was somehow "offended" it was only after the actions of the lynch mob itself! They're the ones who actually spread it around... maybe they're the ones we should lynch. Without trial, of course.

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

#123

Post by trelltron »

paganel wrote: post #5
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.

Exactly. You get to pay for your very stupid mistakes, especially those that affect other people (like this lady's tweet did).

How, exactly, did it affect other people?

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

#124

Post by theorique »

taylorwc wrote: post #93
theorique wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about, "one ironic joke, and then a long flight where she could not communicate that she was being ironic, cost Justine Sacco a lot". She wasn't being racist, she was lampooning American insularity. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't get that it was a joke, and/or didn't get the joke, and she paid the price.

Even if one were to give her the benefit of the doubt on whether or not her tweets express racist sentiment, there's still a stupendous lack of judgment on her part. She's saying things publicly, associated with her name. Anyone who expresses something in that fashion should be fully prepared to deal with backlash. She should have the right to express her views, even if they are unpopular--and she should be willing t…

Perhaps, but in this case, the consequences were really disproportionate to the "crime".

Here's what "should" have happened:

:

: Hey, that's really racist.

: Oh, I didn't mean it that way - I'm making fun of American insularity.

: OK, I still don't like it, but I get what you meant now.

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

#125

Post by ForHackernews »

MrLeap wrote: post #121
ForHackernews wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn. Please tell me where? I've noticed the same irritating trends here. At this rate, I might just go back to Slashdot.

What's the new URL for slashdot? The old one seems to point to a blog for Dice these days.

http://slashdot.org/ AFAIK

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

#126

Post by gumby »

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 to pull out a roman or biblical reference. But he found one that actually focussed on the victimhood of the transgressor. Lovely.

(Sorry to use a French term; I'm not intending to be pretentious, it's just that the term "journalism" has been debased to the point where it is now casually used to refer to advertising).

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

#127

Post by aptwebapps »

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…

It may take more than saturation in social media. I think it will take time. Eventually everyone's Bacon distance to someone who got shamed or similarly mistreated will be small enough that maybe there'll be enough awareness to prevent most occurrences.

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

#128

Post by EvanKelly »

chris_wot wrote: post #108

When I was on Wikipedia as an admin, someone modified their signature to point to a user who didn't exist. I was pretty pissed off about this, and so I went to the admins noticeboard I'd setup not really that long ago to ask someone to resolve the issue. This is where I did something particularly dumb. I created the account to the non-existent user and posted a few comments on it - then quickly switched back to my Ta…

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?

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

#129

Post by engendered »

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…

It's surprising how many have fallen for the "MRA" thing. In the case of Adria Richards, she bullied a person and misrepresented a situation to the point of getting a man fired from a job, torch mob in close pursuit. I don't care if such bullies are men or women, be wary living by the sword because, as Adria learned, often you'll "die" by one (metaphorically...though someone somewhere will declare that a vile death threat from the oppressors).

Torch mobs are an atrocity. They were against a gentleman making a lame but benign joke. They are against someone posting some random thought-crime tweet. They are against the people who send the torch mobs in fast pursuit.

And equally to blame are people in positions of power who bend so easily to torch mobs. If you immediately fire someone for something that would be at most a warning, all because a mob demands it, you are the problem, and a coward to boot.

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

#130

Post by wishinghand »

chris_wot wrote: post #108

When I was on Wikipedia as an admin, someone modified their signature to point to a user who didn't exist. I was pretty pissed off about this, and so I went to the admins noticeboard I'd setup not really that long ago to ask someone to resolve the issue. This is where I did something particularly dumb. I created the account to the non-existent user and posted a few comments on it - then quickly switched back to my Ta…

I guess I'm too lacking in people skills to know this- what was the bad judgement call in what you did?
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