Travelling has its indignities as most people already know. The impertinence of travelers can, at times, be unbearable and difficult to stand. There are limitations however. Justine Sacco, the senior director of corporate communications at IAC experienced firsthand how simple tweets can push the boundaries between harmless intentions and full-blown controversy and virility.
Her journey begins on a trip to South Africa from New York at John F. Kennedy International Airport. She found herself in the presence of a fellow passenger for her flight who reeked of body odor.
She tweeted, “‘Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ – Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”
Then, stopping off at Heathrow via layover, she continued with another tweet, “Chilly – cucumber sandwiches – bad teeth. Back in London!”
Finally, to further push the envelope, on December 20, before the final leg of her trip to Cape Town she wrote, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!”
While her prospective belief remained harmless, what happened next would eventually put her in the spotlight of the public in a way that she would’ve never expected.
After sending out her last tweet, she sporadically checked her phone but to no avail. Nobody replied. It didn’t come off as a surprise to her as she only had 170 Twitter followers at the time.
So she boarded the plane. Being an 11-hour flight, she slept soundly. When the plane landed in Cape Town and began taxiing on the runway, she immediately turned on her phone. One of the first texts she received was from someone who she hadn’t spoken to since high school. It read, “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.”
Baffled, she continued reading another text, “You need to call me immediately.” It was from her best friend, Hannah. This marked the beginning of a whirlwind for Sacco as her phone blew up with texts and alerts. And then it rang. It was Hannah. “You’re the No.1 worldwide trend on Twitter right now,” she said.
Sacco’s Twitter feed quickly turned into a nightmare. The tweets kept rolling in with hate, “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” with others saying things like, “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “I’m and IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever.”
Her employer, IAC, the corporate owner of The Daily Beast, OKCupid, and Vimeo chimed in saying, “This is an outrageous, offensive comment.” However, she was unreachable for much of the event because she had boarded an international flight. So much of this firestorm happened without her knowledge.
What began as public outrage soon turned into a twisted carnival of excitement. Tweets demanding that she get fired came in the thousands. “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even knows she’s getting fired.”
The initial uproar over Sacco’s tweet was not only an ideological campaign against her unknowing narrow-mindedness but was twisted into idle entertainment. Her ignorance to the situation over the past 11 hours helped create a dramatic episode with a one-sided narrative arc. As Sacco’s flight continued over Africa, a hashtag began trending.
#HasJustineLandedYet
Again, the outpour of tweets followed her. “Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can’t look away. Can’t leave.”
One Twitter user actually took the time to travel to the airport to tweet her arrival. Upon her arrival, he snapped her photograph and immediately posted it online. “Yup,” he wrote, “@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town International. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.”
By the time Sacco had landed, angry tweets in the thousands were sent in response to her jokes. Hannah immediately deleted her best friend’s tweet and her account as well. However, it was far too late for Sacoo. “Sorry @JustineSacco,” wrote one Twitter user, “your tweet lives on forever.”
In the early days of Twitter, like the early days of life, a lot of users hopped on these trends without a lot of thought as to how they might affect people. However, there was a time in American history where language we would consider racial slurs appeared in print daily or weekly. Looking back at experiences that forever changed our collective perspectives, society may have a long way to go but we’ve become closer and more empathetic than ever before.
To see this up close, consider a recent column from A. A. Gill, which talked about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”
Word quickly got out on social media, with some journalists leading the charge having had somewhat personal relationships with Gill. They were all too excited to add to the negative ranting that was already building behind Gill and his documentaries.
What tweets like Justine Sacco’s teach is that the collective fury of the public can be all too powerful and effective. In turn this is true as ganging up on people can supplant a dominant feeling inside. As time passes, though, these campaigns eventually fizzle. At least, they did before the age of social media. Today’s mob targets the institutions and influential figures involved with someone or some company. They go after anyone they feel is remotely responsible, and in some ways, Sacco’s tweet proves that no one is safe. The punishment is often disconnected from the crime, and that’s outrageous. It’s almost like the crowd is gleeful in its practice of public shaming, which perhaps says more about our society than these people who “need” to be publicly shamed.
So what happens to these people after the firestorm dies down? Justine Sacco has a new job, but is she whole again? What one might find, if one were inclined to do the digging, is a series of broken unemployed, and mentally scarred individuals who find themselves still searching for redemption. The experiences that these people went through are difficult for most of us to understand, everything from viral tweets to pictures, had the ability to crush their spirits to the brink of insanity. The idea that we tend to lose in these situations is empathy. We forget that there is a human face on the other side of that screen, and that every insult hurled at this avatar is being hurled at a living, breathing person.
Lindsey Stone, a 32 year old woman from Massachusetts, posed for a photograph while mocking a revered sign at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. With her co-worker Jamie taking the photograph Stone stood next to the sign, posed as if pretending to scream and gestured her middle finger to the camera. What may have been a running joke about documenting rebellion in public places quickly turned into controversy as her mobile uploads through Facebook were visible to the public.
Fast forward to four weeks, Stone was out with Jamie celebrating her birthday when all of a sudden they both feel their phones vibrate uncontrollably and repeatedly. They had just found out that someone shared their photo with the online world. A mixed reaction of anger and disrespect from the public came crashing down on Stone’s world. A Facebook page titled “Fire Lindsey Stone” was created and became a social phenomenon. The following morning her house was surrounded by news cameras wanting in on a story for the day’s broadcast. Bewildered, she showed up at her job, a program for developmentally disabled adults, only to find out that she was out of work as they had taken away her keys.
The following year Stone barely left her house, devastated by the events that had occurred. She began to suffer from depression, insomnia and PTSD and isolated herself. “I didn’t want to be seen by anyone,” she told reporters at her home in Plymouth, Mass, “I didn’t want people looking at me.”
While spending her days at home on the Internet, she watched others get turned on that were in similar situations. Stone isn’t the only recent victim either. Alicia Ann Lynch, who dressed in a running outfit with fake blood smeared across her face, arms, and legs, lost her job after she posted Halloween costume on Twitter and was met with immediate backlash. A victim of the Boston Marathon bombing saw the photo and tweeted, “You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died.” Soon afterwards her personal information was leaked and she became victim to numerous threatening messages.
We might disagree with the way someone acts, but today’s idea of mob justice isn’t the answer we collectively need to progress as a society. Empathy is a powerful concept, and it’s easy to lost sight of that when all we see are avatars.
