Thursday Questions: Mob Justice and Social Media
The New York Times Sunday Magazine is going to publish an article titled “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine’s Sacco’s Life.”
Justine Sacco was woman who published the tweet “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” and then discovered she created an Internet storm and lost her job. The article has other stories about people whose posts were taking out of context and this caused an extreme storm of public anger and rage.
Choice quote: “Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so.”
This goes back to Rufus’s post about making fun of dudes who wear Fedoras and whether they are all MRA or MRA by association and whether it is okay to make fun of “nice guys” or not.
There is something about the Internet that reminds me very much of the Two Minutes of Hate from 1984 and we are all the Haters and we are all Emmanuel Goldstein as well.
Thursday questions: What is it about the Internet that makes it so easy to put people into the stocks? Why is a charitable reading the hardest thing to come by? Is this going to be a permanent part of Internet life or will it end and how?
There are serious threats on the Internet. No one should be doxxed and there is no excuse for the sexist and violent antics of death and rape threats. Yet I don’t think sites like the stuff Rufus pointed out in his thread do any good and there is something disturbing to me about the kind of lynch mobbing that Sacco went through even though her comment was rather tone deaf. The most successful on-line news sites like Gawker Media seem to be built on snark and cruelty and I find this a problematic. Gawker Media can publish really interesting stuff like their Letters from Death Row and Letters from Unemployment series but this is only a small percentage of their output. Most of their output seems to be of the “This person is bad and should feel bad and you are totally good for making fun of this person category.”
Quick response time is the primary reason why social media communications often end up the way they do. In the past, responding to a non-real life communication you hated was much slower. This led to more contemplation and reflection before you responded in many cases. The Internet allows for instantaneous response and this doesn’t encourage mulling over things first. It favors a bad faith interpretation.
Justine Sacco’s tweet was rather disgusting though.Report
I’ll suggest a more charitable interpretation of her tweet. The implied sarcasm is basically “‘I’m kidding, white people don’t get AIDS.” You can take it as a straight, racist remark or give her the benefit of the doubt. In her own words,
She can make all the jokes she wants, but tasteless jokes often get taken poorly. I think the pile was way overboard. But its a simply life skill to know your audience especially for tasteless jokes: don’t do it in public. And twitter is pretty darn public. Keep your tasteless jokes in front of people who know you and will give you the benefit of the doubt if needed.Report
And, for the love of god, if you’re going to make tasteless jokes in public, use a fake name!Report
The key factor in her case was her being on a plane. It allowed he furor to reach new heights because she couldn’t explain herself or apologize, and because it allowed people to rage at what amounted to an inanimate object: a Twitter feed with no one behind the screen. It got so out of control that there was a dude waiting for her at the airport.
I have to say that I’ve never seen anything quite like what happened to Sacco, before or since. I’ve seen plenty of Twitter mobs, but that one was the most extreme by an order of magnitude or two, which makes it a poor example to use in “trends in Twitter” discussions.Report
Has a Twitter mob ever been appeased by explaining?Report
1. Gallow’s Humor is very hard to pull off in general and is often done only in context. I am Jewish. There are lots of Jewish jokes which would sound really anti-Semitic if told by non-Jews. I generally only tells these jokes around Jews just in case anyone misinterprets. A lot of people who work in law and crime enforcement and medicine and social work also develop their own gallow’s humor as a psychological defense mechanism but this is not shared with the general public.
2. Tweeting is probably the world’s worst medium for reading tone. If I heard her say that, I can get all sorts of vocal clues and maybe visual cues to indicate that she is joking. This is very hard on a tweet even with emoji.Report
You said:
And the issue is that, on Twitter, nobody knows whether you are a Jew or not. Nobody knew anything about Justine Sacco, where she lived, or what the tweet meant to her. And going offline for a few hours made it much, much worse, since she had no opportunity to say the equivalent of “I’m Jewish”.
I understand this to be part of the “context collapse” described by danah boyd. You neither know who you are talking to, or who is talking to you.
That said, Twitter is no place for irony. A, er, reserved earnestness is the best policy. Or just staying away, like I do.Report
Tweeting is probably the world’s worst medium for reading tone.
Whelp. I can remember having basically the exact same discussion back in the nineties about email and message boards back when “the internet” was dial-up to AOL. The issue isn’t Twitter, although the length limit may exacerbate the problem. The fundamental difficulty is that text is a very difficult medium for conveying emotional context. It’s why we prize people like poets and novelists who can pull it off. It’s also the reason the emoticon was born.Report
It sounds like she was going there because she had an appointment in Samarra.Report
@rufus-f
Awesome.Report
I see that some are already commenting on the poor taste and/or poor wording of Sacco’s tweet. This for me is a separate issue, and perhaps one we focus on to let ourselves off the hook.
I don’t spend as much time as others here on social media, but my limited experience tells me that what happened to Sacco (and many others who face social media’s wrath) has little to do with actual content. Whenever I see someone outraged on SM for stuff like this, it’s a pretty good bet that you don’t have to go very far back into their own twitter/Facebook/etc. feeds to see them posting, “liking,” or retweeting the same kind of jokes themselves.
I suspect that what’s happening when this phenomena occurs has more to with the lizard brain than rational argument: someone exposes themselves as a potential wink link and, if the winds are right, the pack moves in to feast.
I really do believe that if Sacco had posted what she did a week or so earlier or later, she might just as well have been ignored or even retweeted (since I think it was fairly obvious without her explaining that she was mocking white Americans, not Africans) by the exact same people who savaged her. TReport
Wow. Had no idea she was African (or of South African descent).
All I did was laugh at the #has she landed yet…
not on social media, so…Report
I am going to say that the primary role of the internet in this sort of thing is as amplification. People have been putting people in stocks since… well, since they’ve been putting people in stocks.
There’s a cycle of individual stepping out of line, mob pouncing, mob getting our of control, mob slowly realizing that its out of control, and everyone standing around trading recriminations that’s likely been going on as long as human beings have lived and socialized in groups larger than three.Report
This.Report
seconded
Also, why I refuse to use Twitter or any of the other short form social media.Report
I generally think of twitter as the headline without any supporting content.
And we all know how often headlines aren’t supported by the stuff beneath them.Report
Amen, you can’t spell twitter without spelling twit.Report
@north
We might disagree on neo-liberalism but we can always agree on social media.Report
Yeah, I’ll agree with this and think that social media’s problem is the amplification and that the Internet is the world’s biggest small town.Report
If so, then Chris-chan is the village idiot.
… I trust I’ve made my point?Report
These weird things happen anyways. I recall a story about a group of Brits storming a home in protest because they thought a pedophile lived there.
It was a Pediatrician. He was referred to as a ‘pediatrician’ in a newspaper article, and someone…misunderstood, which led to gossip and anger and finally a bunch of people nearly starting a riot outside some poor doctor’s house.
I think another part of the issue is you look at things like this and think “Wow, that’s a LOT of angry people!”. And it is — and it isn’t.
1000 people angry at you on twitter is like finding out that one guy in an entire pro football stadium are angry at you. There’s 50,000 people who aren’t. So really, 99.9% of the people on Twitter alone don’t even know about you.
But on the other hand, 1000 angry people is, well…an awful lot of people in the context of our face-to-face, people I actually know, lives. That’s a HUGE number of people.
And I think that “1000 people angry at me” is much more convincing to most people than 99.9% of the people don’t care, because we don’t tend to deal in percentages for things like that.Report
People have been putting people in stocks since… well, since they’ve been putting people in stocks.
Especially Jim Cramer.Report
It’s strange because the real advantage to moving to a big city and leaving the small town in which you grew up is the chance to escape the small town gossip network that can make your life miserable. The disadvantage is the anonymity can be lonely and isolating. But it seems like through the Internet we’ve been able to do away with the isolation to some extent, while extending the dynamics of the small town gossip network to the whole planet.Report
There was an interesting story on This American Life about on-line media and small town gossip.
Guy lives in a small town Georgia. Discovers he is being slandered and the gossiped about on an on-line message board and it slips into real life. Guy needs to move away to Augusta but he hires a lawyer before he does. The lawyer was able to discover that the gossip came one woman and she was just creating multiple personas and talking with herself about the guy. Guy and his lawyer sue for defamation and win, he is able to restore his reputation and move back.
TAL interviews the woman and she is absolutely unrepentant about her actions!Report
The Talmud states that “the gossiper speaks in Syria and slays in Rome”. Jewish ethics calls the sort of small town gossip and slander, lashon hara. This translate literaily as the evil tongue and a special sort of ire was reserved for it. It was seen literarily as one of the worst things you could do to a person because it could literarily tear everything they built in their life apart and that sometimes moving doesn’t help.Report
I live in a small town and have been the target of it a few times for stepping on the toes of people who like to think of themselves as Very Important. Also for not seeming to give a shit if I do so. The best way to deal with it is to just not respond or give any indication of caring and, eventually, the person leading it will look like they’re nuts.Report
Having spent some good deal of time dealing with corporate PR folk as a reporter, I will say this: when you’re PR for a firm, you’re the public voice for that firm. And the things you say publicly (including social media) reflect on the company.
I’ve one friend (social media friend, that is) who was PR for a fortune-500 company; that’s how I knew her first. She left, and then I started seeing her on left-leaning websites; at first I thought the name just a coincidence, so I asked her if she was one and the same, and she was. She told me straight out that when she was doing PR, she couldn’t let her activism show, and that’s a big part of why she opted to change careers. I know a lot of reporters who feel similarly; they have a brand in their byline, and what they might say of their personal politics, etc., would potentially damage the long years of effort they’ve dedicated to building up that brand.
So there are these sets of careers where, to maintain the career, you have to set aside publicly spouting the idiocy most of us a prone to spouting.Report
You knew the moderate folks. I know a guy in public policy (worked for RAND, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens….). For years he refused to register as either a Democrat or a Republican (because potential clients might think he was biased).Report
Here is an opinion: “Adjective noun verbs adverbly. OFTEN.”
It’s quite easy to respond to this opinion as if it were a disembodied opinion completely unconnected from a person. Just rail against it as if you were in your basement yelling at a computer screen and doing a transcription. Disagree with the adjective? Scream about it. The adverb? Go nuts. And, let’s admit it, “often” is an overstatement.
If your bud across the table said such a thing during a poker game? You could snort and say “you’re an idiot” and everybody laughs.Report
What are you, daft? Noun doesn’t verb all that often. Come on. But, when noun verbs, at least with respect to direct object, pronoun verbs other adverbly. You’ve got to admit that — you can have your own opinion, but you don’t get to make up your own facts.Report
If you’re not An Ally, you’re a target. And boy, you don’t want to be a target. So it’s important to show your Ally nature as quick and as hard as you can.Report
“I see dancing babies.”Report
The guy who originally retweeted her comment has since decided that it maybe was a bad thing to do.
(Of course, he decided this after a similar thing happened to him.)Report
Strange, that is the same advice Ken White at popehat gives his clients.
Just shut up. Stop talking. Now, dammit!Report
I love Freddie’s comment on that post.
It’s okay (or, at least, less not okay) to make fun of nerds because they have real power in society.
So if you want to stuff a dorky kid in a locker, hey. Steve Jobs, right?Report
A practical question: why do people participate in Twitter? It’s sort of like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”.
There’s a generational element to it, I know. I grew up pre-Facebook, when we were told to minimize our exposure on the internet. But the thing is, the old ways work, and the new ways don’t. It’s beyond me why people participate in mob justice as the -er or set themselves up to be the -ee.Report
My freelance writer friend told me that it is exhausting but there is research that shows it does help people project their brands/names and can lead to more name recognition and freelance writing gigs and possible book deals.
I can’t find the study now but people need to do more than just “Here is something I wrote. Come see me act in…: type of postings. There needs to be a mix including commentary on today’s events.Report
Oddly enough, Twitter has greatly improved my relationship with my brother. Not that we were estranged or anything, but we chew more fat since he discovered my trumwill identity and we mutually followed.Report
My experience was roughly the opposite.Report
Some Wills triumph, some don’t.Report
people participate in online communities – like this one! – for a number of reasons. twitter is a great narrowcasting platform, and that’s how it’s used by the majority of yutes who use it.
or go read danah boyd’s most recent book if you’re really interested.
twitter is not my thing (nor facebook, snapchat, whatevs) but it’s not particularly difficult to understand why people like these things. even yik yak makes a ton of sense in context.Report
Cheap and easy way to get a fan club (particularly if you write a bot to pass the twitter-Turing).
People pay good money for fan clubs…
Ergo, decent way to make money.Report
Kafka would have written some very interesting stories if social media existed when he was alive. They seemed tailor made for him.Report
On Twitter, no one knows you’re a cockroach.Report
perhaps, but I have my suspicions about @mattdrudge.Report
[Puts on Twitter Social Justice hat]
“OMG I don’t believe you used the phrase “tone deaf.” That is abelist and you are literally the worst person alive!!!” (she shouts as she furiously Tweets links to this post and also contacts a private investigator to discover the OP’s home address.)
[Removes Twitter Social Justice hat]
####
But seriously, I have deaf friends who are bothered by that turn of phrase. Which, maybe they are too sensitive, but maybe not. I dunno. Personally I avoid using “deaf” or “blind” to mean anything other than literal deafness or blindness. I thus have to give up some useful metaphors, but it makes my friends happy. It’s worth thinking about.
(That said, “tone deaf” is a great metaphor. I have yet to think of a good replacement.)Report
It’s an economical, parsimonious phrase.
“can’t carry a tune in a bucket” is just as descriptive… but it takes a bit longer to type/say.Report
Wrong metaphor, however. Here “tone deaf” means “unaware of how your statements will be heard by others.”Report
v,
I prefer the “bull. china shop” metaphor for that one. (it’s four syllables, but the rest of the metaphor gets filled in by the reader, and you have a great half second pause between bull and china).Report
“bull in a china shop” is fat-shaming! You are literally saying I’m as big as a bull. That is such size-norm discrimination I can’t believe you are even a person!Report
Jim,
fer once, you’re right. I do apologize, Mr. Bovine of uncertain size.Report
@veronica-d
But seriously, I have deaf friends who are bothered by that turn of phrase.
Why are deaf people speaking for the tone deaf people? Do they think that people with tone deafness can’t speak for themselves?
Or are they acting under the justification they themselves are tone deaf? While that may technically be true, that people who cannot hear anything also cannot recognize relative tones, that seems rather assholely of them. It’s a bit like blind people claiming to be colorblind, or quadriplegics claiming to have limited motion of the knees.
People trying to claim all incidental disabilities under their own disability, and then speak as someone who has those disabilities, may be technically correct but are not accomplishing anything other than ensuring that people who have *just* those smaller disability get completely overlooked.
We *already know* people without hearing cannot distinguish tones, that’s sorta obvious. What isn’t obvious is that some people *with* hearing can’t do it either, they do not have the ‘relative pitch’ that most humans are born with. In other words, you can’t just ask people if they can hear, and then play tones at them and expect them to recognize one tone is higher or lower than another.
Whether or not people with tone deafness are okay with the phrase ‘tone deaf’, I have no idea. But they’re really the people who should be objecting, not deaf people in general.Report
This whole comment was tone dea …., um, deficient in empathy for the pitch recognition impaired. Though, really, the concept of pitch recognition impairment is Eurocentric, since it assumes the primacy of the so-called diatonic scale.Report
Sorry, I don’t feel bad. Don’t make sexist or racist jokes, especially if you’re in a public facing job, and you won’t get in trouble. I’ve managed to do that while at a workplace without that much of a problem.Report
What is the workplace in this situation: Twitter or an airplane?Report
@j-r Presumably a Twitter account that lists your position and employer. My Twitter account and FB account list neither. My company has social media policies specifically for if you link yourself to the company.Report
if you’re the public face of something, everywhere is your workplace. which is certainly an inconvenience – to say the least – but such is the life she chose.
that said, had she not been on a plane, it would likely not have spiraled out of control – or at least not to that degree – as further context would have somewhat mitigated the response, at least from her employer. maybe.Report
“if you’re the public face of something”
Everyone everywhere could be considered the public face of their employer.Report
Remember when the Chipotle employee put his hands up when the police got to the register? And when the rightwingosphere demanded that Chipotle fire him?
Good times.Report
Jim,
really? Because you even have any idea who my employer is? I mean, I may choose to disclose potential conflicts of interest when I write posts, but — really?
You don’t have to be the public face of an institution to bring discredit upon it, after all.Report
@jaybird , remember when the police gunned down a mentally ill hispanic man in cold blood in broad daylight, like a firing squad, just for being mentally ill?
It was last thursday.Report
Oh, yeah. And, out of curiosity, what’s your opinion on the act of using twitter to shame the people who will inevitably be protesting against our brave law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every day just trying to make sure that they can get home to their families following altercations with the mentally ill?Report
Is this when I’m supposed to be proud? I can’t tell.Report
ACIS:
Are you getting your facts from Chris?Report
No, he or she got the facts from a widely circulated video showing the murder, but then video has a well-known anti-cop bias, as police unions keep telling us.Report
“our brave law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every day just trying to make sure that they can get home to their families”
It’s this kind of over the top rhetoric that makes your argument meaningless @jaybird. Most cops are not in danger every day. In fact most cops are the furthest they could probably be from danger on a given day.
Three men to “bravely” chase down a man known in the community to be mentally ill, who runs away with his hands up, turns around only to be shot not once but to the emptying of each officer’s guns? That’s not bravery. It’s cowardly murder.Report
Chris:
It is truly amazing that you can tell that the guy was 1)murdered or 2)killed for being mentally ill just from watching a video clip of only a portion of the encounter. But as you’ve said before, you don’t need all the fact to make your pronouncements.Report
ACIS, you didn’t answer my question.Report
Can someone explain to me why Sacco’s tweet was regarded by so many as offensive? It just seems incoherent to me.Report
@brandon-berg
I think what Sacco meant to say was…
“Because I am white and will be afforded the privileges that come with being white in Africa, I don’t have to worry about contracting AIDS. AIDS is a very real issue that disproportionately impacts Black Africans which means that white folks — both in Africa and around the world — do not need to really worry about it. As such, we can continue to support policies that fail to effectively curb this deadly disease.
What Sacco said…
“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
How Sacco was interpreted based on what she said…
“Only brown people get AIDS. I’m white. I’ll be fine. It is a brown people disease for brown people only.”
Now, we can get into what degree of charity Sacco is owed by strangers on the internet when it comes to reading and interpreting her Tweet. Frankly, I’m not all that interested in that particular conversation for a host of reasons. I think what we can agree on is that Sacco’s Tweet was a disaster on a number of levels. This was due largely to the fact that she constructed a fairly incoherent Tweet and attempted to discuss a very difficult issue via Twitter.
Should she have been fired because her Tweet was probably misinterpreted as offensive? Heck if I know. But if I employed her to, ya know, effectively use social media to promote my company and she proved herself to be pretty mad at using social media effectively, you can bet your ass I fired her.
I don’t know if the company made an official statement regarding her release. But if I were them, I would have made it clear that I wasn’t firing her because she was maybe racist or said something maybe racist; I was firing her because she was an idiot on social media and I needed someone who was exceedingly smart on social media.Report
But if I employed her to, ya know, effectively use social media to promote my company and she proved herself to be pretty mad at using social media effectively, you can bet your ass I fired her.
By this definition, Adria Richards should have been fired.
This can take you to some weird places.Report
I remember watching that drama as it unfolded. The fist time I saw the tweet, I knew it was trouble, even if I recognized that it might have been a poor attempt at a joke different from the one people quick to outrage would see in it. And I knew people would call for her job, because that’s what people do now.
I was pretty disgusted by what unfolded (as I wrote here at the time), but I remember thinking, I wouldn’t want a PR exec who doesn’t recognize the PR disaster dropping a Twitter bomb like that just before you make yourself unavailable for clarification for 10 hours could create. Should the company have fired her the next day? Probably not; Twitter storms like that burn out pretty quickly. Would I, in their shoes, have a meeting with her the next day, and do some serious evaluation of her work as a PR exec for my company, with possible consequences for her future with us? Hell yeah.Report
@jaybird
Perhaps. But Richards didn’t get totally misunderstood because she can’t master 140 characters. “I was unclear!” Is an inadequate defense when your job is to be clear.
I don’t think getting fired for being demonstrably bad at their job takes us anywhere weird.Report
I don’t think getting fired for being demonstrably bad at their job takes us anywhere weird.
What if I spin it as “when given a choice between siding with an employee and siding with an internet mob, the corporation sided with the mob”?
It’s easy to look at Sacco’s tweet and think “damn, she should have been fired”. It might be somewhere around that easy to look at Richards and reach the same conclusion… but then we think about whether Lowe’s should have dropped advertising from All American Muslim or, Atheist God help us all, the Dixie Chicks being dropped from Country Radio.
Maybe all of this can be covered by “don’t $#!+ where you eat”.Report
@jaybird
I don’t think she should have been fired because an internet mob formed. If she should have been fired, it should have been because of the content of her tweet. As @chris , she made a series of decisions that would make me question how good she’d be at PR.
Imagine, if you will, that she had to run every social media statement — professional or personal — by her boss. If she ran that by her, what do you think the boss’s reaction would have been? Probably something along the lines of, “Holy crap, don’t Tweet that!” They might not have fired her, but they probably would have taken a path as described by Chris. And if she repeatedly showed such poor decision making, yea, can her ass.
I don’t think it is so much, “Don’t shit where you eat,” as, “Don’t be shitty at your job. And, if you are going to be shitty at your job, don’t be shitty at your job publicly!”Report
@chris
My stance on Le Affair Sacco is pretty much yours. Everyone (including PR executives)* make stupid mistakes and say things off the cuff. PR executives should be held to a somewhat higher standard when using social media though probably.
*I do question how high in IAC she was. IAC is a large company and they can have lots of people called Senior Directors. She still could have been a cubicle jockey. Just like lots of mega corporations have lots of people called Vice-President.Report
Adria Richards was awful at her job, which was to promote her company, not alienate people from it. If she shouldn’t have been fired, it was to avoid rewarding the mob that went after her, not because her behavior didn’t warrant termination.Report
“PR executives should be held to a somewhat higher standard when using social media though probably.”
It’ll be amusing for someone employed in PR to file a wage-hour lawsuit against their employer, claiming that in a world where social media exists they are effectively at their job 24 hours a day for the entire year.Report
Wondering if the criticism of social media as a giant attention whoring mechanism is completely valid.Report
Damon,
Dunno. You’ll just have to ask the bots, I suppose.Report
There are things you say to your friends when you’re all being snarky and funny, and then things you say to people in general within some standard of good public behavior (not to be confused with goody-two-shoes behavior, either). What Sacco said was the first; the snarky stuff you’d say amongst your intimate friends, to borrow a term from Jane Austen which might bear reviving. The problem is the domain here; what should have been in the intimacy of friendship was said in public, with the mic turned up.
That’s really basic stuff; but people have their twittersphere, their FB sphere, and forget that there’s always the potential the mic’s turned on.
#twittersmarts101Report
Social media seems to me to be just another outlet for the most ancient of social mechanisms, that of gossip, bonding, friendship, and shaming.
In another era it would be the regular crowd down at the tavern who would either laugh at a joke, or take umbrage, and isolate and shame the offender.
While there are of course differences, I don’t believe it is fundamentally a form of social behavior that people a few centuries ago wouldn’t have recognized.
Whats interesting to me, is how our concepts of liberalism and cosmopolitan secularism are so unprepared to deal with this.
That is, we celebrate and valorize the idea of fearless iconoclasm, yet there exists a broad web of social taboos and rules, which become all the more powerful because they are unwritten, and enforced by some arcane and mysterious system of justice that is neither blind nor fair. Kafka would indeed find a lot to explore in Twitter and Facebook.Report
I do have to say it’s funny that here’s a lot of men telling a woman what to say, but somehow it’s OK this time.Report