Does Twitter have the right to ruin your life?
In December 2013 a New York City PR woman called Justine Sacco was at Heathrow Airport
when she tweeted this very ill-advised joke to her 170 Twitter followers.
Justine chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half-an-hour,
sporadically checking Twitter.
She got nothing. She boarded the plane. It was an 11-hour flight.
When it landed she turned on her phone. Straight away there was this text: ‘I’m so sorry
to see what’s happening.’
Justine looked at it, baffled. Then another text from her best friend, Hannah. “You need
to call me immediately. You are the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter.”
There were the genuinely concerned, the idly curious, the celebrities, her employers,
the misogynists... a lot of mysogynists...
Her complete ignorance of her predicament for those 11 hours lent the episode dramatic
irony and a pleasing narrative arc. The hashtag began to trend worldwide.
And then Justine did land. And a Twitter user was there to take her photograph.
I could understand why some people found the tweet offensive. But it wasn’t intended
to be racist. As she told me when I met her a few weeks later she was trying to make fun
of white privilege. She said: “Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when
it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.”
Justine was fired. When I met her she seemed deeply confused and upset.
She said she had a great career and she loved her job and it was taken away from her
and everybody else was very happy about that.
She wasn’t sleeping. She was waking up in the middle of the night forgetting where she
was. She had no schedule. No purpose.
Some people will feel Justine deserved everything she got. On Twitter we like to see ourselves
as the hitherto silenced underdog cutting down the privileged elite.
Actually, Justine wasn’t especially privileged. But still, that’s how we like to see ourselves.
But it’s not true. On social media, we have the power now. We have the power to cast people
out into the wilderness, for workplace transgressions – like the journalist Jonah Lehrer who faked
Bob Dylan quotes in a book and when he tried to apologise and ask for a second chance the
response was trenchant.
And then there was Hank, who was overheard whispering a sexist joke to a co-worker at
a conference. The woman in front tweeted their picture.
Hank was fired. Then the woman - Adria - was fired – and subjected to a horrific online
harassment campaign – death threats and rape threats and racist insults. She still
hasn’t got a new job and the harassment campaign continues to this day.
Please don’t underestimate how profoundly traumatising it is to be socially shunned
in these ways, to be defined by a mistake, instead of having your mistake put into a
wider human context.
We’ve always had some influence over the justice system, but for the first time in
180 years - since the stocks and the pillory were outlawed – we have the power to determine
the severity of some people's punishments.
And so we have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with.
Justine is fine now. The trauma lasted a year. So, is a year the right length? Less? More?
Put a figure on it. How merciless do we want to be?