Goldberg writes: "Justine Sacco deserved to lose her job for her idiotic tweet about AIDS in Africa. She worked in public relations at IAC, a big Internet company, and was responsible for an epic Internet public relations disaster."
(illustration: ABC News)
Sympathy for Justine
26 December 13
ustine Sacco deserved to lose her job for her idiotic tweet about AIDS in Africa. She worked in public relations at IAC, a big Internet company, and was responsible for an epic Internet public relations disaster. But the gleeful way she was publicly destroyed as she was stuck in the air, unaware and unable to respond or delete her social media accounts, is still chilling. We've built ourselves a panopticon in which any one of us can be singled out for minor transgressions and transformed into a meme for jeering global flagellation. Almost any of us could be vulnerable to a crowd-sourced inquisition.
It's still not clear whether Sacco's infamous tweet-"Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding! I'm white"-was a very bad racist joke or a very bad joke about racism. Consider a structurally similar quip that appeared on Twitter a couple of days ago: "Going to NYC, hope I don't get stopped and frisked. Just kidding! I'm white." Is it possible that Sacco meant something similar? Certainly, her gibe lacks the bitter logic of the stop-and-frisk joke, but the intention behind it is still ambiguous.
Of course, intention is not the same as effect. Whatever Sacco meant, her tweet was gross and offensive. But it was just one of many, many gross and offensive tweets that continuously pollute the Internet. Even if we assume the worst about Sacco-which the Internet, naturally, did-she still didn't deserve to become, as a Buzzfeed headline put it, "The World's Top Story," covered by The New York Times, CNN, BBC and other major outlets worldwide. She didn't deserve to have her father dragged into it, via a citizen journalist who tracked him down at the airport while he waited for his daughter. She didn't deserve to then have her father's denunciation of her-he reportedly said he was "incredibly ashamed of her" and called her a "fucking idiot"-broadcast to the world. She didn't deserve to be treated like a monster on par with Ariel Castro.
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