How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life | Hacker News Reader

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

nytimes.com

401 pointsveeti569 comments

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 bu Shi da Yu account to say what I'd done and explain the impact it was likely to have.

It was a bad, bad judgement call. I got such a massive lynching that I seriously regretted what I'd done - but there was no way of undoing it. Eventually, I started getting depressed - I mean, my entire reputation was in tatters. None of the work I'd done - not the hours and hours of fighting trolls, extensive article writing, innovative strategies for dealing with referencing or organizing the admins via the board, nor the work on featured article candidates, peer review, articles for deletion, vandalism fighting, meeting up with Sydney people interested in Wikipedia, made any difference at all.

I left the project and asked to be desysopped. About a year or so later, I created an account Tbsdy lives and tried again. I managed to get my admin status re established (I readily admitted it was a bad judgement call), but still I was told I'd left "under a cloud", by none other than Brad Fitzpatrick - their legal counsel.

What's the moral of this? Online communities suck. If you make even one minor error in judgment, be prepared to be lynched. If you get depressed, just exit at this point and don't look back. It's not worth it. It doesn't matter how much time you put into a project - you're going to get judged, and you'll never make your way back.

If you don't think it can't happen, then ask Ben Noordrius how he felt when Bryan Cantrell called him an arsehole and said he should have been fired because he reverted a personal pronoun. That did the Node.js community a lot of good now, didn't it?

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?

The comments weren't awful. It was really a bad judgement call because it violated the principle "don't be disruptive to make a point", which I really didn't consider very clearly before doing it.

The reason I was annoyed about it was because signatures are the way you see who is saying something in a conversation thread. Back then you'd click on the person's username and get easy access to their pages, talk page, block links, contributions, etc. it also made it really hard to see what they had contributed. I was also concerned that someone would go what I in essence did - which was a really dumb move on my part, like I say.

Were you not in a position to edit his signature, or get it edited? You jumped the gun.

That's not an unreasonable question. But no, that's wasn't an admin function at the time, and I still don't think it is.

Right, well that explains why I was downvoted - my ignorance of Wikipedia's administration...

Thanks for the insight!

Are 'admins' on wikipedia more like 'moderators' than actual admins? The word admin to me makes me think of someone who runs something and makes the rules, not always being held to them themselves.

Meta-Wikipedia is where the toxic parts are. Admins are an easy target and sometimes people get swept up in bashing. Read ANI today and you can see similar things occasionally.

It's been a long time since I participated. But admins, at the time, weren't meant to be anything more that editors with some special tools. Those tools require good judgement, unfortunately good judgement is not something any of exhibit 100% of the time, especially if you need to show it every day.

Not sure what the status of admins are now.

You'll have to forgive me, because even after you explained it, I still don't understand.

If someone has a link in their signature pointing to an unassigned user name, then grabbing that username could also be interpreted at plugging a security hole as a stop gap measure while the problem is being discussed.

I don't see how it's outrageous. I don't see how you overstepped your bounds.

It's not clear to me what happened here.

I think the context is important (it's hard to dig up the edit history for so long ago). I actually was in the wrong about the way I went about things - it was being debated and I really did try to prove a point (though it never occurred to me that I was being disruptive).

The editor in question quite possibly had good intentions, or didn't see anything wrong with what they did. Whilst I was not a malicious actor, there was debate about the situation and I think people objected more to the way I went about proving the point I was making (which I maintain was valid). That's a fair cop, and I accept my action was rash.

But yes, it wasn't outrageous.

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

I just want to say, I remember the account name "Ta bu shi da yu" from when I was active on Wikipedia (it's been about 10 years) and you seemed cool. I missed whatever drama this was, but my only association with that name is that it was someone who was active on Wikipedia and doing useful things.

Regarding Bryan Cantrill, never forget this post (a one-line reply at the bottom):

http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html

Which I link not to shame him for what he wrote as a recent college grad 20 years ago, but to say that everyone does dumb, borderline offensive things sometimes, and what matters is that you are not obstinate in your dumbness.

Maybe Bryan would have fired the person he was then; that's fine. We need both effective, meaningful punishment, and also effective rehabilitation. It should be possible to go from Bryan Cantrill in Sun to Bryan Cantrill in Joyent. It should be possible to go from Ben Noordhuis in Node to Ben Noordhuis in io, or Justine Sacco in IAC to Justine Sacco wherever she is now, or Sam Biddle to chastened empathetic Sam Biddle, or whatever.

I was never cool, which is why I was so active on Wikipedia :-) thanks for your kind words!

Provided without comment, here's Cantrill on Twitter relatively recently criticizing Linus Torvalds' "idiocy" in a usenet post from 2000:

https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/456540342649487361

He acknowledges that in the replies, but this particular "idiocy" is not one of tone, behavior, or offense. It is about bad technical policy in the pursuit of ego, which is something that Linus has done several times since.

(And he's a brilliant enough kernel hacker that he can work around his own bad policy and still come up with a system that works well, but that doesn't mean it's not bad technical policy. I feel bad begrudging him for making a worse product when it's so good due exactly to his skill, but still, the product could have been better if he avoided making these sorts of decisions.)

Anyway, I do kind of wish Bryan would issue a clearer apology for what he said 20 years ago. But I also kind of wish we lived in a world where he didn't have to, and it's obvious he's grown up in the last 20 years.

I see what you're saying and agree that's a rational reason for bringing up past events. But hear me out. My issue was that based on these three events it seems like he continues to like to raise his relative position by slamming other people. The means have changed, where before it was social status ("have you ever even kissed a girl?") to social justice "I would have fired BEN NOORDHUIS if he worked for me and did these despicable things").

I have noticed that a number of the most vocal social justice advocates have similar sort of behavior in their past. There is nothing wrong with advocating for social justice, but to me it's clear that as it has become a socially acceptable way to punish, it has attracted people in whom the desire to socially punish others is strong. Callout culture gives these people their "fix".

It's funny you should mention that, as that episode from nearly 20 years ago (!!) has come up much more in the last year than it did in the two decades prior. Of course, the reason is not an accident; it's a direct result of those who vehemently disagree with my handling of the Noordhuis pronoun incident.

Anyway, your request is entirely fair, and let me be clear that I (obviously?) regret the have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl response (which was actually an obscure Saturday Night Live reference). I was young, and it was stupid -- and I regretted it shortly thereafter, for whatever it's worth. I have never actually met David in person, but if I did, the first thing I would do would be to look him in the eye and apologize.

That said, I do think that this is contrast to the Noordhuis incident. I know that this position is not popular here (and that I will be downvoted into oblivion), and that it's likely foolish to revisit this, but just to make clear my position: I am understanding (very understanding, given my own history) of gaffes made on the internet. The Noordhuis issue, however, was not a gaffe: it's not that he rejected the pull request (that's arguably a gaffe), it's that when he was overruled by Isaac some hours later, he unilaterally reverted Isaac's commit. (And, it must be said, sent a very nasty private note to make clear that this was no accident.) This transcended gaffe, and it became an issue of principle -- one that I feel strongly about. So what I wrote at the time was entirely honest, and it is something that I absolutely stand by -- more than ever, actually.

The inarguably contrast is this: I regretted the have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl response; I do not and will not regret my handling of the Noordhuis incident -- and any company that would not employ me over this is a company that I would not want to work for.

Whenever the Noordhuis incident comes up, I'm always quick to point out that `git push -f master`ing a non-fast-forward commit without prior warning is already halfway to a firing offense.

EDIT: No, wait, it was a revert commit, this just raises further questions.

Incidentally, I don't think you should have to apologize for what you said 20 years ago, because it was 20 years ago and that's ridiculous. But I do think you were an ass for escalating the Noordhuis incident the way you did, not because of your opinion on pronouns. And I voted you up because downvoting because of petty disagreement _is_ getting ridiculous around here.

Its fruitful to reflect on such past behavior both professional and personal. I have my share of regrets as well. None of us are without fault, just some of us have our mistakes more amplified than others. It important to learn from such things.

In interest of personal edification (since you seem to be open to feedback) the one criticism I have about the Noordhuis incident is that in my opinion if you felt as strongly as you did about publicly chastising Noordhuis it should have been done from your personal blog and not from the Joyent blog. I feel this was slight abuse of power and influence of the Joyent brand, specifically because you mention the intent on terminating his employment if it was within your power. I don't think that belongs there as permanent public record. That said, I think your desire was to make it clear to the community that gender biases were not going to be tolerated and to me that intent (for the most part) came through.

I do think its plausible that Noordhuis wasn't quite represented properly and that he had strong opinions about process and how commits are merged but those strong opinions were interpreted as an intent to have gender bias. But I don't have enough information to know for sure, that's just how it looks to me.

In the end regret is an entirely personal thing and we all get to decide what kind of person we are going to be. I would also like to suggest that regret isn't black and white there are always ways we can conduct or communicate more effectively and perhaps this could be a take away for you. Could there have been a way to achieve your goals equally/more effectively with less of a direct expense to Ben??

As someone who has worked directly under (and along side) you I have a deep respect for the way you conduct yourself professionally. I see you as someone with integrity, which is probably why you feel comfortable bringing up incidences you have been criticized for (this something far too rare). I offer my perspective as a friend so take it for what its worth to you.

So here's the thing I've always been a little fuzzy on. bnoodhuis' reversion said (to isaacs) "All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert."

The reaction would seem to indicate that this is like telling Linus Torvalds he needs approval to land patches in Linux. Was there anything codified anywhere explaining that this was the case? Did that rule only apply for code and not docs changes? Was the sign-off rule not actually written down anywhere?

I appreciate (as always) your thoughtful candor. And I (certainly) appreciate your kind words with respect to my personal integrity; the sentiment is very much mutual!

In this case, we may have to agree to disagree: I felt (and feel) that a message from Joyent -- not a message from me -- was called for: members of the node.js community were calling Joyent to task for Ben's behavior, and I (we) felt that it was Joyent that needed to respond. That said, I appreciate your willingness to speak your mind and to earnestly engage on this issue!

Haha, hi, thanks for showing up on the thread. Not that I have any real justification in having opinions on something you said to someone else while I was in third grade (... although I think I was using Solaris then), but as a random member of the open-source community, I do appreciate you saying this clearly. :)

I did see it brought up first by some obvious single-purpose-troll account on Twitter in the midst of the pronoun incident. And just to make sure I'm being totally clear, I'm not bringing it up because I want to dog you with it, but because I think it's a great example of how everyone's fallible, even the people that I most look up to for how they push a community to be better. The standard isn't perfection and it's not about individuals per se; it's about improvement, as a community. We ought to criticize so we can build a better community, not so that we can knock each other down at the first mistake.

I was actually glad you brought it up. When I saw the New York Times story, I naturally thought back to my own episode(s) -- and it's been on my mind anyway because it came up on HN as recently as yesterday.[1]

Part of the peril of social media is that everyone becomes a public figure -- whether they want to be one or not. Those who are more traditional public figures (e.g., politicians, actors, athletes, business leaders) often have the personality attributes that make it easier to deal with scathing public criticism (though I don't think anyone particularly likes being excoriated) -- but most normal people actually don't. As a culture, I hope that we will be both more tolerant of mistakes made on social media -- but also more aware that (at some level) we all need to act as public figures when in public. Certainly, it's a thorny, complicated issue -- and one that is decidedly (if not canonically) modern.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028497

That's not the reason, and you know it.

"On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered."

https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

The biggest issue is the way that you handled this. You did this appallingly. You still seem to be puzzled why people still bring this up.

In a community project, people often do things you aren't going to like. Ben rejected a push, and he steadfastly maintains that he did this for good reasons:

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...

Now instead of communicating with Ben, giving him the benefit of the doubt as a non-native speaker of English and calling him out publicly in the way you did was an absolute classic case of what you do NOT do.

In a community run project, the dynamics are different to being in a corporation. The first rule is: you are dealing with a lot of people, from a lot of different backgrounds. There is lots of room for misunderstanding. The absolute golden rule around dealing with a popular project is to try to wrangle this appropriately and with as little heat as possible.

So let's review what you did:

1. You posted one of the most inflammatory, aggressive posts I've seen in a very long time. You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision.

2. You compete with StrongLoop. You basically told your competitor that they should fire one of their best developers to the project. Your company may have been a main initiator of Node.js and you see it as largely the steward for the project, but your own employee reversed the decision of a major contributor.

And this is where you really stuffed up. For some time there had been rumblings about how Joyent was biased about the way they accepted commits and directed the project - rightly or wrongly. There was a perception of bias towards Joyent's interests. That's not necessarily a correct viewpoint. But you started a chain of events you now can't control.

Joyent has finally setup a Foundation, but has now got a fork competing with the core project. StrongLoop is one of the groups backing io.js. A large number of your core developers are publicly backing io.js.

3. Community leaders, like yourself, aren't meant to send abusive messages over blogs. You called him an arsehole. You called for his sacking.

Let's underscore how tone-deaf you have been, and completely clueless over how to run an open source project:

"While we would fire Ben over this, node.js is an open source project and one doesn't necessarily have the same levers. Indeed, one of the challenges of an open source project that depends on volunteer effort is dealing with assholes"

You don't realise how much damage you did. I agree with gender neutral language in technical writing. Many others do as well. If you had dealt with this differently and not decided to become a self-aggrandizing pundit, then you would have probably shown that Joyent can deal with controversial matters maturely and civilly, play nicely with others, resolve conflict, and you'd have the high moral ground.

Now you just look like a bully, and I'd say you were the catalyst for the io.js fork. You also opened yourself up to your own past, which you also regret.

As I say - you've basically given us all a text-book case study into how not to manage an open source project.

P.S. FWIW, I upvoted you.

I don't care how much anyone dislikes Cantrill, but standing up for Ben about this is a mark of shame.

> You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision.

Whereas just above:

> it's that when he was overruled by Isaac some hours later, he unilaterally reverted Isaac's commit. (And, it must be said, sent a very nasty private note to make clear that this was no accident.)

I don't know why you thought you were privy to all the communication that went on in this situation, but that sentence ought to indicate to you that you are not, in fact, omniscient.

The fact that Ben remains absolutely unrepentant on this issue, and sees "I was following the project's rules to the letter on an issue which I myself dismissed as trivial" as a valid excuse should be to his lasting shame, and you should be ashamed of perpetuating it.

You're right - I didn't see the private correspondence - Bryan certainly never mentioned it before now.

I certainly don't feel ashamed about calling out the bullying behaviour of Joyent. It's never ok to call someone an arsehole on a company blog about a competitor's employee, let alone call on his sacking. And who knows what the content of that nasty note was - perhaps he called Bryan an arsehole, perhaps he said that he thought that the change was rubbish, maybe he was passed off that the change wasn't discussed, maybe he thought that it was gasp a beat up, or maybe he swore at Cantrell for being a jerk?

Whatever it was, it's irrelevant. It's not the approach an open source leader should take, it certainly didn't concubine anyone about gender neutral language, it was hostile, ungracious, gave Ben Noordius no way of graciously apologising (had he wanted to) and it led to unnecessary schisms in the project.

All up, Bryan looks like a bully, Joyent look pompous and overbearing, the reasonable debate about gender equality is obscured by the abusive language and tone of the post, Ben Noordius appears to have been wronged, and a nuanced debate about gender neutral language is rather appallingly sidetracked by a man who uses dominant and crude language to ram his pint across - most likely due to political and personal reasons.

I gotta love the iPad spell checker. Puts words like "concubine" into the weirdest places.

>it's a direct result of those who vehemently disagree with my handling of the Noordhuis pronoun incident.

Could it be because of this recent OSNews article bringing it to a bunch of people's attention?

http://www.osnews.com/story/28261/_Have_you_ever_kissed_a_gi...

FWIW, here's the SNL reference.

Video: https://screen.yahoo.com/star-trek-convention-000000768.html

Script: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/86/86hgetalife.phtml

Someone might have posted a link in the original thread but the episode was 10 years old and YouTube was 10 years away.

I can see an organization having an internal gendered pronoun elimination policy --who cares. But I think one should allow anyone writing any contribution to use whatever pronoun gender they prefer. Encourage women to use feminine grammatical gender and men to use either grammatical gender pronoun.

Leave it up to the writer to decide.

For what it's worth, I prefer the neutral 'they' but I also don't get caught up in grammatical genders. Imagine if English had retained grammatical genders for regular nouns --as german and spanish do. What, so we rewrite the language and change grammatical gender because it gets conflated with biological gender?

Also, when I read text and it has the grammatical gender opposite mine, I don't feel disenfranchised by the text. It's not something I keep conscious of. I'm not pronoun hunting, and I think few people do that. Reading would become incomprehensibly distracting.

It's the same as when you see the pronoun 'you' Do you automatically believe it refers to you personally? I know I don't. Same with he, she, they, they're all a third person abstraction.

I must honestly say, I don't get why you'd be pissed off about something like this, nor why would the community lynch you for creating an account.

Seems a bit like sect behavior to me (arbitrary rules and punishments).

> Seems a bit like sect behavior to me (arbitrary rules and punishments).

Wikipedia in a nutshell.

Yup, that was definitely silly of me. Like I say, it was a bad judgement call.

You are not your mistakes, and there is a natural human margin of error. Mistakes make us human and it's what every single one of us has in common.

You seem to be a super bright guy who experienced a momentary lapse in judgement fuelled by emotion. We all do this, it's just not always public.

Also- I don't know how old you were at the time this story occurred but according to neuroscience, the frontal lobe doesn't develop until we are 25-27 years old (males develop later than females) and this is exactly the type of mistake the frontal lobe prevents us from making.

I hope you've recovered from this incident and have learned to not take these mistakes too personally...

Even calculators make mistakes.

Thanks - I've tried :-)

I've been pretty open in that situations probably get exacerbated for me because I have a mental illness - anxiety, depression and adult ADD (I refuse to call it ADHD, I'm not hyperactive!). I manage these better now, but it still leaks into my life. I'm extremely lucky I have a supportive wife and two small children who keep my mind off things and let me focus on what's important :-)

I really appreciate your kind words, btw.

Hey! I don't have mental illness and I can barely land a date let alone lock someone down and start a family with a supportive spouse.

It sounds like you are doing pretty okay to me!

Chris, if I can be of some help... Hyper-activeness in children can be a sign of ADHD, but in adults it's not entirely true.

If you don't mind me posting this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_attention_deficit_hyperac... you may find some answers there.

>Adults with ADHD are often perceived by others as chaotic and disorganized, with a tendency to need high stimulation to be less distracted and function effectively. Additionally, many adults suffer from associated or "co-morbid" psychiatric conditions such as depression or anxiety.[13]

>Symptoms of ADHD can vary widely between individuals and throughout the lifetime of an individual. As the neurobiology of ADHD is becoming increasingly understood, it is becoming evident that difficulties exhibited by individuals with ADHD are due to problems with the parts of the brain responsible for executive functions (see below: Pathophysiology). These result in problems with sustaining attention, planning, organizing, prioritizing, and impulsive thinking/decision making.

Hope I'm being useful -- a close family member was in the same boat. I was able to help, because it was me who randomly saw someone talking about this on an HN comment and I dived further into the world of ADHD and found out that it may not be 'classical' depression, but depression caused by something else. Since then, there's been complete emotional stability, rational decision making and depression is controlled completely.

Lastly, Chris... what you did I think was not a bad judgement call at all. In my mind you were making something right, and fixing a wrong because that was the only tool available to you. Debating something just takes forever and some things need to be fixed there and then. What happened to you, is simply disgusting. I am sorry for that, and I hope you can look back on it as a good memory and not a bad memory (which is tough).

I ran a massive community as the real admin, but the same sort of thing happened to me as well. Been years since I left but it's still sore to think about.

Hope all is well man. :)

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 all the context of all the messages we might consume in day...It's just easier to assume that a 140-character message really is an adequate reflection of someone who we have never met, and who we would have never been exposed to before the Internet. And it feels good to pat yourself on the back as you think, "Jeez, I can't believe such racist people still exist"

To paraphrase the famous comic from the New Yorker, "On the Internet, no one knows that you have nuance"

The problem is compounded in that not only are people easily offended, savvy organizations (cough Gawker) have monetized being offended. So not only are our limited monkey brains quick to be insulted, there are now people whose job it is to find the Maximally Offensive Tweets of the day, which only compounds the problem.

Plus, for some reasonably large percentage of the populace, being righteously outraged is a pleasurable experience. In 1984, the inhabitants of Airstrip One needed nagging from the telescreen to do their morning calisthenics, but even Winston could get worked up for the Two Minute Hate.

Poe's Law: Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.

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.

I could be self-deluded, but I feel like to some extent my ability to imagine the missing context, or even just a possible context for these things has increased in the age of social media, and online gaming, and soundbytes. I'm still aware that in many cases there's a high percentage chance a person is just a jerk.

Maybe it's a situation where working on the 8th floor makes most people more likely to take an elevator than if you worked on the 2nd floor, but if you do keep taking the stairs you quickly become very good at it.

I think it is a mistake to think that most people were actually offended and didn't get the joke. There are definitely much more offensive things out on the internet than the examples in the article.

I think it's much more likely that people revel in seeing someone go down; the article clearly alluded to this sadistic aspect I think. As soon as there is enough critical mass for a public shaming, people will jump on the bandwagon.

What needs to change is that this kind of public shaming on the internet should be looked down upon in the future, just at is now in real life. The first step is for employers not to be so spineless to immediately fire an employee that is talked about.

I think it's much more likely that people revel in seeing someone go down; the article clearly alluded to this sadistic aspect I think.

This is possible. But I think it's less about this and more about status marking. Joining the pile on is often a quick, cheap way to demonstrate that you care about the right things.

I wonder if there's a distinction that needs to be made between offending people and hurting people.

From my self-confessed but unavoidable smug vantage point of white privilege I wonder if being offended is something that needs to be disregarded. I'm trying to remember how it felt to be 'offended' myself and whether anyone other than me should have cared. Is it actually a form of power when one can choose to be offended and know that you can affect the actions of others by doing so?

Genuinely hurting people (emotionally) on the other hand is something different and I'd need to think a lot more deeply about that.

It merely illustrates the absolutely craven nature of companies. Her employer is basically a coward.

I have some sympathy for a company whose Senior Director of Corporate Communications instigates a massive PR disaster by joking about Africans having AIDS on Twitter.

This makes me wonder if PR is actually effective, and not a massive money sink. Would that company really lose any noticeable amount of customers over that Twitter shitstorm? If so, how come that no one apparently got hurt over ACTA/SOPA and Snowdengate? I don't see companies losing significant business over trying to destroy the Internet itself.

Because they have good PR departments. A good PR department makes you forget that there ever was an issue, or if you remember the issue, you forget that the company was ever involved.

PR is an interesting job function in that if they do their job correctly, you forget that they exist. It's much like security in that regard. If you have a bad PR department, you'll know, because you'll be constantly under-siege in the media. (Uber comes to mind.)

"[she] instigates" is the rub.

I feel like most people realized the tweet was a joke. But a "HAHA isn't racism funny?" joke by a white person just isn't socially acceptable anymore. Personally, I'm in the camp where I believe that you should be able to joke about anything, but I know I'm in the minority. As a society, we have judged that certain things can't be joked about. This list includes "racist jokes made by white people".

Personally, this just shows that maybe people shouldn't be broadcasting their every thought out to the entire world. If you're not comfortable with it being on the front page of the New York Times, don't tweet it.

it's hard to read the joke as having any purpose other than the same one as the famous-ish political cartoon about coverage of ebola victims: http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/Faye%20on%20media%20respon...

Is being cynical and self-deprecating really such an unacceptable packaging of the message that someone should be fired over it?

>imagine Louis CK making that quip.

Here's Louis CK doing a bit about being so disgusted by a gay guy rollerblading that proclaims "go skate into an AIDS tree, you motherfucker."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q--gp6YpOpQ

> 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 all the context of all the messages we might consume in day

There's an easy solution to this (if one isn't an idiot). If there's a reasonable explanation that doesn't imply bad intentions, just err on the side of that one. The "principle of charity" honestly has pretty much no downside, and pretty huge upside. One of the real shocks I got coming into adulthood was finding out that more people don't act this way. Somewhat tangentially, it also removes a lot of stress from your life: when a service worker fucks up badly, people I'm with are often pretty pissed at them (whether or not they express that directly) while my reaction is "eh shit happens, people make mistakes, why get worked up".

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 were terrible. But I don't agree that they should be censored. Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes.

It's like with friendships. With good friends you can nettle them; say terrible things and we know that's it's all in good fun, a ritual of sorts. With so so friends you don't make bad jokes because the friendship is too fragile. It's a sign of an immature or fragile society when bad jokes upset the cart.

Edit. An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.

Over-reaction or not, freedom of speech does not guarantee a receptive audience.

It doesn't but one should expect some maturity from society. I think it'll take a generation maybe less but people will learn and understand it as an extension of self albeit diffused.

> Over-reaction or not, freedom of speech does not guarantee a receptive audience.

That's so. But if society frequently inflicts severe extralegal punishment for unpopular speech, then you don't really have free speech. You just have First Amendment rights. They aren't the same thing.

As a thought experiment, imagine Person X said something deemed offensive and society responded in a uniform manner - by constant public humiliation, refusing to do business with them, refusing to even speak to them, etc. All this is well within our legal rights (with maybe some exceptions) but life for such a person would be very difficult, if not impossible - they'd probably end up starving in the streets. That's not a very free society even if there are no legal consequences whatsoever for any speech.

I think it's very important to affirm that even if someone says something offensive that the response should be measured.

I've thought it odd that the discourse over free speech focusses on legal rights.

The idea behind human rights is that they're not government granted, but instead are innate to humans are humans.

The issue is more complicated than "let everyone say what they want to say", but it's also more complicated than "you have a legal right, but nothing beyond that"

> As a thought experiment, imagine Person X said something deemed offensive and society responded in a uniform manner - by constant public humiliation, refusing to do business with them, refusing to even speak to them, etc.

I will note that until relatively recently, those who we consider "conservatives" today did exactly that towards "progressives". You try and dare being publicly against segregation and the mistreatment of black people in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s - Juliette Morgan did, and promptly got fired and ostracised. I'm sure you can find similar examples for supporters of gay rights, right up to today.

It's not exactly a new, nor a partisan thing.

> I will note that until relatively recently, those who we consider "conservatives" today did exactly that towards "progressives".

And we agree that's bad, right? I thought we had all agreed that was bad. 'Cause it really seems like here you're advocating "well they did it to us, so it's okay if we do it to them."

> And we agree that's bad, right?

Sometimes. It's less clear-cut in some cases - specifically, when a statement or action is more directly against some group's human rights, or otherwise directly dehumanises people. However, what I'm suggesting that it's not going to stop - all sides are going to keep doing it, and always have done.

It used to be that if you learned that something was OK, it'd be OK for the rest of your life (more-or-less, ignoring major political events). Now, that's not so much the case as the progressives have more power and visibility, and so it's more visible when someone says something that might've been accepted 10 years ago and isn't now, vs someone saying something that is generally not accepted now but might be in 10 years.

I would just like to point out that the progressives were the ones who pushed to disenfranchise African-Americans for decades.[1] The conservatives were on the other side, pushing for equal rights; as an example, President Coolidge said "[As president, I am] one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.".[2]

The progressive movement has a horrific history, and I find it puzzling as to why someone would self identify with a movement so steeped in racism and eugenics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_Sta...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge

Mainly because "progressivism" as the term is used today has little to do with what it was about in the past? Most movements have had huge changes over the past hundred years.

It wasn't exactly conservatism which brought us back to the point we're at now from there, was it? It seems as if it were a different movement entirely from the late 1800s progressives and the conservative movement.

But if you value what freedom of speech provides—an open marketplace of ideas, socialization between those of different values and opinions without fear of violence—you should practice and encourage tolerance and equanimity, regardless of what the laws about speech are.

Angry mobs petitioning people to be fired from their jobs for bad jokes or unfavorable political donations don't violate the First Amendment, but they certainly discourage speaking freely.

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.

It is deceptive to characterize angry comments posted online as a "lynch mob".

Scale matters. And it has real-world effects... people get fired over this sort of thing, among other things.

The only thing preventing the lynch mob from doing what things the physical lynch mobs used to do is simple, sheer lack of physical proximity, so A: I consider it a valid use of the term and B: It should not be viewed by any sane person as a normal and healthy social correction mechanism, it should be condemned by all. It is still dangerous, and if everyone acts like it's no big deal or even a good idea, it will get worse, until the lynch mobs do do what lynch mobs used to do.

And I mean that 100% fully literally, with absolutely no exaggeration whatsoever. In the real world, the line between "dozens of death threats", which we've already handily reached, and "an actual attempt on your life" is very thin. As easy as it may be to tell others not to worry, if you personally were betting your life on that line, you would not be happy; it is not to be relied upon. There are crazy people out there. Failure to take that into account while passively accepting that online lynch mobs are OK is just stupid.

This stuff isn't a joke. It's one of the foundational bricks between having a civilization and not having one. It is unwise to be so lackadaisical about it, if you like living in a civilization.

Sometimes I wish I could give Reddit Gold for comments on Hacker News.

Cyber-bullying is a thing, with real consequences (depression or suicide).

It's hyperbole, as the victim doesn't actually die. But there are certainly similarities.

They were able to get Sacco fired. They were able to mobilize someone to take her picture right after her plane landed. And she had to leave Cape Town because "no one could guarantee her safety". So, it could have easily escalated into a real lynch mob.

How about people getting "swatted" by internet vigilantes?

So the "not dying" part is about the only significant difference I can see in some of these more extreme cases, and, God help me, I wouldn't be overly shocked if someone actually does end up dead from an "internet shaming" some day.

Not only is someone bound to end up dead, based on past human behaviour the majority of shamers will claim they deserved it, and feel no shame themselves for their part in the death of an innocent. Diffusion of responsibility is a terrible thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility

It's happened already: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/online-trolls-w...

(posting from a throwaway because I resolved to stop commenting here, but couldn't help myself here)

> you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online

If you published something similarly obnoxious in a newspaper before the Internet, I'm sure you'd get a similarly angry response from some people, and quite possibly have someone harass you in person if they knew where to find you.

If you stood on top of a soap box and shouted offensive crap at the public, you might have stuff thrown at you.

The only things that have changed - it's easier to publish things online, you're publishing for a global audience rather than a national or a local one, it's easier to find other people who find those publications obnoxious online, and it's a two-way medium rather than the traditional one-way medium of newspapers.

Basically, the masses finally have a voice. If that's a problem, perhaps free speech has never actually had a chance of working?

But it's still niche media manipulating the voice and attention of the masses, as illustrated by the article. There is so much bigotry and racism that goes unnoticed in the depths of comment boards and bad blogs. Why aren't the masses also voicing about any of this? Because they aren't speaking briefly enough to be easily criticizable.

> There is so much bigotry and racism that goes unnoticed in the depths of comment boards and bad blogs. Why aren't the masses also voicing about any of this?

They do. Constantly. It's just that most of the time, they're talking about <such-and-such a site's community> or <such-and-such a blog> rather than individual people.

I stand corrected.

You're missing a crucial point: whatever an average person does lasts forever. It used to be that you had to be somebody notable before this happened, which meant you had a recompense -- you were already famous for some reason. Now, the average shit you might say at the bar to your friends can mark you for all eternity. That's something unheralded in the history of communication, and it's horrifying.

Exactly. And if you were famous and got tarred one had the option of moving. It wasn't a good option as that typically meant starting from scratch --but it was there. You could start a new life.

Perhaps the so called right to be forgotten deserves serious consideration at least for some kinds of instances. Say, you can have indiscretion purged but not info on a felony.

On the other hand... In addition to searching foe people who get called out for offensive behavior also search for those who engage in mob mentality and hold them accountable when they try to find a job.

One of the cited cases was a person whispering to a friend during a conference, and a stranger who listened in felt offended.

Not only is it easier to publish things, it is also easier to attack people. The only thing needed to begin a shaming, is a large list of followers and the ability to tell a narrative.

I'm not certain if you realise this, but that was part of a much broader discussion on sexism in tech - there's plenty of discussion on the topic of women feeling threatened by the male-dominated atmosphere at some tech conferences.

It's not good, however, that these two got singled out when I have no doubt that there was much worse said at that conference alone.

Anyway, the point of my post was the last line - if free speech doesn't work when the masses have a voice, has it ever actually been a good ideal to work towards?

> Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes.

Sure, but you don't magically make society robust by telling racist jokes. The healthy society comes first; the fact that these jokes no longer sting is just a pleasant side effect.

you really don't have freedom of speech when you can get mugged by being obnoxious online.

Ken White has quite a few posts about freedom of speech vs the Internet. I think this quote is apropos to that type of comment.

Speech Is Not Censorship: Put another way, as we often say here, speech is not tyranny. Freedom of speech does not (and cannot, under any coherent legal or philosophical approach) involve freedom from criticism. Free speech does not mean "I have a right to say whatever I want without social consequences." [0]

[0] - https://www.popehat.com/2012/10/16/a-few-words-on-reddit-gaw...

To me the unresolved problem here is that this approach leads to online coercion, bullying, and suppressing dissent and steers opinion to the center. Korea has many examples of people being harassed and some leading to suicides due to online castigation.

And, as others have noted. On the past these idiotic social indiscretions and letting off of steam were for the most part quickly forgotten, people went on with life. People say all kinds of idiotic things in ordinary speech for many reasons. Few of those reasons are malicious.

For cornering people's though like this is not productive. It's like whack-a-mole. People will let steam out some other way. You can't change society and its mores by force of on-line bullying. Many many times those calling offense don't understand the context.

It's like one day calling out people who when they have sex have a disposition to say nasty things. I can see it rationalized right now. Don't say b c* d* etc. Even as re playing as that unconsciously has an effect on people....

No. Fuvk no. I've come to the conclusion that only allowing the ugliness to surface can we call ourselves free. Anything else is a sanitized life. The thing is who decides what is healthy?

> A robust society can take the jokes.

Let me rephrase that:

> A robust society requires everyone in the minority to shut the fuck up when anyone in the majority makes them feel invisible

> An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.

There's a difference between pointing out someone acting obnoxiously and couch-fainting.

No not quite. A robust society is one which evolves to know limits. You can have stereotypical jokes, racist jokes, etc. But they are part of a bonding mechanism rather than an alienating mechanism.

Societies need to allow the free flow of ideas. We can't be choosy about what we consider proper or not, desirable and not. We have to allow everything.

I used to be a dreamer growing up and thought why not make these bad thoughts illegal, racism cured. No. That was naive. It has too many negative collateral consequences.

> Societies need to allow the free flow of ideas.

Then when does "That makes me feel like shit when you say things like that" become taboo?

You should not receive that from a superior. Nor should one be harassed (repeated uninvited antagonism). Else, society at large, there is no guarantee --taboos change over time. They come and go. People become sensitive to things and become desensitized to other things.

My belief is only our own selves have control over our reaction. We as receivers of all kinds of bad things need to learn how to deal with adversity. Nature is not sanitized, we should be taught how to deal with this kind of adversity. It's a cold place, and not everyone's or every thing's nice. Children often are not prepared by adults for these things.

Now, bullying is something different and there are different aspects to it. Sometimes it's peer pressure, other times it's harassment, other times it's a social mechanism to get people to behave a certain way (don't cut in line), be a certain way (slim, not fat, etc.) Bullying is an intimate attack, a malicious attack on a particular person, typically by a group, but also by an individual often accompanied by explicit or implicit violence. It's about control.

"When men are friends they have no need of justice"

Aristotle

French guy here. This article only speak about employees in american company getting fired about some data shared on the web. But I would be curious to know what happened to people who faced the same situation working in continental european companies. It would be surprising if people would lost their jobs so easily. Either because I think it's culturally better accepted for private people (I mean not public figures) to have unappropriate expressions publicly, plus the law don't allow companies (at least in France) to fire someone on a basis of only one unappropriate expression not even targeting another employee or customer of this company.

This is interesting. I wonder where the line is drawn, though (surely there are some ways to get fired by saying something in Europe).

I believe that it will soon become necessary for some sort of online bill of rights which protects one's identit(y,ies) and privacy.

I'll reply only in regards of french law here but be aware I'm no lawyer. The basis is the following. You can fire someone for repeatedly public attacks targeting another employee, or a client. Then if the fired employee thing you're wrong then a kind of court dedicated to work legislation will decide if you have enough element to have him fired or not.

>Either because I think it's culturally better accepted for private people (I mean not public figures) to have unappropriate expressions publicly

Based on my (admittedly very limited) experience with French culture, this is definitely the most important difference.

America has become extremely politically correct. People in France are much more relaxed about saying things Americans might construe as offensive. In particular, Americans tend to be much more wary of speaking about perceived victim groups (certain racial groups, homosexuals, etc.).

"Based on my (admittedly very limited) experience with French culture, this is definitely the most important difference."

Unless they are saying something conceivably pro-Nazi?

Yes, you can even go to jail for that in lot of EU countries.

In fact, saying something pro-Nazi is criminal in many EU countries.

In France, there are fewer social proscriptions on speech.

In the US, there are fewer legal proscriptions on speech.

Well, in Europe the tradition of mobbing is a serious problem, and its definitely something that occurs on a regular basis in the real world, and not just on the Internet. In Germany, people have been fired for instigating the mob - not necessarily for saying things that offend others, but rather for rabble-rousing and trying to get the pitchfork brigade riled up.

I think Europe has a keener sense of the history of this activity, because the artifacts of prior historical mobbing are abundant. You only have to take a walk through Prague, Budapest, Berlin to see just how this is reflected in European sensibilities - whereas in the US, its a less overt historical fact. Americans are very loud about things, Europeans often very reserved and conservative, but there is fundamentally no difference between the cultures: both are capable of succumbing to cannibalistic, collective-reactive urges. I witnessed this factor countless times in my experience living in the US (I'm not American), most severely during the Rodney King riots. People form a kind of super-being in a mob, a near God-like entity, which can perform powerful acts - go to the moon, solve humanitarian crises, and so on. But it can also turn vicious and heinous as well, and there seems to be some sort of scale upon which the tone of activity can be plotted. I don't think there is a difference in scales for European versus American societies; just that the fact of observation of the energy of the mob is louder in some cultures that have evolved to profit from that loudness - America, in this case. Celebrity/Entertainment culture being what it is in the US, I think its just a brighter shade of pale than, for example, the French may be used to - but its the same basic color.

My english is not perfect and reading you answer I thing I was misunderstood.

This kind of mobbing and over reaction do happens in France as well and I don't deny that. Recently 3 millions get down the street because 18 peoples has been killed. So I acknowledge that over-reaction is not just an american thing. It's more on the employer side that I'm surprised. If an employer is not stupid why would he fire someone on these bases?

I believe its because more often than not, the employer is profiting direction from the mobs own ignorance of itself. A classic case is where employees are not allowed to discuss their wages, as this of course allows the 'owner' of the organization to make bargains and deals, and so on. So the function of leadership, expressed as control over the crowd, has its own degrees of +/-'ve reality. In an open group, where everyone knows everything, its quite difficult to rile people up and get them to pick on an individual member; the dark line that forms around mysteries, lies, deceit and intrigue, is precisely the abyss into which any individual may fall. And it is always 'others' who push them into it.

> In Germany, people have been fired for instigating the mob - not necessarily for saying things that offend others, but rather for rabble-rousing and trying to get the pitchfork brigade riled up.

One of the reasons I love Germany and Germans. They like to solve the root problem rather than trying to pretend to.

> People form a kind of super-being in a mob, a near God-like entity, which can perform powerful acts - go to the moon, solve humanitarian crises, and so on.

I'd hardly call NASA or UNICEF a mob.

Maybe mob is one end of the spectrum, and "organized space-exploration organization" is the other end.

French guy here as well, and this was exactly my reaction. It seemed very exotic, this notion that an employer was allowed to fire you just because a bunch of people on the Internet have started disliking you in a vocal way because of something you said (as an individual, not reflecting your employer's opinion, not illegal).

This feels like the main issue here. Barring substantial improvements in everyone's maturity, you won't be able to prevent random people on the Internet from focusing on you for whatever reason. The actual individual actions that follow, however (the employer arbitrarily sacking you, people refusing you service, people harassing you, etc.) are what crosses the line, in my opinion.

you're wrong, this happened in France too, and it happened a lot last year : http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2014/01/02/quenelle-nabil-perd-em...

just one example...

Ok but when I wrote fired, I was thinking about permanent position (CDI). The article state that he has been forced to quit his job rather than being fired, which is not really clear. His position may has just been a seasonal one as the place he was working in is apparently opened during summer only.

You might not be fired, but you can be arrested for expressing an inappropriate opinion in France. See the string of recent arrests over comments people made about the Charlie Hebdo shootings.

Really? I'll be interested in sources then, because I've just never heard of such things in France. From what I know even well known public figures that has been sentenced about innapropriate expressions just had been fined (Le pen) or had their show cancelled in some cities (Dieudonné)

I don't know about people being arrested for comments about Charlie Hebdo, but people have been fined and imprisoned for statements about the Holocaust: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#P...

Thank you very much. The english version of wikipedia state that Roger Garaudy and Jean Plantin has been jailed whereas the french version of their wikipedia pages state they hasn't been. So it would be good to have reliable sources.

BUT you actually pointed me to a guy that has been an exception to both of my statements. Vincent Reynouard has been jailed for revisionism after having published a book and a video tape about the massacre of small village in south of France during War World 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane

And even before that he lost his job as a teacher because he had some revisionist document on its work computer http://www.liberation.fr/france/1997/04/23/le-prof-revisionn...

So he is really the exception which proves the rule.

Sure thing.

France: Dieudonné sera jugé pour «apologie de terrorisme»

http://www.rfi.fr/france/20150114-france-dieudonne-sera-juge...

France arrests 54 for ‘defending terrorism’ after Charlie Hebdo attack

The Justice Ministry said that 54 people, including four minors, have been detained for defending or verbally threatening terrorism since the Charlie Hebdo attack. Several have already been convicted under special measures for immediate sentencing.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/1/14/france-charl...

France arrests 54 in hate speech crackdown, boosts anti-ISIS support

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/french-lawmakers-approve-more-ai...

French Comedian Dieudonne Goes On Trial For 'Defending Terrorism'

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/02/04/383767811/fre...

Why French Law Treats Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo Differently

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/french-law-treats-di...

All right, random people has been arrested and taken in custody during 48 hours after the Charlie things. I was actually meaning people jailed for months and lost their jobs and suffer all the dramatic effects of prison.

Well, according to the Al Jazeera article, some have already been convicted and sentenced.

I read of a case here in Germany where workers refused to work with a known pedophile, and the company really struggled to get rid of him. It went through several trials where they weren't allowed to fire him.

Another nice thing about France, at least it used to be that way, was that office romances were not frowned upon. You could actually have playful innuendo and it was just ordinary. I'm not saying offensiveness was allowed, no, just that people could be people, comment on looks, dress, etc. and not have it be seen as verbal sadism.

Regardless of your political orientation, you should think twice before cheerleading mob justice. If you think mob justice is good and if you think "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" then you're just saying unpopular speech is always bad and wrong. Once the mob turns against your political beliefs then one day you might be the one getting attacked and fired.

Pretty sure there's a pg essay on this. "Unpopular speech is not necessarily bad and wrong" is pretty much, like, the Official Opinion of Hacker News.

For whatever reason, the following snippet prompted me to see who the author was:

  Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received,   
  one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

As it turns out, the author is Jon Ronson. He's well worth checking out. I've particularly enjoyed The Men Who Stare at Goats (the book), The Secret Rulers of the World, and The Psychopath Test.

According to his wikipedia article he also is releasing a book called "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" on March 2015.

It also mentions that at the end of the linked article. This is an adapted excerpt from the book (unsurprisingly).

He also has an awesome story about his parents on This American Life(http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/214/t...) even though he (and they) are Welsh.

I like to think of self-righteousness as a drug. A subtle but lingering high. I know I get off on it from time to time.

Post anything online and there's a chance you'll be someone's next fix.

I think this is very well stated and I'd like to see this idea presented more frequently in dialogue surrounding internet zealotry.

Simply put, a great deal of what drives the extremist behavior on the internet is straight up narcissism. The people participating in pile-on internet bullying campaigns feel good about themselves when they do so, and receive praise (from the internet mob that they have aligned with) for doing so.

As dislikable as the tweet's content is, it's truly frightening how quickly an incredibly large pitchforks-and-torches mob can come to life via the internet.

The tweet is clearly a quip about western white privilege. Her tweet caused no harm, but the blithering mass of bullying social justice warriors continually ruins lives.

> As dislikable as the tweet's content is

Did you read the article? By thinking for a few seconds, the point of the tweet is obviously not racist. Not a smart tweet, in retrospect, but. Here's her explanation from the article:

> I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal. (...) 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.

> Did you read the article? By thinking for a few seconds, the point of the tweet is obviously not racist.

Honestly, does it even matter? Say it was a racist tweet, and she was a racist. Does that mean she deserved what happened to her? Definitely not.

It matters because making an offhand joke parodying a stupid person is something that we've all done. This example shows that if you make a little parody joke like that in the wrong medium, your life could permanently pivot 180 degrees for the worst.

> This example shows that if you make a little parody joke like that in the wrong medium, your life could permanently pivot 180 degrees for the worst.

Definitely. But my point was, whether it was racist or not, her life pivoted for the worse—and whether it was racist or not, she didn't deserve what happened to her.

This is the saddest thing. It's so trendy to have offended narcissistic egos today that people don't even recognize when someone is on YOUR side, defending YOUR cause with sarcasm!

See how they've even turned against Banksy for his so-called "anti-immigrant" piece, which was meant to satirize anti-immigration ideas.

I think what's more frightening to me is how non-systematic this sort of thing is. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to who wins the "doxing lottery". I was looking at my own Facebook and Twitter feeds and realized that I (and maybe most of us, unless we live a pristine life) could just as easily have been Justine Sacco.

We could argue that people shouldn't make posts like these, but in doing so, we ignore our own humanity. We're not robots. Humor is an essential cognitive mechanism for building neural structures so that we can understand the world around us. It helps us to recognize and make sense of subjects that otherwise would be too emotionally difficult to face head-on. This is part of the reason I think that faux news shows like the Colbert Report have been so successful. By denying this sort of expression, we are essentially denying an important cognitive tool for understanding.

I think it's a hilarious joke.

Except for Facebook and LinkedIn, I haven't used my real name and any personally identifiable information on the Internet in 20 years, since I realized that everything I wrote on Usenet would be there forever. There is no value with having the things I say potentially used against me for the rest of my life.

Same here. I rotate my online username on forums and online comment systems every few months: https://fakena.me.

> I rotate my online username on forums and online comment systems every few months

You might want to rotate your current one a little sooner ;-)

Touché!

I do think it's a bit odd it's considered obvious that children should avoid putting any information online that could reveal their real identity/location/et c., but when people turn 18 it's suddenly not eyebrow-raising for them to have a bunch of social media accounts and such under their real names.

Mind you, such caution used to be common sense behavior for everyone. Then Facebook[1] happened. The second Eternal September.

It also seems to have become common for professionals to promote themselves under their real names without keeping separate, anonymous accounts for non-business activities.

When it goes well they're growth-hacking (puke) their careers, using all their twitter followers and likes and GitHub projects or whatever to market themselves and/or their services and/or products they're paid to sell. When it goes poorly we get stories like this. Live by the sword, die by the sword. (I don't know that that applies in this case, but it has in others)

The situation in the article is really shitty, of course, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm just puzzled that throwing your real name on every corner of the Internet stopped drawing derision and advice to cut it out, at some point. It's why the calls for reducing online anonymity to end online harassment by strangers strike me as such a strange approach—the absolutely undisputed solution used to be more anonymity! It's a major cultural shift from the very recent past, but I don't see it brought up very often.

[1] Not just Facebook, obviously, but the timing fits.

The reason why Google, Facebook, Twitter, NSA, etc, want to reduce online anonymity is so that they can do a better job in tracking your behavior and advertise to you. They are simply packaging it as an anti-harrassment reason, when in fact that's a complete lie. As you said, the only solution is complete anonymity.

I'm the opposite. I use my real name, or real enough, everywhere. It makes me think twice before hitting enter. Anything I say I'm backing up, for better or worse, with my identity. I may someday regret this decision. So far so good.

I do the same thing, I use my real name as my username on all social media sites including Reddit. I always think to myself, is this something I want permanently associated with my real identity?

It could obviously backfire. You say something that you think is fine, someone else gets offended, and they know exactly who you are. But generally, I think using your real name makes people more accountable for what they say online.

The problem with this approach is you have no idea what will become wrongthink in the future. In 2008, opposing gay marriage was a relatively mainstream idea. In 2014 someone was fired for donating to an anti-gay marriage campaign. In 2015 it might be acceptable for one to express wariness of expanding the H-1B visa program, but in 2020 will it be so?

You at least admit that it might backfire on you. I try to tell people, you don't get a choice in how people interpret what you say. If an angry mob decides to take one tweet out of context, your good intentions won't save you.

I am tempted to upvote this with the HN accounts of my desktop, my laptop, my work laptop, my phone, my work phone, my tablet and my TV. ;)

Separation is good opsec.

I think that public shaming can be laid directly at the feet of Social Justice. It would be great if people who want to make things better for minorities chose a different tactic - private communication rather than public ostracism.

SJW here. Private communication works well if the problem is specific people behaving badly in private, and public ostracism is, in fact, inappropriate. But usually the goal is to establish a changed social norm, and to combat an existing one, which needs to be done in public; ostracizing an individual is not the goal (and, to be clear, isn't a good thing!).

Someone brought up the example of Ben Noordhuis and node.js elsewhere in this thread. Assuming for the sake of argument that Ben's behavior was something that you didn't want in the world, it's not enough to message him in private and say "Hey, this was wrong for these reasons." That gets you change within the node community (well, provided it's Ben acting), but not anywhere else. Meanwhile, if you object in public and write a blog post about it... do you think io.js is going to risk rejecting a pull request about gendered pronouns now? Or any other equally large, somewhat-overlapping language community?

I would definitely agree with the criticism that the blog post should have tried harder not to look like an attack on Ben as a person. But it reads to me like it wasn't the intention; it was an attack on anyone who acts in the same way.

Essentially, your argument is that the ends justify the means, right? Or, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? The issue is that we now know that things blow up in social media so we should adjust our behavior to be ethical.

The case of dongle-gate at PyCon is a good example to talk about. We should now understand that attempting local solutions outside of social media is far preferable. Individuals (on either side of an issue) should not be cannon fodder for social causes. Inviting/creating that sort of public ostracism is extremely irresponsible. I hope that we (collectively) are learning that lesson.

Maybe protecting individuals from social media attacks can be seen as a social justice cause? The most vulnerable minority is the minority of one.

No, absolutely not, and I'm sad that anyone would think I'm advocating that, because it means I wrote unclearly. My argument is that distasteful but not disallowable means should not scare us off from meaningful ends. Disallowable means are, as always, disallowable.

Here's an example of a disallowable means: come up with trumped-up excuses using forged evidence to fire all the powerful white men on the grounds that once you get rid of them, the people who'll fill in will be (probably) less oppressive. You can probably even come up with data backing that. But it would be completely inappropriate. (Not to mention strategically wrong because it legitimizes a harmful strategy, but it's also inherently wrong even if it weren't strategically wrong.)

My worry is that we'll look at a possible side effect of a means as a threat, as you're portraying things "blowing up", and that will be a chilling effect on change. Whatever the problems are with social media, to use that as an excuse is just that—an excuse, to prop up the current, bad systems.

but really what we see with these crusades by SJW's is just an opportunity for bullying, usually by people who were once bullied and now want to get their own back. A lot of it is bandwagon jumping by the majority of people, who may or may not have a dog int he fight, but just want to cause a fuss. It is these people that call the employers, DDOS employers websites etc and then everyone lumps them all together as SJW's, giving everyone a bad rep.

Doing things quietly would bring about better change, not chnage through fear (as it is now) but change through education. Explain to eople why they are wrong, get them to conciously change their behaviour as opposed to reactively change it to protect themselves and not because of an understanding of where they went wrong.

Reasd the article and everyone involved still thinks that what they said was a joke and was blown out of all proportion. No minds were changed here, people just batten down the hatches to protect themselves and their families.

That would be extremely nice, if it worked. Then the entire question about distasteful means wouldn't come up, which would be better for everyone, because distasteful means are still distasteful.

Unfortunately, that's not how changing minds works, in practice.

http://www.contralbum.com/blog/2015/2/5/political-correctnes...

See the section starting "The second great flaw...." (And yes, I get the irony of trying to convince you of this by cordially linking you to some random blog post that lists research.)

So, looking at your link and I find and interesting line. "42% of Americans still believe we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" is presented as 42% of Americans are stupid and uniformed. It would seem those "informed" people are not readers of the New York Times as they have an article[1] detailing the WMDs found and the effects on our soldiers. Perhaps these "correct" people don't have friends who served or never served themselves? I suppose they can go with the Mother Jones approach and say there was no "active WMD program". But, that probably wasn't the question asked and I sure families of those veterans would say some were found.

Seems if you only have 140 characters, a short conservation snippet, or a single data item then you might not get the whole story.

Summing up the article as "the end justifies the means" seems appropriate and, to me, is still the simplest definition of evil.

1) http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleea...

2) "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."

So your go to alternative is bullying. Well I would prefer to effect no change than to have to force it through with threats and intimidation.

SJW is more of a pejorative term these days, I don't know anyone who uses it in a positive way and you are perhaps the first person I have seen that indicates they themselves are an SJW. My experience of those who the term applies to is generally negative and I cannot think of one positive action that has come from these SJW's.

I won't even wish you luck as I think it is a retarded idea that they preach. Yes I disagree with sexism, racism, homophones etc, I consider myself a bleeding heart liberal but there seems to be no redeeming qualities to the SJW movement it is juts bullying, hatred and damaging their own agenda (on the rare occasions when that agenda can be loosely agreed upon).

What would you do about George Wallace in 1963?

Leave aside the question of whether social justice today is comparable to the anti-segregation fight 50 years ago (reasonable people can disagree), and let's just think about segregation. The governor of Alabama literally says in his inauguration speech, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

You have the option of going to Congress and passing a federal law, going over the governor's head, that makes segregation illegal. As a federal law, backed by the federal law-enforcement apparatus, this is the very incarnation of threats and intimidation. And Alabama certainly isn't about to integrate voluntarily.

Does your conscience bother you?

If the government making laws is "the very incarnation of threats and intimidation" then you have never really been subjected to threats and intimidation.

I hate to burst your bubble but not everyone is from the states, so it is difficult for me to comment knowledgeably on your reply. From what I can see George Wallace was a politician, if you don't like what a politician says you vote against them. I would not condone shooting him or terrorising his family to force a change when there is a legitimate route to address the problem.

Why would my conscience bother me?

Sorry, that last line was from a song, "Sweet Home Alabama," that briefly mentions Gov. Wallace. It's decently well-known in the US, but my mistake in expecting everyone would recognize it. :)

Anyway, nobody's talking about shooting or terrorizing anyone. But the Civil Rights Act in the US compelled private business owners not to discriminate in their clientele, and that compulsion was behind the (implicit) threat of police response, as with just about all government compulsion. That is way more of a response than anyone's discussing in this thread; the worst that's happening is people losing their jobs and livelihoods, which is pretty bad, but not nearly as bad. But it's not a particularly common belief today that the Civil Rights Act was evil, or that its ends did not justify the means of government compulsion. (It was a somewhat common belief then, and some US politicians did oppose it on those grounds, though who can say if they also privately objected to its substance.)

Now we have created a culture within which ostracism, shaming, and zero tolerance for difference or error is the norm. Then you add in making examples of people to frighten others into compliance.

Perhaps the possibility that the means of choice are toxic should be considered.

> I think that public shaming can be laid directly at the feet of Social Justice.

I'm not entirely sure of what "Social Justice" means in the US, or how can such a thing be negative, but it seems to me that it's about enforcing social norms. If the social clock was set back a few decades earlier, you would get the same pitchfork mob if you tweeted something in favour of homosexuality. Just look at what happened to Adria Richards.

My personal theory is that people like to see blood flowing. We don't get our bread and circus any more, pogroms and lynchings have gone out of fashion, but we still have the Internet to get our kicks.

> I'm not entirely sure of what "Social Justice" means in the US, or how can such a thing be negative

The phrase "social justice" in this context usually refers to things like this:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=social+justic...

http://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/top/?sort=top&t=all

I actually thought it was funny. If you get offended by a thing that's so over the top it just can't be taken seriously, you sir are an absolute moron. Hate how people are just looking to get excuses to get offended and show off their 'righteousness' at the expense of other people.

Point is: It's a joke. Learn the difference.

"It's a prank bro! It's just a prank! Calm down!"

Offensive people who do offensive things and then defend them saying 'it was just a joke, bro!'

I don't think anyone got truly offended, just that they saw an opportunity to do something interesting with Twitter - which is mostly a very mundane activity - and went with it. An opportunity to rally the pitchfork brigade can feel very empowering to people who spend a majority of their time 'socializing' with a facile society such as Twitter provides. If you ask me, the root cause of this cannibalistic mob desire is, fundamentally, dire loneliness.

When can you get 15,000 people to hate something you've decided is worth hating, its quite a buzz.

> If you get offended by a thing that's so over the top it just can't be taken seriously, you sir are an absolute moron.

I gather many youtube commenters have a Twitter account and an attitude.

He explains his viewpoint:

"Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized."

This is delusional slacktivism. Overthrowing power structures and hierarchies by retweeting. How more delusional can you get?

OTOH, if you've got a PR job or a shitty position where you'd get fired for saying such stuff, you really ought to be ever so careful. Why are people posting this stuff with their real names attached? Unless you've got FU money or are in a career track that's mostly immune to this kind of harassment, just use a separate personal account. FFS, does anyone think the general public wants your tweets?

But it's not that over the top. There are A LOT of people that would say the "I'm white" comment and MEAN IT. It's not obviously over the top.

Once I saw a T-Shirt in tshirthell.com that said something like "arrest black babies before they become criminals". I don't remember the exact words. THAT is obviously and ridiculously over the top.

"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 almost makes it sound as if HN is a bunch of MRA losers :( A pity it's so sloppily worded (unless it's true, in which case, ugh).

Um, sometimes? HN is big, and there are crossover populations.

I don't think HN is a bunch of MRA losers, but it's certainly closely connected to places that are. (as in, lots of people participate in HN who also participate in places that could be characterized as such)

So I'd say it's MRA-loserville-adjacent.

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 crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.

> 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

Holy crap, I haven't been there in awhile. It's almost torture to see such trash on the front page. Soon I will go there to get my TMZ updates about the hollywood stars or rappers who did something, maybe, possibly tangentially related to tech?

If you're internet-dogpiling people or taking creepshots and getting people fired for jokes not even directed at you, I will happily internet-fight you for being an awful person.

It's amazing how self-described "progressives" can come in here and happily defend this kind of behaviour. I hope you find a nice new website and never have your views challenged again.

I... what? Hold your horses, there's an awful lot of projection here.

I haven't come in here to defend internet lynch mobs - there's literally not a word in my post condoning it.

The bulk of tech progressive aren't the ones spoiling for a Twitter fight, they're the silent majority that's reading posts on HN, rolling their eyes, maybe sighing a little bit, and moving along with their lives. They're not orchestrating backlashes, brigades, or downvote chains, or any such devices. The most they're doing is emailing a link to some comment to their friends with a "sigh, HN again" quip - and I've received many such messages.

Heck, I know people who read HN - but only the links - knowing what a cesspool the comments are going to be. Heck, this is me on most days.

These are the people I'm talking about - the ones who've largely left this place behind because the tone of the community has shifted to one where any talk of race, gender, or even age (or in fact any talk of institutional problems in the industry) is automatically the work of professional victims (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior") out to oppress techies. The general tenor of the community here now has a very distinctly reactionary twist, which has caused people to bail for greener pastures.

I'm sorry, I was overreaching. Your reply seemed to support the OPs idea that Adria Richards was harassed for no reason by "MRA losers".

>These are the people I'm talking about - the ones who've largely left this place behind because the tone of the community has shifted to one where any talk of race, gender, or even age (or in fact any talk of institutional problems in the industry) is automatically the work of professional victims (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior") out to oppress techies.

I won't deny that the MRA side is often reactionary, but you must admit that the "social justice" side is just as bad. The internet of today is designed for reactionism, makes it so easy to react and so easy to find controversial conversations.

This is something I've noticed a lot - both sides are as bad as each other. Both claim to be better people, but both are so mired in faeces that they haven't even noticed they're throwing it themselves. (I've been up for 36 hours that's the best I can come up with).

> (and a largely fictional narrative of a "social justice warrior")

That's a very opinionated statement. Unfortunately, few agree on the definition of SJW, so everyone makes up their own. Pretending that there isn't a clique of 'progressives' in the tech world doing their best to cause trouble is just fantasy. Look at Adria's creepshot/dog whistling, the elevatorgate thing, that time Ben Noordhuis was forced out of the Node community because of a SJW hate mob enraged over a pronoun, or this thing: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32778.html. SJWs exist, and have done plenty of damage to the industry.

They've also no doubt scared many young women away from STEM careers through their wild stories about misogyny and dudebro cultures in the tech world. Would you, as (possibly) a woman, want to work in an industry frequently proclaimed to be an unaccepting boys club? Funnily enough, the proclaimers of such always seem to benefit personally from such attacks, landing cushy "developer relations" jobs and hefty sums on patreon. That's where the "professional victim" label comes from.

> that time Ben Noordhuis was forced out of the Node community because of a SJW hate mob enraged over a pronoun

bcantrill commented on this above, with more authority than I could address this with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041086

Also, it's worth noting Ben Noordhuis wasn't forced out of the Node community - just the core contribution team (although I do believe he chose to take a break afterward). His company, StrongLoop, would go on to be the owners of the Express repo, and Ben Noordhuis is one of the contributors to IO.js.

That's weird, I'm the opposite--I read HN specifically for the comments.

It's not true for articles like this, which I generally don't read. But when the link is a programming article expressing an opinion on _______, I definitely want to read what HN has to say.

I see a lot of what you're saying happening, and subjectively, it has gotten worse. One interesting thing is that I see this popping up in comment sections and forums far removed from HN - neo-monarchists, redpillers, neo-objectivists, and their loosely related ideological ilk have spread far and wide. At the same time, the ILM does seem out of control, both on the SJW and anti-SJW sides. The Internet has become an excellent hate amplifier.

Another interesting thing is that the same thing happens on the other side. For many others (like myself) who are on the liberal / progressive / pro social justice side who couldn't take the influx of inchoate, unfocused rage (along with all the other fun stuff like oppression olympics, tone policing/anti-tone policing, fights over trigger warnings, slugfests over performativity, implosions over minor transgressions causing a space space to turn into an unsafe one and all the rest) that has become prevalent in various online SJ communities - they also left, looking for said greener pastures (or just hang around and don't comment - that's generally what I do in those spaces.) Michelle Goldberg wrote a good article on this a while back:

http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twit...

Anyway, if you know of any places for technology discussion with a good signal-to-noise ratio and low on hate and warriors/conspiracy theorists from either side (and a liberal bent would be even better), I'd appreciate hearing about it. I saw Slashdot rise and fall. Sad to think it could be happening to HN, too. Where do we go next?

>neo-monarchists, redpillers, neo-objectivists, and their loosely related ideological ilk have spread far and wide

Those are widely different viewpoints who have more in common with mainstream viewpoints than with each other - it is dishonest to label them together, please don't do so.

Maybe you don't agree, but there's overlap and ideological cross-breeding in today's versions of these movements: http://boingboing.net/2015/01/28/a-beginners-guide-to-the-re...

I'm fully aware of where and how they differ, and I'm aware of the strident disagreements both within and between - but to deny an overlap today I think is misguided.

That is a slander piece. If you are going to come up with a source then at a mimimum I expect the author to know the http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa... and be able to tell me with a straight face that that is what those who (like me) believe fathers should have better custody rights.

Oh and how PUAs and MRA are part of the same moment when PUAs look down on MRAs, how PUAs want a class of alphas with more social responsibility like the NR.

To me your argument only works if you adopt a you are either with us or against humanity attitude for political correctness and associated belief with _is_ inline with what many SJW think.

I will give you this much: about the only thing these people you have grouped together do agree on is that feminism and modern leftism has gone a little too far: but since they do not agree on how much (wiz MRA wanting more custody rights to NR wanting James of Stuart as king) nor what to do about it they in fact have more in-group and out-group variance.

Of course the fact that they disagree at all is enough for some (such as the author of that hit piece) to wrap them all together, we should be above such simple mindedness here on hacker news.

Edit: removed unecessary and counterproductive anger, added call to unity.

> 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).

This much is true.

> HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago.

This may be true in some circles, but I don't think its generally true. Its probably true that HN is seen by some who participated in it earlier as less of an exclusive club of like-interested folk as it has gained popularity, but that's going to happen with any narrow forum over time that doesn't have an exclusionary wall for membership (and exclusive walls of membership have their own problems which will can erode the image of a forum over time in different ways.)

> Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind.

Such as...?

> 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.

Well, I suppose you could have a forum with a political litmus test for membership or heavy-handed pre-publication moderation of comments, but given how much the tech community overlaps with the ancap, MRA, and anti-SJW crusader communities -- and, perhaps more importantly, the reaction many outside those communities would have to the kind of approaches necessary to eradicate the unwanted comments -- you'd probably lose some value for actual tech and, particularly, tech issues discussions.

But where do you see those better alternatives?

> "Such as...?"

Ahah, not about to name names - the trouble with openly naming people who are opposed to MRAs/anti-SJWs is that the demographic is also very, very adept at launching internet lynch mobs.

Sadly the events of the past half-year or so have succeeded in silencing some people who would otherwise speak, for fear of being doxxed, swatted, or otherwise harassed (where harassment goes above and beyond receiving angry messages of disapproval).

If the people who have left HN because of the toxicity want to make themselves known, they should do that. It's not my place to direct the people they want to avoid straight to their doorstep.

A good place to start would be the top posters list and seeing who's still around. Many of these folks still read HN but no longer participate in comments. Many read HN and have their commentary elsewhere. I know some of them, I certainly don't know all of them.

> "you'd probably lose some value for actual tech and, particularly, tech issues discussions."

Yeah, this is where idealism and values run head-first into the brick wall of reality, and no one really knows how to fix it.

We like freedom of speech, we dislike heavy-handed moderation especially when it comes to things that inform our views. At the same time we have real instances of abuse, and we have even more instances where extremists in one camp can simply shout down any dissent (extremists, for some reason, have a lot more time to comment on the internet than the rest of us).

I don't think anyone really knows the right answer to this. We want to preserve intelligent discussion, but at the same time give minority views held in good faith a fair shake. The solution thus far has been for people to abandon communities with toxic demographics, but that hasn't really solved the core problem - it's just hit the reset button until the new community itself attracts the wrong crowd.

> Yeah, this is where idealism and values run head-first into the brick wall of reality, and no one really knows how to fix it.

That's the thing. We do know how to fix it. We just don't know how to fix it in a way that preserves social mechanisms such as public shaming of people you disagree with.

I believe many of the active people who have supposedly left are actually still participating under pseudonyms (or even ephemeral throwaway accounts).

A taste of her own medicine. It shouldn't have happened, but at least she only got what she gave.

She tried, very intentionally, to use the social media "machine" to punish what she deemed deviant behaviour, the fact that that same machine turned on her is both unsurprising if you're paying attention, but also a little deserved.

While the original joke was childish, I cannot think of one adult working in any industry who's never said something in a similar vein (or pointing out someone else's phasing might have a double meaning, and so on). It really has nothing to do with gender politics, she was just on a quest and picked up any small examples she could find.

Nobody should have been fired. That's on the employers. However if anyone was going to be fired she deserved it the most, simply because she started this ball rolling on purpose, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Also, her job at the time was as a developer evangelist. The high-profile name-and-shame she had engaged in would have made any developer within a hundred miles hesitant to deal with her at all, making her far less effective at her job.

I can't really blame SendGrid for thinking that a tech evangelist who deliberately publicly shamed a couple of developers over an unfunny private joke is maybe not a good fit. This doesn't justify all the abuse that followed, though.

She gave death threats?

She dog-whistled the mob, no doubt that mob gave death threats.

People lose their shit when anonymous trolls send death threats to prominent women, but typically completely ignore the same happening to men. Perhaps women get more because they react more? Perhaps people shouldn't feed the trolls?

Please don't reply to this with a pithy feel-good response like "nobody should send death threats!". It's like saying "there shouldn't be war in the world!". It's an obvious goal that everyone agrees on, but there is no way to achieve without use of totalitarian control over the world/internet - something I'm sure we can agree is unacceptable.

> dog-whistled

You seem to be confused about what "dog whistle" means. She wasn't using secret SJW shibboleths.

> no doubt that mob gave death threats

"No doubt"! What a convenient way to assert that something happened without having to provide evidence for it.

> typically completely ignore the same happening to men

No doubt you have evidence of this, too. No doubt you have evidence that this happens to as many men as women, and as often, so as to warrant equivalent reactions.

> but there is no way to achieve without use of totalitarian control over the world/internet

You need to have a very limited imagination and near-total ignorance of history to think that positive change only comes about via totalitarian means.

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.

I wouldn't say that HN "is" a bunch of MRA losers; HN is a big place, and there are a lot of different types of people on it.

But there are a bunch of MRA losers on HN. How many, it's hard to tell; maybe a few that are very vocal, maybe a few with many sockpuppets, maybe a lot. If you ever get involved in a thread about any issue about women in technology, programs for encouraging women in technology, or the like, you will see them come out of the woodwork (and such threads will frequently drop off the front page as the long comment threads trigger HN's algorithm that try to discourage flamewar topics).

What's an "MRA loser"?

"MRA is short for Men's Rights Activist. MRAs argue that, as human beings, men should have human rights, due process in legal matters, and should not be subject to "reverse discrimination" in favor of other groups.

MRAs typically point to men's lower life expectancy in almost every country, higher rates of incarceration, more severe penalties for similar offenses, lower rates of health care spending and health research spending on men, higher suicide rates, higher rates of being subject to violence and murder including by women and when they are children, higher rates of genital mutilation, liability to conscription, higher rates of death at work, various disadvantages in divorce and child support, and higher school and college dropout rates, as reasons why men's rights should be on the agenda."

A lot of people feel that since men are privileged in so many areas, no effort should be expended on men's issues until every women's problem is entirely resolved. Due to that scapegoating Men's Rights Activists as people who hate women is popular.

So how does any of that make you a loser? What's going on in this thread? As far as I can tell it's nothing more than a similar type of bullying the article is itself is talking about, which I didn't ever expect to see on HN, let alone tolerated.

At what point can you no longer express controversial opinions without being called a loser?

On the Internet, someone is already calling you a loser, possibly without your knowledge. It's best to worry more about the folks who have greater power to destroy your social standing than just simple name-calling.

And to provide a sentinel value for the previous search space, I'll just say it. You, and everyone else who may be wondering if someone on the network is calling them a loser, are all losers.

Now that's taken care of, and you can go about your business, expressing controversial opinions without worrying about incurring greater harm to yourself than has already occurred.

The reason you'll get banned for such behavior, and the whole reason why such behavior is against the rules, is because personal attacks are counterproductive to logical discussions. When HN degenerates into a group of people who go around calling other groups of people losers, that does not bode well.

It was, I admit, somewhat of an obscure joke. I realized, after my first sentence, that I couldn't be certain that it was true. So I added a sentinel value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_Cairo

Don't despair. Being called a loser does not make you one.

Ah, I see. Sorry about that.

>As far as I can tell it's nothing more than a similar type of bullying

It absolutely is. "MRA" is a short cut to dismiss an entire spectrum of arguments and perspectives. Just as farcical, but on the opposite side, are people who declare anyone who has a problem with something like, say, "GamerGate", a "SJW".

These are shorthand for idiots. It lets you pretend that you're in a tribe and everything is black and white.

It doesn't make MRA losers. If it did there would be no reason to tack the word loser on. Being an mean, agressive alcoholic bum implies being a loser so you don't often see loser tacked on.

I am an advocate for men's rights for many of the reasons you cite, but I also acknowledge that there really are people who adopt the MRA label who are bitterly misogynist nutjobs who have no interest in a more just and equal society, but are rather the flip-side of those misandric feminists who believe--amongst other things--that "rape is nothing less than a conscious conspiracy by all men against all women" (likely not an exact quote as it's from memory, but Brownmiller says something with the same meaning.)

The problem is that misogynist MRAs disrupt the possibility of positive change the same way misandric feminists like Brownmiller and McKinnon do. Because they share a label with sane people, they allow the enemies of sanity to mount a trivially plausible ad hominem against any proposal to genuinely address the real injustices that men and women face due to the simple fact of being a man or a woman.

The undisputed face of the MRM is Paul Elam who runs the hugely popular "A Voice for Men" website. He is a great example of a bitter misogynist MRA asshole: http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2013/10/18/paul-elam-of-a-voic...

There are lots of good reasons to talk about issues affecting men, but sadly the bad parts of the MRM far outweigh the good at this point. I'd say it's 85% bashing feminism, complaining about women's sexual power (e.g. The Friendzone), denying and minimizing rape as a social problem, etc. and only 15% talking about fathers' custody rights and boys' education issues.

I was surprised at the lapse in thorough reporting at that point in the article. It was because a few women in the tech community wrote about her history of passive-aggressive bullying. This made clear that it was not a men-vs-women issue and gave the backlash the legitimacy that led to Richards' dismissal.

It just goes to show that even in an article against bullying it is okay to bully and make fun of nerds _and the nerds accept this_.

The sad thing is the history of America is sprinkled with a few stories of angry armed mobs of people storming jails, overpowering the guards, and physically freeing people whom the public believed had been wrongfully imprisoned. That took balls. Now, mob justice is used to tear people down for writing some quip in poor taste. What a shame.

I've actually given a lot of thought to things like this, having worked with someone whom I despised due to a complete lack of tact and decorum. Despite the fact that I would never ever want to work with or be associated with this person again in any way, he still has the right to earn a living and contribute his skills to society. In fact, I would argue that most if not all the people he has offended over the years would not actually feel good about "justice" being served if he were fired and/or out of work.

This is also why I've never had twitter, never will, and only use facebook passively. There is no upside; anything you say can and will be used against you.

If you're a band announcing a tour date, or a food truck sharing your location, sure, but if you are trying to be a commentator or funny guy to gain a following, it will probably just blow up in your face like this eventually.

The good news is that you don't have to use twitter. This is only a problem if you allow it to be one for you. There are plenty of other effective means of communication.

Let's build an Internet. People can connect. They can share their feelings. It'll make the world better place.

Had no one seen what mobs of angry people do?

This is getting worse, not better. We will see this kind of anger junkie mob mentality explode into real violence. And then the violence will escalate.

Good news. We are seeing the end of the nation state. Just like they said. It is being replaced with niche mobs of worldwide scope.

The internet has always put me in mind of Dostoievskys under-appreciated story Bobok.

"It may be so, but think of putting it so bluntly into print. In print everything ought to be decorous; there ought to be ideals, while instead of that...

Say it indirectly, at least; that's what you have style for. But no, he doesn't care to do it indirectly. Nowadays humour and a fine style have disappeared, and abuse is accepted as wit. I do not resent it: but God knows I am not enough of a literary man to go out of my mind..."

btw I guess it was a throwaway comment, but.."We are seeing the end of the nation state" Where do you see that? (I see multi-level governance.)

The state, by definition, is the group that has the monopoly on the use of force. If I see a crime taking place, after deciding whether it is appropriate or not for me to intervene, my next step is to contact the state. I trust the state to take corrective measures: arresting the person, perhaps imprisoning them, perhaps killing them. I also trust them to use force (sometimes lethal force) in maintaining social order.

But on the net, I am only limited by my degree of outrage. Somebody does something stupid -- then each additional commenter takes it on themselves to "up the ante" and make the stupid person pay.

Right now we're just ruining people's lives (!). But as we start seeing these lynch mobs physically start acting out, then the state will no longer have the monopoly on force. Whether or not that's an existential question depends on your comfort level with chaos, I imagine. Whatever your personal view, the state as we know it in many cases will no longer exist.

That may sound hateful or angry or whatever, but here goes...

> I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere.

Is this really what we've come to? We have all this technological progress so you could stalk someone you're butthurt over and try to get at them?

> Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received

So that others who have nothing better to do could pile on this?

> Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized.

Wake up! Who ever gave a damn about some tweet? Be it corrupt mega-corp or a media figure.

> I didn’t want people looking at me

Well, now that's a cool story you better tell everyone on twitter :)

> The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance

Ah, nothing like snooping in on the conversation that isn't meant for your damn ears and then getting all butthurt about it.

> <Story about people who can't take the, admittedly, offensive joke, a person who's not smart enough to not crack that joke on the net>

It's not the tweet that is stupid, it's people using the platform in such ways and maybe even the platform itself. Come on, we can do better than that after all this time.

TL;DR She got exactly what she deserved in this context, but that doesn't mean that community is some righteous force - quite the contrary, it's simply poisonous.

"justice were being democratized" = mob rule

same as it ever was, now with a lot less effort from the mob

I'd say for a mob it may even be understandable (if you decided to roll with us, you're in for a full trip), we are talking about deeds after all, not empty words.

Here, it's just ridiculous.

But the empty words now result in people being fired and blacklisted, with as little effort as writing a sentence or a retweet. The mob doesn't even have to be in the same ballpark as truth. The worse thing is these things are picked up by newspapers trying to tap into social and making them "the official record".

I don't think he was presenting his past actions as good. He was showing that he himself has made the same mistake.

As a german i have to ask: Why do people get fired over things like this? Are american worker employee protection laws so weak that there is no recourse whatsoever for them?

French guy here, had the same thought

You're correct, there are basically no worker protections in America. The euphemistic term is "right-to-work", which means that you can be fired for any reason whatsoever.

Here's how worker protection laws work in the U.S.

1) For any given case, yeah, there's probably no protection. This is because we love freedom. No, really. Well, if you can get an honest answer from politicians and CEOs that's not the reason, but to the average "man on the street" who's against stronger worker protections, that's the reason. That or unemployment scaremongering. Really.

2) On the off chance that there is a law, and you know there is, can you afford to be without work and to pay lawyers long enough to fight to have it enforced? Do you even know where to begin? If not, nothing happens. (think minimum wage workers)

3) Is it worth even a small risk of a de facto blacklisting in your industry, permanently limiting your future employment options (and therefore how much you earn)? If not, nothing happens. This is related to the "everyone Googles you these days" thing mentioned in the article. (professionals, skilled trades)

In the end it's riskier for to individuals, on average, to fight these things than it is for businesses to break the law, so little is ever done. That's assuming there was even a law to be broken.

Collective action (class action lawsuits, for example) can help but is nearly impossible to organize effectively without unions, which we've been successfully convinced to hate on principle. Every so often there's a lawsuit, businesses are slapped with fine that's a rounding error in their account books, everything goes on as normal.

yes, American worker protection laws are incredibly weak. Most employment in America is "at will" meaning you can be fired for any reason at any time, and similarly can quit for any reason at any time.

Very few things count as legally protected classes. Its generally limited to race, religion, and gender. Even then the fired worker would have to prove that they were fired because of their membership in a protected class and not for some different reason. This means, at minimum, a lawsuit and I'm sure you can imagine how lopsided lawsuits between well funded corporations and your average private citizen are.

The employer-employee relationship in the US is generally "at-will", which means either side has the right to end the relationship for any time and for basically any reason.

But the actual reason why these people are getting fired is because employers are scared shitless of these digital lynch mobs. To them, _not_ immediately firing a person who makes an offensive joke means the employer tacitly approves of the employee's behavior and thus the _employer_ becomes a target.

http://www.nrwinvest.com/Business_Guide_englisch/Employees_a...

Apparently, you can also be fired in Germany for "disturbance of the general working environment"

Legal liability would put an end to this.

Imagine this: Someone says something unfortunate or offensive at a crowded street corner. Another person hears it and launches into a righteous indignation frenzy. I'll call him the Lead Bully. He stirrs up others. Very soon this turns into a physical attack and the speaker ends up in the hospital with serious injuries.

In this case anyone would easily conclude that the Lead Bully and a number of others should be brought to justice and suffer financial damage for their transgressions.

Well, a lot of these online attacks are not far from my hypothetical scenario. They are launched and stoked by a Lead Bully and stoked by them and perhaps a small group of friends and followers. These attacks result in serious and significant damage spanning from physical and emotional to financial.

According to the article, in Justine Sacco's case the Lead Bully was Sam Biddle, editor of Valleywag. This person single-handedly unleashed the hordes on Sacco. Given his position and following it is impossible to imagine he did not understand the potential consequences of his actions. He ruined this woman's life and quite possibly scarred her for a long time, if not for life.

Much like the street corner beating scenario, he ought to be liable for his decision to affect someone's life. He had at least two choices in front of him. He took the one he knew would stirr-up a hornet's nest.

The case of the guys at the tech conference is similar. Adria Richards decided to be the Lead Bully and, as a consequence, cost a father of three kids his job and caused much pain. I happen to also have three kids. If you are single you have no idea what that man felt at that moment. You can guess, but you can't know. It's horrible.

Did these people say stupid things? Probably. The way to deal with them isn't to ruin their lives. In most cases at a street corner they would be ignored.

When I was younger a mentor said something to me that stuck. He said: Having freedom and being free does not mean having freadom or being free from the responsibility for your actions or what you say.

This cuts both ways. The person who utters or tweets a potentially insensitive remark deserves to be responsible for what they said IN PROPORTION to the nature, degree and context of the statements. The people choosing to eviscerate them using social media ought to also be responsible in proportion to the consequences of their actions. That would be just and fair all around.

Think before you act.

> in Justine Sacco's case the Lead Bully was Sam Biddle

You'd be surprised to find out just how many times the Lead Bully turns out to be Sam Biddle.

No I wouldn't. There are no words to describe how big of an arsehole he is.

The proportional response to offensive speech is a rebuttal.

It is not stripping away the other's anonymity. It is not convincing their employer to fire them. It is not ostracizing them and all their immediate associates from civil society.

If someone tells a horribly offensive joke, there are several acceptable responses. One is "We are not amused." Another is "The Aristocrats!" Grabbing torch and pitchfork, and marching to the castle to demand that the monster be let go--and without even a letter of recommendation--is not.

Think before you act, yes. Think before you speak? That seems a rather lofty expectation, even in 2015. There is no ill-considered thought so swift that it cannot be hunted down with a remorseful apology.

This is call-out culture at work. There is no room for error, no tolerance for people who do not agree with you 110%. To make any mistake or disagree with The Group is cause for expulsion and lynching.

The core problem here is ironically the effectiveness of online media to broadcast personal opinions. An "offensive"/"revolting" message can be spread exponentially quickly with only a small effort by each participant. Add to that the statistical tendency of a small group of people to be extremely offended by certain innocuous messages without the opposing effect: people are usually either offended or simply don't care -- guess what effect always prevails!

To illustrate, if your message randomly spread to cause a response to 100k people, and on average each person dedicates 1 minute on it due to offense/indignation/etc, collectively ~1600 hours or 70 days will be spent on it. If a single person is the target of this effort, it can be disastrous.

I don't think we're going to have any less effective social media in the future (nor should we); neither do I believe in the near term people will be much more enlightened as to collectively avoid strong reactions directed at individuals.

So the only way to be strongly opinionated in public online is through anonymity (or through being a "brand" -- a celebrity, a comic, etc, but not the case for the average person). Major companies (facebook,google,...) fail to see this fundamental aspect of the internet: anonimity is a basic tool. We need the hierarchy where our personal communications are more transparent and the more public they become the more anonymous we can be.

I wonder about this a lot - in 15-20 years, political candidates / public figures will have hundreds of things they have said online embarrassing their campaigns/images. Do we all just become more accepting of sarcasm, racism, bad jokes, etc? Is it a step backwards or is it a step forward?

I can tell you for a fact I'm sure things on my Twitter account could likely be taken out of context as I can sometimes be a bit of a "Larry David" with my public observations that I can't help but share.

Public figures can afford "online reputation management" firms.

A lot of the people planning to be politicians are purposefully keeping their current digital life clean.

CJ John Roberts knew from a young age he wanted to be Chief Justice. (Overachiever, but lots of us on HN are overachievers.) He kept his record very clean. He never even got a speeding ticket.

And I totally see understand why: he was aware of how the media pick apart people, and who knows what one tiny thing might spiral out of control.

But it means the CJ, when making ruling about police stops, has never actually experienced something the majority of Americans have, and the Court loses some bit of useful perspective.

In addition to the research of 18-19th century public shaming, it would have been insightful to look at Court Opinions from early Freedom of Speech cases.

Believe it or not this mob response is exactly what is meant to keep speech in check, of course the Court's verbiage is not mob rule, rather "the market place of ideas." The law only cares about the Government not prohibiting speech, otherwise the Court's generally expect the speech itself to be accepted/promoted or rejected in the market place of ideas.

One example of accounting for ones words which didn't rise to the level of Court Ordered public shaming, is Lincoln's ridiculing local politicians through anonymous letters. On one occasion when Lincoln's true identity was found out, Lincoln was challenged to a dual. Lincoln himself did not want to dual, and was lucky enough that on the day of the dual the dual was cancelled. From that point forward Lincoln never wrote a critical letter of anyone, and made it a point never to criticize anyone for anything. This is a story that is more fully described in How to Win Friends and Influence People.

I believe people are fundamentally unable to comprehend the impact of having anything they do or say available to anybody in the world to witness and critique (probably a reflection of Dunbar's number - as social primates, we've been limited to small social non-anonymous circles for the majority of our evolution).

The issue is that up until the development of the internet (and particularly the social internet), most people weren't subject to this degree of anonynous public exposure. Before twitter and facebook, news outlets were the only exposure, and because of scalability issues, they typically only targeted 'noteworthy' individuals to catch them off guard. So those people learned to hide behind PR individuals, and carefully guard their words and actions when in the public eye.

The article cites the destruction of self-respect as being in some ways worse than a punishment of death. I could argue that those that participate in this sort of public shaming have a lack of self-respect and seek the thrill of dragging everyone else down to their level.

Sadly, there will never be a lack of self-confidence, which means that there will never be a shortage of these sorts of things happening.

I wish humanity was better than this.

> I could argue that those that participate in this sort of public shaming have a lack of self-respect and seek the thrill of dragging everyone else down to their level.

I think this idea is well-reflected in the movie Precious, when Precious's mother is put on the spot for abusing Precious and is forced to confront her motivations:

> Mary Lee Johnston: But, those... those things she told you I did to her? Who... who... who else was going to love me? Who else was going to touch me? Who else was going to make me feel good about myself?

Social media has taken the power formerly belonging only to politicians and famous actors and distributed it statistically over the masses. For normal people suddenly getting famous over something is a lot like electrons in a lower orbit jumping to a higher one - it's completely based on chance (incidentally, there is also a sort of uncertainty principle for social media: if you know what you're saying, then you don't know how famous you are becoming, and if you know how famous you're becoming, you don't know what you're saying). So anytime you say something on social media, you run the risk of getting infamous over something really dumb. This is all the more reason to learn to talk to one's friends using email, phone, real-life communication, or other "defunct" methods of interaction such as AIM, and use social media only professionally.

If you think about it, this rather makes sense. Why should centralized agencies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google determine how I interact with my personal friends?

I feel a bit more relaxed now that I have received many rejections to job applications. Since people won't hire me anyway, might as well be outspoken about my opinions.

Before I really struggled with the issue. It goes against my values to shut up, but I know it is probably wiser to do so.

The only people that can get away with a tweet like that are stand up comedians. The tweet in the article sounds almost verbatim what a comedian like Amy Schumer would say on stage.I guess it is a reality of social media. I dont know that I have ever felt compelled to police social media. Sure it takes so little investment to involve yourself in some drama that in real life would require more work, and most peoples sense of shame prevents them from partaking in.

I almost wonder if the best way to handle a scenario like this is to go FULL TROLL MODE and up the ante. Blow out your own credibility so that people realize they are wasting their energy on nonsense.

Another relevant instance from last Summer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869644

I see a lot of hypocrisy from the left on this issue. When their mobs attack someone, they say that if you express an opinion, other people have the right to criticize you for it. But when the left are attacked by mobs, they describe the actions of the mobs as harassment, and either get the law involved, eg through restraining orders, or lobby for more laws. The ambiguous nature of these laws, both existing and proposed, encourage this double standard.

If I say something stupid to a group of friends, usually they'll tell me it's stupid or I said something wrong, and everyone moves on. If I say something stupid on twitter, it's literally archived forever. Another reason I'm glad I've disconnected from all social media. I'll keep my stupid, non-politically correct jokes in my own head.

It's for that exact reason, I never post to Twitter. However, I consume a lot there. And as a consumer of various Twitter Feeds, I have to say I am pretty happy with the product.

There is this idea of self-censorship before you post something public--which Twitter is. That said, I'm not unhappy that there was no Twitter when I was a young twenty-something. I have no doubt I would have posted things that I'm glad I didn't have the opportunity to.

set up a twitter account and dont link it to your real name. sign up through a vpn, say waht you want and dont worry about it. unless what you say is actually illegal no one can really track you down without getting your login IP address from twitter. People get tracked down because they link it to their PSN/XBOX/FB account or reuse usernames between twitter and somewhere else they have left personal details.

I have a twitter accout that I set up through TOR and a VPN. I use a username I have never used elsewhere. I dont post anything controversial but I would be pretty happy that I could not be traced without someone obtaining a court order requiring twitter to hand over my IP address, even then it would point to a VPN that (supposedly) does not keep logs.

Do you not interact with friends on Twitter? Not having that takes a lot of the fun out of Twitter.

Nope. I interact with them on WhatsApp, text message, email, phone and in person. Twitter is like a crappy version of text messaging on a feature phone for chatting with friends.

I think some people don't feel fully validated or had a complete day unless they have found something online to be outraged about.

This has long been the raison d'etre of downmarket UK newspapers The Daily Mail and The Daily Express.

A fair point. Also Comment is Free in the Guardian.

I don't wish to comment on how sensitive people get. The masses have spoken, and there is nothing she could of done except face that fact and deal with it responsibly.

I do have a problem with one getting fired over a joke - debatable how "funny" it is - on a personal Twitter account. Would a tenured professor be fired over it? Nah....

"As Sacco’s flight traversed the length of Africa, a hashtag began to trend worldwide: #HasJustineLandedYet. “Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet."

Who are these people? Really nothing better to do than that? I just don't understand.

So far, what I see is:

"Don't use Twitter."

And on the smaller side is "Don't upload shit to social media."

You missed the bigger point, then: Mob justice is a barbaric and ugly thing; stop patting yourself on the back and thinking you're a good person for being a part of it.

This is not about justice, it's about a bad human being getting what she deserved. When you're an open racist you are a bad human being.

"bad human being."

I'm sorry, but none of us are capable of judging the entirety of a human being as "bad" or not, based on a few of their tweets.

Cast the first stone, and all of that.

> This is not about justice, it's about a bad human being getting what she deserved.

... I'm sorry, I thought we were using the English language here and that we had a seven-letter Latin-derived word that we generally used to describe the situation of "[person] getting what [he/she] deserved". Perhaps I erred. Entschuldigung; tut mir leid.

But regardless, even accepting the (modestly tendentious) assertion that this is about a Bad Human Being, angry mobs following the Outrage Of The Moment and out for blood are hideous and disgusting phenomena themselves at the best of times. The modern justice system was largely invented to counter these barbarous shortcomings, which is why we have nice things like presumption of innocence, rights of the accused, impartial trials, the notion of the finitude of one's debt to society, et cetera.

I think that people who meet the following criteria:

- Are judgmental or annoying.

- Feel the need to interject their unsolicited opinion.

- Are not me.

Will be categorized as "bad" people. Bad people should have their livelihoods taken away from them and be subject to public shaming.

Please report to HR.

So, if a person is racist, but doesn't say a thing, than they're good?

Sorry, can't see any logic in your statement there.

I don't think someone is a "bad human being" even if he or she thoughtlessly makes a bad joke.

Moreover, lynch mob can hit someone wasn't bad at all. Someone just mishears or misunderstands, is mightily offended and the twitter storm starts. Like that guy who joked about dongles. It is not inconceivable that someone might make a half-tone joke that is completely harmless, and someone mishears and thinks it was racist or sexist.

There is no way to defend against that. "I didn't say that (in that context)" is not going to work.

Firstly, she's not a racist, she made one joke with racial tones.

Secondly, do you not see how your position is a rather extreme one, that other, more moderate people might not endorse? Racism is bad, but saying racists aren't people and deserve any kind of mob justice against them is also bad.

>racist

I'm not sure you know what that word means. Telling an off-color joke that simply referenced race is not necessarily being racist, any more than telling "your mom" or "that's what she said" jokes makes someone sexist.

Racist:

NOUN

    a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.

It's about the scale of the response. If someone rolls their eyes at you, you don't throw them down and stomp on their head. Yes, they were rude, you perhaps would be OK to flip them the bird, but a curb stomp? Really?

And please don't say this is totally different because racism. It was an isolated twitter joke to 140 followers. Tweets don't move the world - but floods of them can certainly ruin individual lives.

I'm worried about people who water down the term "racist" to mean someone who posts mean things on Twitter.

I'm sure the systemic issue with blacks in America is largely caused by immature comments on Twitter. I'm so glad the lynch mob was able to right this wrong, its almost like I'm living in a post-racial America!

So you are not of the opinion that her tweet was rather about privilege?

When you make assumptions about someone based on 1 line, then you may or may not be a bad human being ;)

you're awfully quick to judge a person you've never met and know nothing of except for about 16 words you read on twitter.

Correspondingly, this thread is about a bad HN user getting what s(he) deserved. When you don't read TFA you are a bad HN user :)

I missed no such point. If you want to be a racist, sexist, or anything else potentially covered by *-ist, do so locally and quietly. If you don't, the mob of internet injustices will hit and will kill your livelihood.

You are assuming that the "mob of internet injustices" make good choices. It's pretty clear that they don't in all cases. As someone else said, that's why we have due process, we're supposed be thoughtful before we get out the torches.

Actually he hit it right on the nail. The takeaway is don't use twitter, and say nothing. That mob justice is just a secondary takeaway.

This type of mass shaming existed before twitter. The Steve Bartman incident[0] comes to mind. The difference appears to be that it used to only be possible for such things to snowball when the media or a celebrity pushed the issue into the spotlight. Nowadays, twitter allows for quick and easy mass shaming by anyone and everyone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bartman_incident

Well, as a sometimes Cubs fan, I have to say Steve deserved what he got.

As a fellow Cubs fan, you're dead wrong.

The play Bartman disrupted didn't advance any runners. It was a foul ball. Cubs were up 3-0, with one out. Had Moises Alou caught the ball, there would have been two outs. The Marlins proceeded to score 4 runs before the second out occurred, and another 4 before the third.

Bartman didn't throw a wild pitch, or commit a fielding error, or give up 5 hits and eight runs. The Cubs did.

Yes, but all that happened after the Bartman incident. Pre Bartman, expected runs were 0.69. If Alou makes that catch, expected runs drop by over 50% to 0.33.

http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/brooks/public_html/feda/datas...

Thank you. Sometimes the leads you get here give us gems like this:

"The loose ball was snatched up by a Chicago lawyer and sold at an auction in December 2003. Grant DePorter purchased it for $113,824.16 on behalf of Harry Caray's Restaurant Group. On February 26, 2004, it was publicly detonated by special effects expert Michael Lantieri.

In 2005, the remains of the ball were used by the restaurant in a pasta sauce."

It's worth saying that this does seem to be something distinct to twitter (maybe tumblr has some elements of it). It doesn't seem to happen in the same way on facebook or less social-oriented web fora.

(That's my impression anyway; I don't have statistics)

Instead, she said, she just felt personally humiliated.

Well, if I'm wearing a Nike hat, Nike t-shirt, Nike running pants, Nike shoes, and a Nike employee badge and make a joke in poor taste at a bar / mall / airport / etc, and the crowd turns to look at me with contempt for the humor in poor taste, it might reflect bad on Nike. The personal humiliation part is being called out in public on making a bad joke. She wasn't just personally humiliated, she was professionally humiliated. Job in PR = maybe know about PR...at least the "Do's and Don'ts" for survival.

It happens, which is why I suppose my Dad taught me early on that if I make a joke at the expense of somebody who is bigger, stronger, and angrier at the world than me, they might punch me out. Can happen in a bar, a grocery store, a parking lot, a motel lobby...it's life. That seems to apply to the internet as well, albeit with some caveats...never let your private thoughts wave around a company banner...

The term "public shaming" doesn't feel quite right for describing a response to what someone chose to do in public, of their own free will, in forums that are meant for dialogue. "Negative reaction" or "backlash" or might be better.

“This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.”

(Late D. F. Wallace, Infinite Jest)

I would encourage anyone against these lynch mob driven decisions to investigate the companies IAC owns and if possible cease doing business with them, and to let them know why. In particular, OKCupid is in their portfolio.

Care to elaborate?

weird to think about, but what if the scenario had been different and her account was hacked? How would it have gone, would there have been any vindication or recovery or would she have ended up in the same boat?

Ever notice how most "Social Justice Warriors" are women who love to stir up drama? As the NYTimes article states, this incident was highly entertaining to many people.

The funny thing is that taken literally the tweet is actually incredibly damning of the inequality between access to treatment for blacks and whites. White people DONT get fully blown AIDS because they have access to therapy. The fact that the twitter community can't even distinguish between HIV and AIDS is revealing of how hard they are projecting when they react to 140 characters or less. The reaction reveals a thousand times more about the ignorance and hate of online communities than anything about the individual they are responding to.

Cool scrolling visual effect with those birds in the top illustration. Wonder if it was intentional?

It seems like more than just one stupid tweet.

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).

Apparently he is about to publish a book about public shaming, so this article was pulled out of a broader set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Ronson

> reportage [1]

Not to worry: put the emphasis on the second syllable and it's an English term as well.

Every word is an English word.

"Pukka sushi compadre" is an English sentence. Even my spell-checker mostly agrees. The word origins are Hindi, Japanese and Spanish, respectively.

England gave up her empire, but kept all the words.

It's b/c it's the NYTimes-- they actually do reporting & journalism.

There's seems to be a lot of piggybacking/freeloading off of original reporting. I was involved with a project that got a big splashy NYTimes write up and it was astonishing in the coming days to see how many joker press outlets basically crimped off the Times' original reporting. They'd include a link and all that but they'd lift the juciest quotes/content and the only thing they'd contribute was some usually sassy commentary.

Here's a really vivid example-- great write up about Target detecting a pregnancy from purchase data: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

It's a great little news nugget- provocative, interesting, yadda yadda.

And then before you know it, all these "summary"/"reaction" stories get published which didn't exactly contribute much or move the ball down the field:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

http://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-s...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102859/How-Target-k...

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-t...

I'm not sure if this is a real problem or not, but it seems kind of lame that those other groups get to sit on their cans and pontificate while others get out of their offices.

This has been a standard practice with journalism for a long, long time.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism:

> In his book Flat Earth News,[3] the British journalist Nick Davies reported a study at Cardiff University by Professor Justin Lewis and a team of researchers[4] which found that 80% of the stories in Britain's quality press were not original and that only 12% of stories were generated by reporters.[1]

This is the reality of social media. If you offend the wrong person, you will most likely get fired from your job and or get unwanted attention in other parts of your life..all for just expressing an opinion.

It's essentially online bullying by people that want to silence you for having an opinion that is different than their own.

The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit.

I see this especially in many of the open source and tech communities, which is why I no longer contribute.

I also don't post anything political on my Facebook account. A future employer may look at this and judge me before I'm even hired..and decide not to hire me. Just looking at my list of friends, most people don't seem to realize that this may be a problem.

The same power that gives special interest groups and individuals the ability to launch campaigns to get people fired gives companies the power to not hire you based on your lifestyle or personal beliefs.

This and many other problems are instantly rectified when one stops using shit like twitter or fb.

Communicating with friends? fine, perfectly acceptable, PM or share with some reduced circle.

Trying to be funny in the world where someone could get butthurt over a joke that was snooped from the conversation not intended for their ears? You're asking for it (for the lack of better wording).

And yes I do realize the irony about this comment, feel free to downvote for 'victim blaming' if you don't understand the message.

A tweet is not part of a private conversation and the user in question should have known that - particularly considering their profession.

Twitter & FB aren't the problem. A lack of awareness and judgement is.

You're right that lack of awareness and judgement is the problem.

Lack of awareness of the fundamental error of attribution, and rushing to judgement based on far too little information.

Anyone who thinks they can reasonably judge anyone based on any single post, much less 140 characters, is not doing a great job of being a citizen in the 21st century. Everything we say can be misunderstood, and if you can't imagine anyone tweeting something you don't like without them being racist/sexist/whateverist that is simply because your imagination sucks as a tool for knowing reality, just like mine, just like everyone else's.

What we can or cannot imagine has absolutely nothing to do with what is real. This is the lesson of three hundred years of science. This is why ideas must be publicly tested by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference to be counted as knowledge.

This is not to say we must never judge, but that judgement is far more difficult than most people realize, and they are far too quick to do it based on far too little information and far too much imagination. [edit: I should have said "we are far too quick..." The habit of judgement is hard to break!]

I'm not judging the woman. I'm judging the action she chose to take, in the given context.

I'm saying she did something really stupid. I don't know anything else about the woman bar the fact that she seems to have a very nice taste in New York social spots.

Anyone who thinks they can reasonably judge anyone based on any single post, much less 140 characters, is not doing a great job of being a citizen in the 21st century.

^ If you're referring to me, as I said, I'm not judging her. But it's great that you see fit to lay down a marker for what constitutes being a good citizen.

^wat

^ Agreed, but unfortunately thats a symptom a lot of the internet suffers (arguably, feeds) from.

> A lack of awareness and judgement is.

The only problem is that you don't know what you don't know right up until it smacks you in the face like this.

I would say 80% of people on here have shown a little lack of awareness and judgement at least once on HN.

Have you ever posted a joke that might offend?

Have you ever linked to one or more past projects?

Are you aware that you can not delete your account or your posts?

Maybe I'm missing the ToS where copyright is assigned to HN, but I'm going to guess that a simple DMCA notice to HN would have all your comments deleted quite expediently.

That's a bit questionable if you fight it as they may be considered to have an implied license due to the fact that you posted it here to begin with. It was never really contemplated in terms of removing content placed there by its author.

You might also get put into a Chilling Effects database, assuming HN contributes to that (I honestly don't know, but it seems plausible). These are significantly less public than they were prior to the Google removal, though.

I think the biggest problem is people not understanding human nature. But that cuts both ways. Still a mob mobbing one person is not a fair fight.

Brendan Eich wasn't purged for anything he put out on social media, it was for a past political donation. But you are correct that minimizing social media use, or at least viewing what you publish with a PR perspective, will minimize risk of becoming the prey of ideological mobs.

Replace "offend the wrong person" with "do something really f*cking stupid" - which is what she did - and the outcome seems fair.

No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions.

Fair? Do you really think so? If so you terrify me.

I've done plenty of really f*cking stupid things in my time. I'm very thankful most of them were offline or pre-internet.

You're terrified by the idea that someone should be fired for gross unprofessionalism?

To repeat: she did not deserve ANY bullying or harassment whatsoever.

Did you experience consequences of the stupid actions you've taken?

Gross unprofessionalism? She wasn't on the job. It wasn't an official account.

You'd think a PR person would know PR doesn't take breaks or consider unofficial stuff to be out of bounds.

I'd like to live to a world where your actions outside of the workplace in a physical or online sense don't affect how you're perceived but it's just not true.

Not true because of people like you who force the link, who call,email and tweet employers about the behaviour of their off duty staff.

because of people like you

^Thats quite an assumption to make, no?

For the record, I've never done any of the above.

I think you understand what I mean but are perhaps being dense for the sake of argument. There are people who hold simile views to yourself and these people take it up on themselves to bring people's employers into arguments that they have no part of or perhaps would be otherwise unaware of. That's not to say the employer cannot have a response to comments and posts of this nature but they are not allowed to deal with it in a professional manner because the mob is baying at their door.

Nope, not being intentionally dense - I'm already unintentionally dense without adding to it! - but your comment felt like you were saying that I did those things, when in fact I never have.

That was not my intention, Apologies if it came across like that.

I'm dating myself, but I grew up thinking pretty much whatever you did outside of work--was no one's business.

The first time I knew society changed was when Charlie Sheen was fired for his lifestyle. Actually, the first time was the Clinton/Monica fiasco.

The only benefit I see from this hyper morality is true hypocrites/authority figures are exposed. I partied in the eighties, like everyone else; The only time I was offered hard drugs was by three off duty cops at different engagements. I don't think I(a stranger) would get that offer today?

I don't like it when one of you guys are fired over something said, but I'm all for exposing hypocritical Politicians and Law Enforcement types. Yes, I have been harassed by law enforcement, and if it happens again, and all this tech works, I will post the offence online. Legally--I know they can randomly stop people, I can randomly post. I now have two cameras front and rear of my vechicle. I am waiting for the next time I get pulled over for no reason. I also try to keep that Iphone camera handy if I suspect abuse of authority.

I liked the old system because I was white and middle class, but I can't imagine what a lot of women and minorites had to put up with?

(Actually the I more think about it, maybe the reason we are so sensitive over online comments is because, as white males, we didn't experience the injustice the rest had to endure? I know my generation wasen't sexist, or racist, but my father's generation--is a whole other story.)

> To repeat: she did not deserve ANY bullying or harassment whatsoever.

That wasn't clear. You said the "outcome was fair" - the outcome was that her life was ruined.

I also said: No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions.

I meant the outcome from a professional standpoint was fair. I don't believe how her life has been "ruined" as I've explained elsewhere.

Clearly the person who fired her only did so because of public outcry, i.e. the bullying. That was in their best interest. It wasn't fair. It wasn't a consequence equal to her action. It may have been equal to the reaction to her tweet, but that reaction was unjust.

The consequences of the bullying, given her being fired, is much worse than if she was not fired. Her ability to compete in the workplace has been severely diminished because of this. Her PTSD that she will probably suffer for a long time has been greatly exacerbated by her firing.

Given the worst intention of her tweet (ignorance), getting fired was still not the right reaction to her "crime."

Do people need to be held accountable to their actions? I agree that they should. Outside of criminal law (since this wasn't criminal), the mob is not the right group to decide what the correct consequence of her actions should be. History shows that this leads to barbarism, which this was a case of.

She didn't get what was coming to her, she got much worse.

if you think the outcome from a professional standpoint was fair, you have a very bleak and dystopian view of fairness. she was posting something to her own private twitter account in her own time; it had nothing to do with the job.

I've posted something online that almost got me fired. No racists remarks, no hate, it was just some techincal info I shouldn't have shared.

The power that a few sentences can have is sometimes terrifying.

Among the reasons that I "am" "Dr. Edward Morbius" and "work" is "Krell Power Systems, Unlimited".

It appears that a big part of this discussion is about how we as a group are not sure if it really is a situation in which she "[did] something really f cking stupid", though.

Clearly, you do interpret her statement to be an offensive, racist remark, but by her own admission, she instead was commenting on how "[l]iving 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."

Whether or not her explanation for the off-color is truly genuine is up for debate, but scuttling somebody's life and career for something that only might have been a racist remark doesn't seem all that fair to me and (it would appear) a significant fraction of commenters here.

Her explanation does sound like it was crafted by a political PR group - which makes sense considering her profession - but I'm still happy to take her word for it.

However, it's pretty easy to see how it could be considered a racist and bigoted tweet and I'd expect her to have realised this before sending it.

EDIT: I totally agree that scuttling someones life on career off the back of one tweet is unfair - I 100% agree with that. As I said in the original comment, the bullying she experienced was totally unfair.

I don't believe, however, that her career is ruined by it - evidenced by the fact that she's now gainfully employed. I think it's definitely a red flag on her resume but by doing volunteer service after the fact I'd be surprised if any company wouldn't see this as "I did something dumb, I learnt and grew from it".

Professionals in PR should naturally be extra-vigilant about issues like these.

if the joke had come out of Louis CK's mouth, its intention would have been obvious.

given that, as she said in the article, "only an insane person would think that white people can't get AIDS", and the phrasing is obviously comic (dour opening, sudden & glib reversal, edgy punchline), I literally cannot read the tweet as bigoted or racist. Is the joke off-color? yes. Is it obviously self-deprecating, and aware of the fucked-up-ed-ness of white & first-world privilege? yes.

if the joke had come out of Louis CK's mouth, its intention would have been obvious.

^Agreed but Louis CK is a world famous comedian. When he speaks I know to take most of what he says in jest. Theres a context I can apply when he speaks.

A counterpoint to this would be that she had a small following on Twitter, most of whom she may know in real life, who likely know that she was joking. They can apply a similar context because of their relationship with her.

However, I would expect her to know that people will be able to read a tweet without that context - thus taking it out of context - and reacting accordingly.

I literally cannot read the tweet as bigoted or racist

^And that's okay. I see it differently. We all take different understandings of things. The tweeter should have considered this when posting the tweet.

> And that's okay. I see it differently. We all take different understandings of things. The tweeter should have considered this when posting the tweet.

I find it hard to accept this. I've offended people, unintentionally. Heck, there are still a few times that to this day I don't understand why the person was offended (I mostly do understand when they explain themselves).

We are human; I don't think it is reasonable to parse everything 140 characters that ever leaves our mouths or fingers and correctly predict how any/every person in the world might possible interpret it.

I mean, do you know anyone, ever, that has never offended somebody? It seems like an impossible standard. People shouldn't brake to late and rear end somebody at a stop light. People shouldn't ski too fast on a ski slope and fall. They shouldn't trip and fall. They shouldn't talk over somebody during a conversation. But we do them, now and again.

I loathe posting in conversations like this because it is almost inevitable that someone somewhere will misconstrue what I am saying. "Look, Roger is sticking up for racist posting!" Uh, no, anything but, but someone somewhere is going to say that. I'll probably get lucky and that won't develop into a Twitterstorm, but who knows? A good part of me says just delete this and don't hit reply.

But I don't want to live in that kind of world of perfect expectations. I'm going to try hard to express myself well, but you (you=public, not you the poster I'm replying to) have to understand that modelling the minds of others is a difficult and mistake ridden field.

I think there's something to be said for the idea that when people don't have context, they should slow their roll on the pitchforks, not make the worst assumption.

That's why I'm happy to see post-mob coverage of stories like this one, and some of the Reddit mob-justice-gone-wrong situations.

1) when I read the offending tweet at the beginning of the article my first thought was "she's making fun of clueless white/rich people traveling abroad." (If you've traveled you may have bumped into this not-uncommon type.) so I think it's reasonable to believe that explanation.

2) I got the impression that this was a personal account, meaning I'd judge it based on what stupid shit I hear people say in bars or other social/personal situations. I know plenty of people who have said way worse things, and continue to.

When I was younger and much more stupid, I told a joke once that in hindsight was homophobic. I in no way every considered myself homophobic whatsoever and it was just pure stupidity and thoughtlessness on my part. I was at a party and my joke went over like a lead balloon and I was immediately embarrassed. I believe I deserved to be embarrassed and that thought me a lesson. I feel like that, or perhaps a stern lecture is an appropriate reaction to somebody telling a thoughtless, tasteless joke.

At some point in life we all realize that we're not as funny as Steven Colbert, we're not as good looking as Brad Pitt, etc, etc. When you come to that realization, learn your limits and don't try to pull off a racist joke or wear a speedo to the beach. It's unfortunate that she had to learn this lesson in such a painful and public way. She was clearly in the wrong, but I don't agree that mob justice fits the crime.

The gray text makes it look like a lot of people disagree. So suppose for the sake of argument that lots of people on the internet considered this post "really f*cking stupid" and tried to get you fired for it - would that not be a problem?

I mean presumably you don't think it was a repugnant thing to have posted, but then neither did Justine Sacco.

A fair point but comparing the ideal that people should be held responsible for their actions to a bad racist joke intended to highlight that "living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world" is apples and oranges at best.

If you feel like Gawker would be interested in running a piece on my comment then feel free to go ahead and submit it.

These things are subjective. Presumably Sacco felt that comparing genuinely racist content to someone's sarcastic joke about themselves was apples and oranges as well. I rather do myself.

Put it this way - nobody is against the idea of "people being held responsible for their actions". But it's pretty hard to buy that that's what happened here. I remember when the Sacco thing was trending and I never saw anyone who seemed hurt or angry, or even offended. To the contrary, people were thrilled that some PR asshole was going to get fired but didn't know it yet.

> Replace "offend the wrong person" with "do something really f*cking stupid" - which is what she did - and the outcome seems fair.

And yet if she was a writer for SouthPark or Family Guy, we'd all be laughing at the joke.

"consequences need to exist to actions"

Didn't G.W. Bush say something similar about people who criticized the Iraq war?

> The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit.

Hahahahahahaha no. Eich paid money to political campaigns to ensure that some of his own employees and fellow citizens would not have basic human rights. Then, he refused to apologize for it and dodged the question when asked if he would do it again. That's not "expressing an opinion," that's nearly sociopathic. He was clearly working against his employees' best interest. Even ignoring his employees' feelings, he was bad for the company. Many productive employees threatened to quit because they didn't want to be represented by a person who explicitly expressed hatred towards them or their friends.

That kind of person does not belong in a position of power, full stop. Expressing homophobia in 2015 is going to close doors, the same way expressing racism or sexism does and should. There was no "bullying campaign" except the one supported and perpetrated by Eich.

Just curious why this is getting downvoted. Are people actually buying the whole "Eich is a victim because as a white multimillionaire he lost his job because he cared deeply about taking away the rights of others"...?

It's because they are going overboard... I stopped reading when I saw the word "sociopathic".

Do you think campaigning to ensure a group of people don't have certain fundamental rights that others do, for no reason other than your own personal animosity, doesn't qualify as sociopathic? I do.

This matter you are concerned with has always had more to do with recognition and acceptance in society than rights and equality.

You seem sharp set to demonize Eich and otherwise be combative with others in all these comments. Have you ever considered that your attitude would harden peoples' hearts against you rather than warming them?

Do you think you will you ever be able to drop this victim act and heal and move on with life?

Are you really suggesting that outrage directed at those intentionally harming other people for no reason at all is an act?

> for no reason other than your own personal animosity

If that's your understanding of people who vote against gay marriage, then you really have no idea what's going on in this country.

Please enlighten me.

Most people on this planet have religious beliefs, that claim some behaviors are good, and some behaviors are bad. A lot of them don't make much sense. Maybe you think that God doesn't want you eating bacon. Why? I don't know. But you follow them because you believe that's what God wants you to do. A lot of people—millions and millions of people in the US—believe that their God disapproves of gay marriage. And so these people, who are trying to understand the world and their place in it, try to live out the expectations they believe that their God has for them.

Maybe you think that sucks. Well, in fairly short order, gay marriage is being legalized over their objections. That's a good thing. But to believe that it's being fueled by sociopathic animosity—to turn millions of Americans into movie villains because they haven't yet learned what you already have—is an act of arrogant blindness. And it's a harm to you as well—by not understanding why they believe what they do, by turning them into fictional caricatures, you lose all hope of changing their mind, and helping them learn what you learned.

I have no doubt that, over time, quite a lot of them will see the errors of their ways, and support gay marriage. But it will be despite you, not thanks to you.

We have a constitution. The first amendment of which says religion will have no influence in making laws. Done, discussion over, and the courts agree.

That's not what the first amendment says. A lot of laws have inspiration in religion (and tradition)—people believe X, and so want laws that support X. But if X gets passed as a law, it's because people support X, not necessarily because it comes from a religion. What we're seeing with gay marriage is, people are studying the matter, and finding out that the only reasons against it are religion, and tradition. And those aren't sufficient. So laws against it are being overruled.

But that isn't to say that religion has (or should have) no influence, because it influences the believers, who then support laws & lawmakers. Nor is always it possible to separate the beliefs that someone holds for religious reasons, vs. beliefs they hold for other reasons. But it does mean that a law needs more than religious reasons to stay on the books. Thankfully, gay marriage seems to be one that is mostly held for religious reasons, so laws preventing it can be dismantled (versus, say, marijuana prohibition. It's more than just religion, so it's harder to dismantle).

But if all you take away is that people against gay marriage aren't driven by sociopathic malice, then that's still an improvement.

Yes, people are downvoting because Eich is white. That's most certainly the reason. ;)

I was a little rude there, but people claiming that Eich is the fricking victim here really sets me off.

The downvotes from cowards and/or homophobes do crack me up though. This is a discussion forum, folks. If you disagree, let's discuss it!

> Then, he refused to apologize for it and dodged the question when asked if he would do it again. That's not "expressing an opinion," that's nearly sociopathic.

Forcing someone to apologize for something that is not universally considered to be wrong is a good example of bullying. As is calling publicly his behaviour "sociopathic".

> He was clearly working against his employees' best interest.

This is hardly considered to be a firing offense for a CEO -- in fact, in many cases this is considered to be good by many people, e.g. by anti-tradeunionists when CEOs fights with unions.

> Many productive employees threatened to quit because they didn't want to be represented by a person who explicitly expressed hatred towards them or their friends.

Saying that he explicitly expressed hatred towards anyone is misrepresenting the facts, and is another example of bullying.

> in fact, in many cases this is considered to be good by many people, e.g. by anti-tradeunionists when CEOs fights with unions.

Sure, but arguably they're benefiting the company then. In what way does denying some people fundamental rights that other people are allowed to have benefit Mozilla? It's a different situation.

> Saying that he explicitly expressed hatred towards anyone is misrepresenting the facts

It really isn't. Did you see the Prop 8 campaign? Do you know the kind of offensive garbage anti-gay groups spew, even today? They regularly call homosexuals pedophiles, rapists, accuse them of having an "agenda" to convert others to homosexuality, or that their god hates them. These groups are a wellspring of hate, and Prop 8 was no lily-white exception. The "National Organization for Marriage," a major supporter of Prop 8, has been classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

That's what Eich was paying to support. If giving material support to a cause forwarded by hate groups doesn't classify as expressing hatred, I really don't know what does.

Made me think of this tweet I saw the other day:

"Everyone who questions my obviously compassionate and righteous cause is a dangerous sociopath" — Many sociopaths

Go on, tell us why gay marriage shouldn't be legal.

To elaborate, you're implying there's a different, valid side to this argument. I'm curious to hear it.

I'm not religious, so I don't advocate for religious beliefs. I don't, however, deem people with non-violent religious beliefs, that differ from mine, to be "sociopaths".

So you'd be okay with, say, banning bacon because Jews don't eat it? I'm not arguing against a religious belief. I'm arguing against a religious belief being enforced by the government.

This isn't a disagreement over optimal taxation rates. There are people committing suicide because they've been demonized by people like those Eich paid money to support. There is real harm being done.

The alternative side to this argument is that if Eich discriminates against anyone at work he loses his job, but that inclusiveness includes including people we don't like - and that means Christians with weird but semi-private views about gay marriage.

The only reason anyone knows about his ciews is because political donations are public, not because of anything he did at work.

Yeah, sure, if you're privately a bigot, how is anyone to know?

But this was the CEO of a company unapologetically supporting a hate group aimed at many of his own employees. Then people have the balls to claim he was "bullied" out of his position as head of a major Internet company?

This isn't crazy programmer Ed going on about some conspiracy theory, this is the CEO of your company supporting hate directed at you and your friends. You can just wave Ed away. This guy is going after your fundamental rights. Screw that.

>But this was the CEO of a company unapologetically supporting a hate group aimed at many of his own employees.

There likely wouldn't have been a Mozilla corp or org if he hadn't founded the company and as Mozilla grew he did nothing to hamper its growth into a highly diversity-friendly company. Privately he had issues, likely religious, about the definition of marriage and this was, culturally, a mainstream view at the time.

Aw, I already answered that one!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041105

Do you think people should get fired and ostracized for donating to Planned Parenthood? They literally murder babies. What kind of person thinks murder is ok, and would donate money to help an organization systematically murder? This kind of person does not belong in a position of power, full stop.

How do you define "baby"?

The young offspring of a human

At what point does a set of reproducing cells become an "offspring"? It's a hard question to answer and there's no bright line. I understand the opposition's argument, and I don't feel nearly as much animosity towards them.

There is no legitimate argument against gay marriage.

I'm gay (& partnered, fwiw), and I'd have to agree that there certainly aren't any good arguments against gay marriage; at least, not any arguments we'd accept in a wealthy, industrialized, western society at the beginning of this millennium, but do keep in mind that the great, great majority of the world does not agree with that assessment.

So, what makes an argument legitimate? In order for one to suggest that there is no legitimate argument against gay marriage, you'd have to rationalize what it is that we in the west know better than those living in less-wealthy, less-industrialized societies outside our corner of the globe.

I don't know that we need to go that far. In the US we take the stance that people should be free to do what they want unless what they want to do interferes with other people doing what they want. Where people conflict in their desires is where the law comes in to settle the matter. Whether that system is good or not is an open question, I guess, but it's what we have.

Using that as a rulestick, no one will be negatively impacted by homosexuals getting married. Studies have been done, plenty of places around the globe have tried it with no negative consequences. The courts agree. There's no government interest in preventing gay marriage.

Sure, keeping in mind that I don't disagree with any of that -- is this a stance that we've just adopted within the last ten(ish) years -- because if the issue of gay marriage were really that simple, wouldn't it have always been legal?

I would argue yes, it should have been. Just like women and minorities should always have had the vote and slavery was always immoral. But they all required periods of strife, and now anyone who argues against those positions is rightly shunned.

In order for one to suggest that there is no legitimate argument against gay marriage, you'd have to rationalize what it is that we in the west know better than those living in less-wealthy, less-industrialized societies outside our corner of the globe.

Most of those other societies incorporate substantial religious influence in their legislative and/or judicial processes. It doesn't require "rationalization" to demonstrate that this is harmful to human progress.

As an atheist, I agree, but asserting that the rationale behind prohibiting gay marriage is mostly religious isn't supported by evidence. More than a quarter of the world's population lives in countries that are majority-atheist without being any more supportive of gay marriage than those of us in western, more-religious countries.

I'm not aware of any countries that are majority-atheist (maybe Norway?) Any references for that?

The classic, easy, example is China.

EDIT: Apparently that's a little contentious -- only 47% self-declared atheist (http://redcresearch.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/RED-C-pres...), but given that 9% of those surveyed did not respond to the question, the majority of respondents to this specific survey question did self-proclaim themselves as atheists.

Aren't most religions prohibited in China, though? Those people are basically answering the survey under duress.

Naw -- not really illegal; although it's probably politically complicated to be religious: "No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens because they do, or do not believe in religion." (Article 45 of their 1978 Constitution).

Even today -- decades after the state/social pressures against religious affiliation disappeared -- most former soviet states still have very large atheist populations.

For the record, I don't think the author was actually trying to defend that point, but instead to highlight how when taken out of context or in hindsight any one of our behaviors could in the future be seen as a real, unambiguously "wrong" act.

Yes, I'm likewise highlighting that there's a gray area in that particular question, unlike the other question.

Thought experiment: Let's say hypothetically scientists discovered a drug or "vaccine" that a pregnant woman could take, which would guarantee that a male child of hers would not be gay (I'm operating under the assumption that homosexuality is caused by genetic or environmental factors and is not a free choice of the individual).

Would you be opposed to pregnant women taking this drug?

They abort fetuses, they don't murder babies. A baby has gone through the process of birth while a fetus has not.

I understand that this won't change anyone who's already formed an opinion on abortion but lying about your opposition shows a weakness in your position.

I think the grandparent is making a point about perspective and POV, one that you have conveniently proved by responding with an argument in absolute terms.

To some people, Planned Parenthood aborts fetuses. To other people, Planned Parenthood murders babies. I personally am much more in the former camp than the latter. But would you want the people who believe the latter to get you fired from your job because they read your Hacker News comment and plaster it all over conservative newspapers that "wavefunction is an apologist for baby murderers!"? I certainly wouldn't.

The nuance that always gets lost in these discussions is that different people have different points of view, and the same words may mean different things to them. Combine that with the lynch mob mentality and you have a powder keg.

> Do you think people should get fired and ostracized for donating to Planned Parenthood?

Yes, I think people, in a position where PR is a part of their role such as CEO, that work toward things that cause substantial outcry that prevent him from doing his job, should probably not be in that position.

Or are you saying that you'd think someone working against the ideals of Planned Parenthood in their own time would be suited to lead it?

You might disagree with the reasons, but the reality is, he couldn't do his job because of the outcry. So, the fundamental question becomes: Do you think someone should get fired for not being able to do their job?

>That kind of person does not belong in a position of power

That position of power, and Mozilla as a whole, would likely never have existed without Eich.

Good point, what other forms of hate should we allow him to express without consequences? :)

What would you recommend the consequences should be for Barack Obama, given he publicly held the view that Eich privately held?

I'd argue anyone against gay marriage is unfit for holding office. It's one of several reasons I never voted for Obama.

He's a war criminal who slaughters innocent civilians in countries he is not at war at (not that it matters, since, innocent civilians), so ideally, he should be tried at the Hague?

So if the CEO of your company doesn't share your political views, and votes for or against a law that might harm you, that CEO doesn't belong in a position if power? Someone who is enacting his fundamental rights, and having an opinion shouldn't be in a position of power? I'm curious, while he was a CEO did he do anything that would hurt his employees? Did he say anything that would indicate he would hurt his employees?

Twitter, in particular, is awful. There's no context and very little thought possible in 140 characters. So you either get marketing from corporations, jokes/memes, or full-frontal assaults by the pitchfork-weilding mob, with no effective defense possible in the medium.

At least on Facebook you can elucidate your thoughts, defend your opinions, and otherwise make an effort too look like a person who appreciates nuance, rather than someone whose entire intellectual capacity is captured in 140 characters.

Twitter seems pretty much designed to function as an emotional amplifier.

It's not dissimilar to traditional news media in that respect -- "if it bleeds, it leads" and all that. Humans like to pay attention to other humans, and are fascinated by bad behaviour and messy accidents. Newspapers and TV channels are always after something that provokes their readers and gets them emotionally engaged at a fight/flight level. And twitter and other social media that permit unrestricted engagement play to this -- that's precisely why they've grown so big.

(Facebook is in no way an improvement unless you lock it down to friends-only. After all, the difference between 4000 characters and 140 isn't that great, when you're trying to discuss complex issues, especially if you're not very articulate or thoughtful in the first place.)

Yeah, the most important benefit of Facebook is that you can say things "privately". But even then, it's a lot harder to portray someone as an evil villain cartoon when there's context.

Even if most people don't read more than a sentence or two, it's possible to look like a real human being, whereas on Twitter you get your 140 characters, and that's that. By the nature of the network, nobody cares or sees the ten tweets that come before/after the offending one.

> Facebook is in no way an improvement unless you lock it down to friends-only.

This is definitely not true. As lunatic as they may seem, many of the people in these online mobs are at least somewhat reasonable, and if they were able to see context (for example, a comment or edit on the original post) it would pretty seriously attenuate the virality of stuff like this. Twitter is drive-by conversation: there's practically no possibility for context, for clarification, etc. Hell half the time I'm exposed to Twitter, I end up looking at fragments of conversation whose context is pretty damn painful to nail down. A shitty interface like that is a hell of a lot more efficient at instigating mobs over misunderstandings.

Scott Alexander's "The Toxoplasm of Rage" (h/t mlp at Ello) describes how Tumblr is apparently the perfect storm of outrage:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage

More from Merideth: http://maradydd.livejournal.com/530110.html

The phenomenon reminds me quite strongly of Orwell's Two Minutes Hate from 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate

That's what has been so frustrating about watching the GamerGate stuff in a subcircle of the people I follow. Or any argument/outrage-of-the-day I've seen pop up.

There are people on both sides of an issue who are genuinely, mistakenly trying to have conversations. On Twitter, where the UI is designed to strip context away.

The thing about Twitter is that everyone is connected to the same party line.

Imagine you are at a party of 100 people, all having their own small conversations in of two to five people. Then imagine someone throws a switch and every single thing said is heard by everyone in the room, but only fleetingly and with no time to imagine the context.

And sometimes Twitter's culture makes it really hard to find context. If someone responds directly to a tweet, you can see that in the conversation, but a manual RT destroys that chain.

The real solution is that we have to recognize that our lizard brains love beating the shit out of people. We've put on a layer of civilization that stops us from doing that in person, but it's just as bad to do it online. Once we recognize that we can be monsters, we can figure out how to stop doing it, or at least do it less.

I have some pretty serious objections to summing up people making a campaign to remove a bigot from his role leading an open source, community friendly company as "an online bullying campaign"...

Then the whole edifice is inherently unstable and will collapse at some point.

I will still post economic or political-ish things, under my real name, but they're generally not very controversial, they're references to articles, book or blogs ( usually that I'd like to see read a bit more ).

Which is why you keep different online identities that don't point to each other. So you can say the stupid jokes on your "sgt.lonelyheart97" twitter while posting on your prim&proper official account once or twice a year. Someone who really wants to will probably be able to connect the dots after enough digging... somehow. But at that point it's someone with vendetta against you specifically.

Or just go and post on 4chan anonymously.

Two of the women mentioned in this article were doing just that. They posted pictures that the wrong people found offensive, got doxxed, bullied, and fired.

Which article did you read? Everyone in the article was demonstrating their innocence by doing things with their real names, with public profiles describing their place of employment.

Would society really be any better off if people aren't held accountable for what they say?

The coorect response to what most of these people said is for someone to pull them to one side and say "stop being a dick, especially if you're using the company social media account".

Threats of violence, loss of job, weeks long campaigns -- none of that is an appropriate response.

in for example Eich's case how do you pull him aside and say "stop being a dick by donating to hate, and then trying to run a diverse company?"

Just because somebody's idea of diversity is different from yours doesn't make them hateful, it just makes them different.

It's ironic that this is lost on people who argue the most loudly for inclusiveness.

No, it doesn't make them "different," it makes them hateful. You're carrying water for some people that will go down in history next to the KKK. Stop it.

What, stop defending people who are being forced out of society by an angry mob? No. I dislike angry mobs, it's kind of my thing.

Not only that. If you take that approach to an extreme one e fs up a hermit or worse a selfreinfocing mentality. I mean no restaurants where a cook, server disagrees politically, no working for companies who have people who disagree with me, no listening to music from musicians who disagree with me....

Go ahead try and see how far people get. Not very.

I'm sure that if you really stretch your mind around the issue, you'll understand and agree that the rules are a bit different at the CEO level.

I don't think so. So long as they don't seek me out personally, I'm okay with the CxO, etc., being diametrically opposed to me.

I'll put up with an F'ed up president/prime minister with whom I disagree to the utmost, but I'm not going to move out of the country. I'd do what any civilized person would do and avail myself the tools at hand, vote, in the case of president/PM/Chancellor. But I'm not going to get in a tizzy over it.

I think there's a point you come to in life where you realize that no matter how righteous you think your personal cause is, it's your framework which makes it so. Live in another era, in greek times or babylonian times, their idea of what was right and wrong were different due to their frameworks. People who believe that when they are old and frail should go out to pasture to be consumed by nature are no less right than the person who believes in life prolonging drugs, euthanasia or hospice care.

I'm also not saying we're insignificant beings and nothing really matters in the face of the universe. Just that with few exceptions, like murder, etc. we can't say 'this is the righteous way', the enlightened way.

When I work for someone, when I buy something, there is no further symbolism -it's unconditional. I make a transaction for service or product. You pay me, I work for you do do x. I pay you and I get service or product x in return. I don't expect any conditions like, oh, you must say sweet things to your partner, don't think nasty thoughts in your dreams, else this breaks some implicit agreement, etc.

What you're missing is that people like Eich are the angry mob.

This is what your angry mob looks like.

https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/03/mozilla-statement-on-... https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/

I'm really sorry to have to be so direct about this, but it's perspectives like this that are part of the problem.

By saying that they're "next to the KKK", you're marking your opposition as not only immoral, but beyond reprieve. If you're willing to simplify the moral landscape to a single line onto which you've placed yourself squarely at the "good" end, you're taking a gravely irresponsible logical shortcut.

EDIT: I foolishly used 'retribution' in place of 'reprieve', thus making my above comment confusing and nonsensical.

By saying that they're "next to the KKK", you're marking your opposition as not only immoral, but beyond reprieve.

Can you elaborate on that? Several prominent racists of the KKK era, including people like Robert Byrd and George Wallace, ultimately renounced their earlier views. Eich is free to do the same whenever he wants. He has not, as far as I'm aware.

Whether or not you agree with Eich getting fired (stepping down) over it is another thing, but donating to a cause whose sole purpose is to prevent a group's right to get married (and reap the tax benefits!) seems pretty hateful. You can get into semantics about what was or wasn't written in religious texts, whatever, still doesn't make it right.

What CamperBob2 said was probably inflammatory but probably also right. If you're against same-sex marriage you're probably on the wrong side of history.

Note to hopefully avoid unproductive tangents: all the views I use as examples here say nothing about how I feel about these issues, they're just examples of how _society_ feels and may feel about certain things (which is what is relevant).

> If you're against same-sex marriage you're probably on the wrong side of history.

The problem I have with this is that it condemns the vast majority of society, throughout the vast majority of history. Understanding someone's views while stripping the context of society's views at the time is foolish. In 2015, being religious (e.g.) isn't a good excuse for opposing gay marriage in 2008 (when a majority of society was in opposition to gay mariage, btw). Hypothetically, in 2025, maybe support for Israel's actions vis-a-vis Palestine will be widely considered the new apartheid. Similarly, what if in 10 years, we decide that a robust social welfare system in the US is a moral imperative (there are many who already feel that the way poverty is treated in this country is a huge moral failing)?

Does that mean all of my friends in 2015 who donate to and participate in organizations and rallies in support of Israel should be forever blacklisted from public positions? Should all the people you know who in 2015 are opposed to robust welfare/basic income and the accompanying tax increases be forbidden forever from rising to certain positions of authority in entirely-unrelated fields?

I don't necessarily really agree with your statement that a majority of society was opposed to gay marriage in 2008. But I think it is a valid point to say that what happened near 6-7 years ago should not necessarily count against you in the present.

_BUT_ (and I'm largely paraphrasing) when asked about this issue and same-sex marriage, Eich pretty much sidestepped the question and refused to answer it, citing how he has never discriminating against anyone. And to a lot of people that wasn't good enough of a response coming from a CEO of a company that prides itself on its diversity, especially when they also have gay employees.

Anyways my actual point about this originally was that Eich's situation doesn't really parallel the situation Sacco went through. For one, Eich's situation was pretty enclosed to the tech world, whereas Sacco was a worldwide trending topic that brought her a lot of unwanted attention. I also doubt Eich got called a whore, bitch, slut, etc much. And to say Eich was "bullied" in the way Sacco was bullied is laughable (Not saying you said it, although I think one of the ancestor posts mentioned it).

> I don't necessarily really agree with your statement that a majority of society was opposed to gay marriage in 2008.

I actually thought this was the least controversial part of my comment. This isn't just my anecdotal opinion, it's pretty well supported by polls if I'm not mistaken. Do you mind if I ask on what basis you think the opposite is true?

> when asked about this issue and same-sex marriage, Eich pretty much sidestepped the question and refused to answer it, citing how he has never discriminating against anyone. And to a lot of people that wasn't good enough of a response coming from a CEO of a company that prides itself on its diversity, especially when they also have gay employees.

This is a more compelling point actually. On the other hand, it's easy for me to imagine that he just (like me) failed to comprehend the level of lunacy he was facing and figured the best way to handle a manufactured controversy was to not give it more attention than necessary. On top of that, I feel like I'd also be much more morally inclined to emphasize that political views are irrelevant, rather than pander by saying "oh I've completely changed forever" and implicitly approving of the intolerance implied by political litmus tests (regardless of your location on the political spectrum).

> I also doubt Eich got called a whore, bitch, slut, etc much. And to say Eich was "bullied" in the way Sacco was bullied is laughable

As you said, it wasn't me who compared them. That being said, I don't think using the term "bullied" for either person is particularly unwarranted though.

Calling it hateful is just a political smear.

Living in a democracy I'm uneasy when I see large-scale mobs form to punish and intimidate people for participating in our political process in "the wrong way." Take note that I've been a long-time supporter of same-sex marriage, but seeing Eich get forced out by the group I always supported because they were so innocent and powerless made me reconsider some things.

You see he has donated to a hateful cause. You then tell him that this action has triggered extra scrutiny of his actions at work. You the. Scrutinise everything he has done at work, and all interactions in the workplace. As soon as he discriminates againt gay people in the workplace you fire him.

But he has already discriminated against them by donating to a party that wants to take away their rights. How can he then claim to take diversity seriously?

I kinda agree, a PR person of all people should be held accountable for making a terrible joke that comes off as racist.

The problem is just the reaction of a mob of arm chair vigilantes thinking they are each delivering some unique tiny bit of justice with their comments, emails or calls. It's a death by a thousand cuts, not to mention the nut-cases who send horrible threats of violence and worse.

It's obviously something ingrained in our DNA, it reminds me of nature documentaries - watching a group of apes attack one of their own who they perceive as weak.

[McMurphy:] "Is this the usual pro-cedure for these Group Ther'py shindigs? Bunch of chickens at a peckin' party?"

[…]

[Harding:]"A 'pecking party'? I fear your quaint down-home speech is wasted on me, my friend. I have not the slightest inclination what you're talking about."

"Why then, I'll just explain it to you." McMurphy raises his voice; though he doesn't look at the other Acutes listening behind him, it's them he's talking to. "The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peckin' at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it's their turn. And a few more gets spots and gets pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin' party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it-with chickens-is to clip blinders on them. So's they can't see."

great quote from a great movie. It's bizarre how much animal behavior we have in us when you look closely.

This is actually from the book, which is worth reading (also required reading, in some American high schools).

I'm not sure it goes back to the formation of our DNA. Or at least not in that way.

We're raised on stories of Abraham Lincoln and Rosa Parks and we idealize how important they were to society. Now as people leave childhood and begin facing their own complete lack of importance think they can join the social justice fight and simply by bullying people really be somebody. They'll spend hours a day in a rage at their keyboards while thinking what they're doing is really benefiting society.

Getting outraged politically is a quick and easy path to a social identity and group membership. That does make us sound a bit like apes....

I would certainly like the people who mobbed and bullied Justine Sacco to be held accountable for what they said, which unlike her innocent, easily-misunderstood comment was full of willful malice.

Yes.

You have to appreciate the difference between actionable speech and expressing an opinion.

Would you really say that a society where no one is ever held accountable for what they say is the alternative to what happened to Sacco?

Imagine if someone with a lot of twitter followers interpreted the statement you just made here as a veiled death threat, unleashing a raging mob against you, ultimately leading the utter destruction of your life as you knew it. Would you say that you were being held accountable for what you just said and that any society that did not do that to you had to be one where no one was being held accountable for anything they say?

Demanding that people should be held accountable for what they say is so generic that it allows for any kind of reaction to just about anything anyone could ever say. The islamists who killed the Charlie Hebdo caroonists could have said the exact same thing.

Proportionality is important.

Also, Sacco's case clearly shows that there are always lots of people out there who are waiting for an opportunity to bully others, regardless of how contrived and intellectually disingenuous the pretext may be. Portraying a joke about racism or race relations as a racist joke is just daft. I can't believe that many people honestly felt that Sacco was being racist. They just wanted to bully someone.

There's a spectrum of 'accountable' between being an unemployable pariah and being totally unaccountable which disorganized mass action cannot be properly calibrated for.

The "Mob" API has exactly one public method: start().

It doesn't return. You can't be sure if it worked.

And, most importantly, you don't have the ability to say "no, no, it started against the wrong person" or "okay, that's enough." It will run at its own speed, maybe finding a new target when the first one is destroyed.

An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit.

Maybe he shouldn't have participated in an offline bullying campaign against an entire segment of the population.

While FOSS developers share political beliefs relating to the benefits of sharing software, FOSS traditionally had a culture of putting unrelated politics to the side. Strategically, FOSS couldn't afford to be seen as partisan given that it already encountered resistance from people who viewed it as a suspicious, vaguely communist, movement.

Now that FOSS is established, and there are developers that have grown up with FOSS existing unchallenged in society, political agnosticism isn't seen as important.

In contemporary Western culture, ideology seems to be taking the place of religion in terms of regulating morality. Social media has been instrumental in this transition. We're now seeing the emergence of global, ideological tribes that can communicate in realtime. Those who have power within these tribes are largely untouchable within the sphere of social media: they have the power to direct followers to lobby against others for perceived abuses, yet the power they wield intimidates many who would criticize them for abuse of power.

While Foss should be to some degree apolitical, individual contributors should be allowed to express their political views. The politics and the software itself should be treated differently.

I argued politics with a lot of FOSS developers on Usenet in the early 90s. They weren't apolitical. And the internal politics in FOSS were often very highly charged and often bitter. The splits that created OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, Stallman's politics with FSF and GNU bleeding over into endless licensing flamewars on the LKML mailing list, etc.

You are either highly naive about FOSS or you've just defined all the vicious politics in FOSS as being just and righteous -- and that is exactly the justifications that the lynchmobs and their leaders in this article hold towards their victims as well.

There's a qualitative difference between making a joke, which probably had no bearing on her actual opinion or position on AIDS or Africa, and actively trying to deny rights to other people. It's not like she donated money to Stormfront.

The equivalent comparison to Eich would be if he made a joke ending with "... Oh wait, I'm not gay" or something.

(And wasn't a lot of the Mozilla thing really a disguised way at getting back at him for JavaScript?)

> The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit.

It's kind of weird to think that Brendan Eich is still active in the web standards community, even though he's been forced to leave Mozilla. A man without a company.

Given his past contributions to the web, it's unsurprising that he still participates and people listen to him.

The people who fought for Eich's departure like to downplay just how much knowledge he carries around in his head. I think deep down they're afraid to admit just how much damage they did to Mozilla, Firefox and the entire open source community. They still think they did a good thing.

What's something concrete that you think the entire open source community lost as a result of Eich no longer heading Mozilla?

Losing one of the most important people at one of the most important open source projects is a loss in and of itself. That was twenty years of experience and technical knowledge that walked out the door.

Losing one of the only people in a position to fight against DRM who had the will to do so is another blow. The end result as I see it is the social justice community gets a "victory", religious people at Mozilla learn they're not to take part in our political process, and those who were left gave up the fight against DRM. Not that they had a choice, how do you ride into battle short a CEO and a CTO, and while licking your wounds from a vicious boycott/smear campaign?

Firefox circa Eich on DRM: https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad-drm/

Firefox post boycott on DRM: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...

So basically without a company a person is nothing?

It would be a sad world if you needed commercial endorsement to be relevant about anything.

  It's essentially online bullying by people that want to 
  silence you for having an opinion that is different than 
  their own.

Do you see any breakthroughs coming in platforms and/or technologies, that tackle this problem, on the horizon ?

Stuff like that is analogous to threatening or killing cartoonists who mock Muhammad (that is, insanely extreme reactions to relatively innocuous actions). We just happen to agree with these cartoons, therefore we take the side of the cartoonists. The mindset described in this article (social justice bullying) is as much a hinderance to free speech as islamic extremism. But we are blind to it.

I find it difficult to believe you actually think that – it's not really a self-consistent viewpoint, given that what you describe as 'social justice bullying' is absolutely free speech.

What is a hinderance to freedom of speech is not the bullying itself, but the mindset behind it. If you can't make a foolish joke without having your entire life ruined and getting fired, then yes that is the very definition of lack of freedom of speech. Getting fired for a joke, come on? Action and reaction are completely disproportionate. But worry not, I will absorb the downvotes like a sponge for I know that my common sense has not gone missing yet.

I do agree that having one's life ruined over this sort of thing is disproportionate, and that's something worth talking about. But we've got to be careful not to overreact to this sort of thing, which just results in shouting matches.

Let's remember that it's one thing to 'make a foolish joke', and it's another thing to 'make a foolish joke in front of millions of people.' One of the issues here is the lack of understand that people have about the act of publishing, and I think we'd be better focusing on that.

As over the top as the internet lynch mob might have been, I don't think a private company opting to fire a PR director for badly misjudging a public communication falls into the same category as making blasphemy a capital crime.

Are you sure about 'relatively innocuous'? My impression was that any depiction was extraordinarily offensive to most Muslims, not just extremists. I don't think the cartoonists deserved to die, but I thought their intentions were to inflame in one way or another.

Comedians say much worse on a daily basis and rarely catch any flack. Are regular people not allowed to make jokes?

Comedians have a social context for their jokes -- the presumption of anyone looking at the content of what they say is to look for a second or ironic meaning first. Justine is just a normal person, so the presumption of the mob is that the literal meaning of what she says is what she meant to communicate.

There are a lot of people who are hungry enough to signal how righteous they are to their peers that they'll immediately jump to the least-charitable interpretation of anything anyone says, and Justine was their target for 24 hours.

That is my issue with this. Daniel Tosh makes sexist, racist, and rape jokes on a daily basis and people at large aren't up in arms threatening to strike if he visits their workplace. To me this says these psuedo-activists care more about picking on an easy target than actually preventing hurtful speech. Not to mention the hypocrisy of many of those tweets when they call her a bitch, or send her death threats.

I'll let another comedian, George Carlin, explain:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those words in and of themselves. They’re only words. It’s the context that counts. It’s the user. It’s the intention behind the words that makes them good or bad. The words are completely neutral. The words are innocent. I get tired of people talking about bad words and bad language.

Bullshit! It’s the context that makes them good or bad. The context. That makes them good or bad. For instance, you take the word “Nigger.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with the word “Nigger” in and of itself. It’s the racist asshole who’s using it that you ought to be concerned about. We don’t care when Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy say it.

Why? Because we know they’re not racist. They’re Niggers! Context. Context.

We don’t mind their context because we know they’re black.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pksx_IAHDE

In this case, people know the context of Daniel Tosh's words, therefore they don't mind. They minded here, because a Tweet has no context.

It's the same reason that SF gentrification articles come in waves on HN. There is a cause du jour, and it only lasts a little while until the new one.

Our culture, or lack thereof, is just unbelievable. If a comedian had made that joke, it likely would have been no problem for him (there would still have been some outrage no doubt), but people assume everything is so serious, even when there is no logical reason to assume so. What infuriates me is that the masses let idiots deny climate change and talk about how vaccines will give you autism without shaming them, yet they destroy people's lives for posting, let's face it, a funny joke. If you want to shame someone for being a scumbag, there are plenty of targets but no one is doing it. If you want to shame someone because you failed to understand the meaning of her statement, however, that seems to be the zeitgeist. Why go after a real target when there are innocent people out there who really cannot defend themselves and whose misery you can really revel in? The irony of the story of the woman who took the picture of the guy telling the joke and then got shamed herself is quite delicious in many ways.

Posting anything on the Internet, whether it's public or not (or rather, you think it's public or not) that you wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with the whole world is just stupid. Maybe people will realize this at some point. Hell, I'm worried about my home NAS that's not connected to the outside world, is behind two firewalls, and is encrypted. Of course, if it's that sensitive, it doesn't belong in any digital form.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt - mark twain

Interesting article, though I wonder why the title here on Hacker News is "How One Stupid Tweet Ruined Justine Sacco's Life" whereas the title on the actual article is "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life."

clickbait headline i assume.

It looks like the title was originally the former; probably a late change by a copyeditor.

NYT likes to tinker with titles. They don't change the urls as often, so if you look at the url you'll sometimes see the original title.

Humans are sexually dimorphic primates. Primates form status hierarchies spontaneously. Status is zero sum. Higher status males mate with the majority of females. Low status males do not reproduce at all.

We are descendants of 40% of males and 80% of females. As religious and legally enforced monogamy decline across all societies, we will see increasingly vicious status wars across all human societies.

This writer is double dipping for his status points, as not only did he specialize in attacking the status of others, but is now acting as the merciful lord who has chosen to forgive those sinful peasants. Clever.

Monogamy was an aberration and an affront to nature, because it forced average females to mate with average males, robbing them of their desire for the highest status male's genetic material. In the past, male resource provisioning was important, but the state has nullified that variable by providing for all.

Status reigns supreme. Defend yours at all costs. Oh, and the best defense is a great offense. Ah homo sapiens...such a fascinating species.

Uhh, what is the connection here? And how are you so sure that status wars did not happen as much, if only in different forms, during the days of "enforced monogamy"?

My mistake, I should have been more clear. The current "political correctness" paradigm along with all of its associated hate mobs is a ferocious status competition as a result of the unmet sexual and pair-bonding needs of singles.

Single males and females are different, in that females hold out for the absolute highest status man for as long as possible, whereas males try to poach any female who meets their minimum fertility requirements. Both end up frustrated as dimorphic sexes have different sexual optimization strategies which are impossible to satisfy simultaneously.

What's important to note is the psychological state of singleness, and its resulting anxiety, is far more damaging than the actual lack of intercourse. In the past, religious and social institutions attempted to prevent this by encouraging early marriage and enforcing it with strict penalties. In the past few decades, all of this has changed rapidly along with the development of effective contraception.

This confluence of factors has thus lead to fiercer competition for each sex as they double down on their strategies, both of which involve status as the main currency. Males attempt to hoard status, and females attempt to attract it. As such, we see far more ruthless status posturing and attacking, of which this article lists many examples.

I did not believe my comments to be controversial, as any cursory glance of the relevant scientific literature will reveal the mundane facts I've stated. However, it appears my statements trigger an immune response in a group of HN readers, for reasons that I can only guess involve discomfort with the somewhat disturbing reality of man's evolutionary origins and predispositions.

I commend you for asking a question rather than reflexively recoiling in disgust. I do believe we will have to confront our natures eventually. Running from the mirror rarely works long term.

I did find your original comment interesting, but wasn't sure about its relevance to this article. This comment is more clarifying, thanks.

I agree with your evopsych explanation. Political correctness is to do with status, as noted by Kristian at http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/the-economics-of-political-correc... but even he doesn't go so far as to connect it to sexual competition. Sexual competition, especially without enforced 1-on-1 pairings (e.g.: marriage of the past), does lead to conflict. Cases like that of Elliot Rodgers come to my mind.

However I'm not convinced that enforced monogamy has seen less conflict than modern times. Can you back this argument with statistics? For example, did crime rate increase? My feeling is that even in the good old days where 1-on-1 marriage was the norm, high-status males still surreptitiously poached females paired with lower-status males. Per certain writers even the Victorian Era was not immune to it.

Pinker suggests that violence has in fact declined over time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

There is a widely observed empirical correlation between out of wedlock births and poor outcomes for children, who grow to be dysfunctional adults. This is was the first article from google when I searched the terms [1]. An excerpt:

"However, results of the study conclude that compared with "traditional families," parents of fragile families are more likely to have become parents in their teens, more likely to have had children with other partners, more likely to be poor, suffer from depression, struggle with substance abuse, and to have been incarcerated."

Aggregate crime may have decreased, but it is because we are still in the unraveling phase of widespread monogamy. Once its vestiges have fully eroded, then we will see the results.

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lavar-young/children-out-of-we...

Wondering why no one came up with "I'm Justine Sacco"

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).

Outside of offending people, how exactly did her tweet impact anyone else?

Offending people who might have lost a close family member to AIDS you mean?

There's no use in trying to explain. I'm being downvoted to hell for trying to explain why racist jokes are not ok, with replies like "this is just an off-color joke" or "do you know what racism means?" . I'm pretty dissapointed in this community, been here for lots of years and thought that generally speaking people in here would be more open-minded. But the minute you start to explain why making jokes about one's race or incurable disease is not ok you realize you're in the wrong group.

It's a weird, weird world when "open minded" means "likes to participate in mob justice".

And if you understand the tweet, you'd understand the she was making fun of ditzy white girls who naively assume that white people can't get AIDS. It's a caricature of racism, not racism itself.

In all honesty, you did a really poor job explaining why racist jokes are bad. You're being downvoted because (1) you assume that her joke was racist, and (2) you assume that racist jokes are bad (without showing understanding or "open-mindedness" about people who think otherwise).

Personally, I disagree on both counts. I like offensive jokes of all kinds (I mean, if they're actually funny). Coming from a very homogeneous Central European country, I have never been on either side of oppression (other than being bullied in school for being weak, small, smart geek), so I definitely don't have your experience of being "hurt" by jokes, but your experience doesn't translate into a universally-applicable moral/rational argument that racist jokes are bad. However, even if I agreed with you and would personally dislike racist jokes, I would still strongly oppose restrictions or censorship on racist/offensive jokes, to avoid situations like the recent Charlie Hebdo attack.

How, exactly, did her tweet affect people?

...unless you standard for "affect" covers all communication. In which case, you're saying "People should pay for the sin of expressing an opinion or making a joke".

...and perhaps you are.

> How, exactly, did her tweet affect people?

Have you ever been the victim or racism? If not, let's say you're in an open group, you're of a certain nationality (let's call it X), and some other member of that group starts making racist or xenophobic jokes about your race/nationality.

By mistake my skin is white (so I've never been the victim of racist jokes/looks, even though my brother, whose skin is browner, has been a victim of said racist jokes), but being from a not-so-important-East-European country I've been the victim of xenophobic remarks/jokes coming from people "with the best intentions". They always, I mean always, hurt. It also hurts me why I have to explain on HN why racist jokes hurt people. I've been in this community for lots of years and never thought I'd see this day.

Could you point the racism out in this tweet?

> By mistake my skin is white (so I've never been the victim of racist jokes/looks ...

Are you serious?

That white people couldn't be victims of racism? That only white people can be racist? You've never met even just funny looks? Then you haven't been out to the world too much.

I'm a big, white European, and when I was in China, I could hear myself being referred to as "laowai" "or dabizi". I could have gotten mad, because yes indeed by nose is big by Chinese standards and this is a reference to my racial features, but I chose to carry on. The people mostly meant nothing bad. Even the ones that actually maybe thought bad of me - possibly associating me with Western colonialism, of which I or my country were quite innocent - did nothing bad to me, so I let it be.

When our family went to the zoo, we were looking at the pandas, and a hundred people were looking at us (Look! Three white kids!). Very slow looks. It may be a bit awkward, but needs to be tolerated. I was just as much in awe when I saw the first black person in my life.

But perhaps I can do this because there was nothing I could gain by acquiring a victim identity. I'll leave getting mad to a time when someone actually tries to insult me.

As a fellow Eastern European ... man up. Really. Taking offense is the stupidest thing to do.

She paid about a hundred thousand times over for that mistake. Is that fair? Is that justice? No, it's a mob lynching. This is indefensible.

How, exactly, did it affect other people?

It looked like a harmless joke to me. wtf is wrong with ppl.

Racist jokes are never harmless.

Please elaborate on the harm caused by her tweet.

Edit: Maybe I'm not being clear. What I mean is can you point to any harm done by her tweet besides hurt feelings?

Being publicly racist harms people towards which said racism is directed at. I honestly thought that was an established truth.

Except she wasn't being racist, she was being sarcastic about racism.

And in any case, no crime deserves the horrific public shaming she got.

Please point out the racism in her satire-laden joke about how america perceives the rest of the world?

Am I the only one that "got" what she was saying?

In an open and democratic society, free speech is a value that is foundationally the core value that underpins everything. Free speech is there to protect the offensive and inappropriate... not civil discourse.

Supporting an environment where it's acceptable to respond to some perceived slight (which changes over time) with an crazy overreacting mob isn't OK in an open society ever. You're very sensitive to racist statements... how do you feel 10 years from when the "offensive statement of the day" is an anti-war statement? Or a statement offensive to a particular religious doctrine?

History is littered with people who do awful things while believing that they are righteous. Nobody in colonial Massachusetts was pro-witch. Nobody in 1950 America was pro-communist.

Isn't taking about them freely(Joking included) the first step to addressing the issue?

Don't say Jehovah.

People get offended, you might think that's right, wrong or whatever but it happens. And you certainly wouldn't make that joke outside of your close circle of friends.

Mob justice mentality certainly sucks though, imagine someone simply inspects one of your tweets, rewrites it and posts it somewhere and says "hey this person's racist, call their employer #{employer-number}".

She's a victim because the consequences were completely out of proportion to her transgression.

Really? She mocked a whole nation, and used a disease that has killed over a million people as a joke in a public forum.

You're right, she should probably be executed for that joke. /s

Yes, exactly, as a joke. The amount of backlash she got is far greater than the atrocity of making a bad joke.

The joke was supposed to be on her ignorant statement not on the nation, the disease or the victims. Unfortunately, no one got the joke.

You should, in general, stay away from the internet -- especially twitter -- people make these joke things about "serious" stuff all the time.

Gotta thicken up that skin, friend.

She was being ironic - making fun of herself by pretending to be a ditzy, entitled white girl who though that she could never get AIDS. Unfortunately, in her absence, people took her literally and assumed she was serious.

She has plenty of reason to now explain it as being ironic, but we'll never know if that was her original intent, will we? Her other tweets from the same period strike me immature and mean-spirited.

So you choose to believe she meant she literally cannot get AIDS?

Come on.

My point is, it's natural for her to say afterwards that it was meant ironically now that the backlash has happened. Maybe she's just a jerk who got caught being a jerk.

My point is, either she was saying it ironically or she was saying it seriously. She can't possibly have said it seriously.

Was it a somewhat insensitive joke? Sure. But you can't take the statement at face value.

Since, we'll never know the context, better call her a racist, publicly shame her. and get her fired!

She publicly broadcasted something that was, at best and assuming one gives her the benefit of the doubt, extremely insensitive and in any case indicative that she is perhaps not the best choice to be a communications director.

If an accountant got caught stealing in her off hours should she expect to find herself still employed?

> She mocked a whole nation, and used a disease that has killed over a million people as a joke in a public forum.

Pssst...Africa is a continent, not a nation.

She was mocking racism, people confused it for racism. The reactionaries remind me of the people who wrecked this Banksy: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/01/banksy-m...

Exactly. I thought hacker news was a relatively smart crowd, but it seems there are people in this thread that don't even get that.

"Stop the planet. I want to get off."

I don't like the extremism behind the idea that we should fire someone from their job over a off-color joke which is intended for a small audience, but may be overheard accidentally by others.

That sort of absolutism of policing thought just doesn't end well, ever.

To translate it away from Twitter: imagine you're at a public space, such as a mall, and you happen to be walking by a table of people leaning together just as one makes a racist joke.

Is your response a) give them a sort of disgusted look and go on about your day or b) call everyone you know and repeat the joke to them, along with the location of the table in hopes you can whip up a mob of people to shout obscenities at them, continuing to follow them around for the day, and eventually form a mob outside of their office building, continuing to shout at them until their employer fires them?

Most of us would go with 'a' and not 'b', because we realize that what happened doesn't really fit the extreme response. It's interesting to me that people feel that more extreme response is okay, as long as they don't feel personally too involved with it (eg, they can shout remotely).

I'm not saying firing her was fair or unfair - the company has to respond to public reaction too. I'm saying how is Twitter the bad guy here.

> but may be overheard accidentally by others

There is nothing accidental about tweeting in public. If she wanted to limit the exposure, she could have used the "protected tweets" feature.

There's nothing accidental about being in public when you're at a table at the mall, either, and yet we accept that people make communications in such spaces, which because of the medium carry beyond their party, that were really only meant for their group. In the same sense that voices carry in a public space, Tweets can be seen by a larger group than was intended.

It's a sad state of affairs if our only option for having semi-open communications on the internet - things that friends of friends can see without having to sign up to a walled garden - is if we only say things that are acceptable to everyone possible, for fear of mobs semi-randomly forming, or worse, forming at the behest of a for-profit company driving the mob in a frenzy to get ad revenue (which is the case for times companies like Gawker have stirred the mob up).

Sounds like victim-blaming to me.

If only she wasn't wearing /that dress/ in public...

I think if you want to use the appropriate analogy, you have to include that it was fundamentally a public thing to do, even though she believed her audience tiny. Your analogy as presented gets confused because of the social conventions against eavesdropping, even in a public place. A tweet is fundamentally meant to be a broadcast to the world, not just your immediate followers.

Rather, imagine her shouting it out at a mall on a day when the mall is relatively empty. (So that she had reason to believe the audience tiny, but still broadcast it) Unfortunately for analogy-world Justine, a news crew was downstairs shooting B roll for background and she's there clearly visible and audible in the corner of the screen, and the clip got leaked. That's the analogous real-life situation.

I think the issue is that the response is disproportionate to the sin. Littering is socially undesirable but randomly executing 1 out of every 10,000 people who litter is probably excessive. In the same way, racist tweets are undesirable, but lynching randomly people who make them seems unproductive and does nothing more than fill people's want for something to self-righteous about.

If everyone was treated equally, no matter the platform, I might agree with you.

But, don't you think it's interesting that out of all the countless racist and sexist comments on twitter, that those who are chosen for pillory fit an obvious demographic pattern.

Eighth Amendment - and secondly, I can't say the "social media lynching" is right either. This has gone far & above reprimanding someone for racial language to full on schadenfreude and mob punishment, and I can't agree thats an appropriate response to anything.

Aren't all these Twitter sh*tstorms over within a few days, or in the worst case, weeks? People should just sit them out and not panic / call their lives ruined. Seems to work even for politicians.

Pax Dickinson is still unemployed a year later.

People's names become toxic. Note that the Donglegate guy wouldn't let his name be used, and another woman in the article wouldn't do a followup interview.

To be fair, Pax Dickinson wasn't one stupid tweet, it was a pattern of awful shit over years. At some point, it's not a careless lapse anymore, you're just a d-bag. A few examples:

"In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."

"aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"

"Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron."

And arguably the worst, for a freaking CTO:

"Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn."

Would you hire that guy to represent your company?

The first tweet, which seems to be the one that people reacted most strongly to, is pretty clearly a lampooning of Mel Gibson. I suspect most people missed that, though. It's distasteful, but it's not exactly Dickinson himself expressing racist, victim-blaming sentiments; it's a mockery of them.

The second is a pretty standard libertarian talking-point (which is more "personal responsibility rah rah rah" than "yay, starving poor people!"). The third I don't really get (but I don't really follow basketball), and the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"; the truth of the statement is debatable, but I do think it takes some willful effort to read that and be offended by it.

I think Dickinson made unwise choices in how he chose to tweet, but I also think the backlash he's suffered has been orders of magnitude worse than the offense. He has been made persona non grata to the point of being unemployable over a handful of ill-considered tweets - he's unemployable now because of the extent to which people have gone to associate him and anyone associated with him with racism, rape, and sexism - regardless of the reality of his actions.

On one hand, he's suffering the consequences of his decisions (see tweet #2 for some schadenfreude). On the other, because the internet loves a shitstorm, it seems that the magnitude of the consequences are way out of line with the original offense.

> the fourth I suspect you're misinterpreting as "Tech managers don't want to hire women", when I think it's more "Tech managers don't care about the gender of their developers"

You're giving that the most contorted, charitable reading possible. In your reading, the reference to a "unicorn" is nonsensical. I would argue the accurate reading is: "Tech managers don't spend time worrying about hiring talented women because [like unicorns] they are mythical and don't exist."

Now, the further implications behind that statement might be:

a) Talented female developers are rare--we need to make serious efforts to improve the educational pipeline and get more young girls interested in programming.

b) Talented female developers are rare, but it's not the tech industry's job to worry or care about that.

c) Talented female developers aren't rare, but [usually male] hiring managers are too blinded by sexism to recognize them.

> regardless of the reality of his actions.

That's the thing. We don't know the reality of his actions. Based only on his tweets (I don't know him personally), he certainly sounds like he might be the kind of guy who would discriminate in his hiring. He might not even do it consciously, he'd just think "Well, I only hire the best" and in his mind, "the best" does not include women.

If you take that tweet in isolation and read it as a comparison of female developers to unicorns, then sure, I can see how you arrive at that conclusion. I think it's a faulty conclusion, and I think that its faultiness is further illustrated by his response to the whole drama, in which he explicitly clarified his stance of female developers. My reading of it is based on what I know of him, which does not consist solely of a Valleywag article and four tweets.

You're exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem here; you took a tweet, extrapolated it into a full sum of a person, and then don't bother to establish any further context and have decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath based on a context-free reading of a one-sentence statement. That's great for feeling superior to people, but it's pretty awful for useful dialog.

> illustrated by his response to the whole drama, in which he explicitly clarified his stance of female developers.

I mean, obviously he's going to say that. I'm not sure how much stock you want to put into after-the-fact PR damage control. I think actions speak louder than words, and I'd reserve judgment before hearing from some of the women developers who he's hired (he has hired women, right?) about how he was to work under, what he was like as a boss (not as a co-founder).

You accuse me of "exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem" but I'm trying hard to be as neutral and generous as possible. I listed three possible implications of that tweet, only one of which is explicitly negative, and you claim I've "decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath". If anyone is guilty of twitter-like hyperbole in this conversation, it's you.

Well, there are both of these, in which the women who worked with him defend him (Julie Sommerville in particular):

http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/11/ladyboss/

http://www.amyvernon.net/glimpse/why-ive-joined-glimpse-labs...

If you didn't think that Dickinson was being a racist, misogynistic, victim-blaming rape apologist, why those tweets in particular? This whole discussion is happening in the implict context of the Valleywag article that touched this whole thing off, where those explicit accusations were made with those tweets as evidence - we aren't discussing this issue in a vacuum here. They're certainly in bad taste, but bad taste doesn't deserve the accusations that he's had thrown at him. You listed multiple implications of the tweet, but then called it "the worst" of a lot that include jokes with racial slurs about rape of a venerated religious figure, so it's pretty safe to infer that you aren't giving it any of the charitable readings; if you were, it wouldn't be anything worth mentioning!

My point in all of this, relevant to the original article, is that these sorts of accusations can have a profound and disproportionate impact on those affected, even if the truth is something else entirely. I think it's unfortunate that Dickinson was fired from BI because they couldn't afford to have the accusations against him associated with their brand (and note that it was the baggage that was the issue, not him actually being a misogynist to his employees or whatnot), but I don't think it's an unreasonable response - he made a bad choice in what he said, and he suffered the consequences of it. I do think it's unreasonable that he remains effectively unemployable because of the bogeyman that has been constructed around his name in which those tweets are trotted out with accusations of racism and sexism every time someone mentions him.

> why those tweets in particular?

Because those are the tweets that got him fired. Obviously!

Fine, let's say Pax Dickinson is a completely wonderful guy without a bigoted bone in his body.

He still showed monumentally bad judgment. I don't buy your premise that losing your C-level position (and being unable to find another one) after carrying on for years the way he did is such a "profound and disproportionate impact". He demonstrated repeatedly that he's not willing to comport himself in a professional way in public. I also dispute that he is "effectively unemployable". He can certainly go get a job at McDonalds, because he's demonstrated that he's unqualified to be a corporate executive.

Edit: After reading the links you sent, it seems like the women he's worked with don't have a problem with him. So maybe he's not an asshole, he just plays one on twitter.

Still, you've really shot your own argument in the foot here:

> Shevinsky told me just the other day that she was still a bit uncertain about Dickinson after returning to Glimpse. “I was hoping he wouldn’t blow his second chance, because a third chance would be a challenge.” Now he’s co-founder of a company with a strong female CEO and a strong female advisor

Tell me again about how he's "effectively unemployable" and has disproportionately had his career destroyed forever?

Yeah, he showed bad judgement. I'm not sure I agree that it was "monumentally bad". The fact of the matter is that he lost his job and has baggage that follows him around because people continue to perpetuate the Valleywag-constructed outrage, not because of actual behavioral sexism or racism (the accusations of which pretty rapidly evaporate upon closer inspection). It's not something that will blow over in a couple of weeks, because it's an enormous straw man that has taken on a life of its own at this point.

Regarding employability, you'll note that article is from Dec 2013. He's now gone from Glimpse.

> I also knew that I was holding Elissa back. I know my baggage was hurting the company. We were asked to insert clauses that would strip my equity if I “embarrassed” the company and it’s reasonable to assume that my presence as co-founder made other VCs shy away from us, which is heartbreaking to me because Elissa is fucking amazing and deserves better than that.

He further writes:

> My career has been irretrievably damaged. I’ll always have trouble finding a job. It used to be easy for me but even a year later I find that recruiters shy away and applications to jobs I’m well qualified for don’t result in a call back. I’m not worried, I know that with enough time I’ll find someone who doesn’t mind my notoriety given my skills, but I’ll always pay a very real price for this whole incident.

If he says it's still following him around, I'm inclined to believe him, because...well, he'd be the one to know.

"You're giving that the most contorted, charitable reading possible."

I don't think he is, but given you only have 140 characters on twitter, everyone should give "the the most contorted, charitable reading possible" unless you follow up with the person and get a clarification of their tweet. Hell, given autocorrect, you should do that even if you think it is plain.

Didn't he create a startup? If so, he is not unemployed.

He bowed out of that after 6 months, as I recall.

I'm saddened that Pax's work at Glimpse didn't help to redeem his reputation. Pax showed excellent judgment on social media for the entire time that he was my cofounder. And we did excellent work together (we consistently had 10 - 18% week over week traction, app had five star reviews, well known security experts pen tested our app and found it was well designed etc.)

For what it's worth, some VCs did want to fund Glimpse. We didn't follow up on that while Pax was on board, for various reasons. A significant A raise would likely have helped Pax rebrand positively in a mainstream way.

Pax is now publicly pro-gamer gate (as you can see on his Twitter feed and with his most recent startup ExposeCorrupt.) I understand why that would have an impact on marketability.

As much as we talk about diversity in technology, there are some ideas and some kind of people that are simply not welcome. I worry about this a bit because I think it hurts a lot of people, not just neo-reactionaries.

Also - Pax apologized and then spent over a year being an excellent citizen of the startup community and on social media. I worry about an ecosystem that is so unforgiving.

I believe that ostracizing people - without the possibility of giving them second chances - is ultimately bad for everyone. It takes folks who have messed up and disenfranchises them so that they no longer have a stake in their reputation and participation in the community.

HR has the ability to use Google before they hire you, as do clients. So while you and I might not remember this person's name, it's still infamous.

I think they article would more aptly have been titled, "How One Thoughtless Public Expression of Justine Sacco's Lack of Judgment and Racism Had Consequences." Really hard to feel sympathy for her.

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 to handle the consequences.

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

Here's what "should" have happened:

<public>: Hey, that's really racist.

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

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

I agree with you that there was an overreaction. But that's a risk each of us runs when we publish something via a public medium. Any time I want to publish something, whether it's a private SMS, a tweet, a comment on HN, or something else, I'm obliged to consider its content, and make a judgment call on whether it's appropriate. If I'm wrong, I have to deal with it.

Well, I think she knows that now. I guess you aren't the sort of person to ever make a bad judgement call in public. Like not even a single occasion.

I sure as hell have. Many times. And every time, no matter how much I hated it, I had to face the music and deal with the mess I had created, regardless of whether it was my original intent.

I was probably a tad harsh there. Sorry about that. I guess it's a matter of degree - she wrote something she thought was ironic which came across badly, but instead of getting a chance to face up to the music and explain her side, the entire Internet went insane and she lost her job.

It seems a little much.

> Really hard to feel sympathy for her.

I'm sorry you can't feel sympathy for her for the bad things that happened to her. None of us are perfect, we all act badly sometimes—but we're not comic book supervillains, either. Even bad people deserve sympathy when bad things happen to them.

Really? No sympathy? Did you read the article? Obviously what she said was inappropriate but there are very few people that should be dragged through the mud as roughly as she was. Especially over less than 140 characters.

Should she have lost her job? Yeah probably being in such a high profile position. But should she be reviled as an truly awful person when her only crime was an ill-conceived tweet? I don't think so personally, and it scares me that we are willing to judge and condemn people for so little.

> it scares me that we are willing to judge and condemn people for so little.

Me too! That's why I try my absolute best to exercise caution and be thoughtful about what I say in a public forum. I don't disagree that the reaction was overkill; but that's the way the world is, even if I think it's wrong.

How was her life ruined? She lost her job, then got a new one. Her life seems fine.

Did you even read the article?

- She was jobless for a period of time, and there's a lot of stress that comes with that.

- Her family seemed to be set on disowning her for tarnishing their name.

- She can't date without someone Googling her and most likely being turned off by what they find.

Turned off by what? A tweet ... unless for couple of million participants in the oppression olympics, for the sane people having said or done something offensive is not a big deal.

If so many people were offended on the internet, is it that big of a stretch that people in real life might be turned off too? Just because you or I don't think it's a big deal does not mean that others might share the same opinion. I could easily see how someone might be turned off, especially before actually meeting the person.

Actually yes. Internet is not real and is the place where everyone overreacts.

As long as she is above the hot/crazy line, she won't be turned down dating for such a petty "offence"

You do realize that a concept in HIMYM does not accurately apply in real life, right?

>After that, she left New York, going as far away as she could, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She flew there alone and got a volunteer job doing P.R. for an NGO working to reduce maternal-mortality rates.

Anyone for whom something even remotely resembling this can be said certainly has had a thick mat of privilege to land on, even if the experience were difficult, as it seems to have been.

At least logged into my Google account, if I type "Justine", it suggests "Sacco" as the top completion. It's not all that hyperbolic to say "ruined your life" when your first name is literally a global URI to the (perceived) worst thing you've ever done.

I once created a server-side app that would monitor where certain search terms showed up in google rankings, so you could monitor change over time.

The biggest challenge we faced was that google dramatically changes your search results based on who you are, and where you are.

My point is - Justine Sacco isn't even on the first page of Justines for me. Maybe google just thinks Sacco is the best Justine for you, but it's probably not as bad as a "global uri".

If you add pws=0 to your querystring, it'll search without personalization. Actually, there are other factors at play too [1], but that alone should work well enough.

1: http://moz.com/blog/face-off-4-ways-to-de-personalize-google

yeah, but the goal was to track how your ranking would appear to individual users. not to a hypothetical completely unpersonalized user with no geographic location.

> Her life seems fine.

I think you and I have very different definitions of what "fine" means.

Was it really just one stupid tweet? It looks like a lot more than one to me.

Articles like this lend credence to the occasionally heard wisdom "Don't post anything personal on the internet, ever." I tell people I think that society is moving beyond digging into people's lives for little infractions, since with so much social media, everyone is guilty, but apparently that's not true. Or at least, not true yet.

1) It's an offensive tweet. Whether you intend something to be offensive or not doesn't make it any less offensive.

2) It's very easy to pass off casual racism as a joke or a misunderstanding of the medium after it blows up in your face.

I totally agree. I was also surprised to see the author of the article defend the tweet as well.

>But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors.

Her comments that followed seemed to agree with your second point.

Even if we were to take the offensiveness of the tweet as a given, the reaction seems insanely disproportionate.

It's great to push back against casual racism, but I don't think anything is gained by turning it into a lottery where any given tweet has a one-in-a-million chance of provoking a national-scale, life-destroying burst of outrage, and the rest are ignored.

You can't control what other people find offensive, and you can't avoid offending other people. You can control your own reaction to what you find offensive.

That's a very simple way to look at human interactions and it doesn't give you a licensce to go around saying whatever you want.

In my experience, the people who find these things the most offensive are the people the barb is pointed at. Privileged white people--who have nothing better to do than run around worrying about what other people are thinking out loud, trying hard to make sure that the whole world is protected from harmful speech, but who do nothing about actually solving things like the AIDs problem in Africa--are exactly the target of these kinds of comments.

These comments call out and critique the people who only care about Africans when someone says something that can possibly be interpreted to be offensive to them. Of course, privileged white people then use the alleged racism as a shield to hide their own hypocrisy behind and make blanket statements to the effect that there is some universal, writ-in-stone definition of what's offensive.

Now that the mob has doled out justice and protected all the Africans from a menace like Saccio, they go back to Whole Foods after their yoga classes and continue right on not giving a damn about how shitty things are in Africa.

If you find that tweet offensive, perhaps you should pause for a moment and consider that maybe, just maybe, it feels that way to you because you were the intended target.

Someone finally said it! I have often remarked that much of the so-called anti-racism is in fact designed to keep a lid on actual racism itself. People are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

> It's an offensive tweet.

It was offensive to you. It also wasn't offensive to some other people. Offensiveness isn't an objective property; the fact that something offended you doesn't make it "an offensive thing".

And segregation wasn't offensive to most southern whites. Your counter argument is silly because you could use it to argue that nothing is offensive.

Nothing is offensive or inoffensive, in and of itself. A person is offended by it, or they aren't.

Offensiveness is a function with two inputs; it depends on both the thing and the person in question.

> And segregation wasn't offensive to most southern whites.

Does racial segregation offend you, then? If so what are you actually doing about it? Are you putting your kids in a diverse school? Are you encouraging them to date people from other races? Are you married to one currently? How much of your social circle, other than acquaintances, involve non-whites?

There is no way you are going to "fix" societal issues without demonstrating a resolution in your own life.

Everything is offensive to someone. In fact, the sentiment in these comments that a single bad joke on twitter should blow up publicly and cost someone their job I find disgusting. The trick is to not invoke mob justice every time you're offended by any little thing.

A bit off-topic but following similarity is noteworthy:

From this article:

>>> They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.”

This was year 1742.

From the web (http://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/raif-badawi-to-be-p...)

>>>HE IS brought before the crowd and whipped relentlessly 50 times with a long, hard cane.

This is year 2015.

But you can notice the similarity in punishments.

We need to understand that society in every country evolves over time at its own pace. This evolution can take centuries of time in some cases because societies has to understand and readjust peacefully as much as they can.

I guess American political leadership needs to understand and remember these parts of their history before pointing out and shaming/preaching other countries on human rights,intolerance...etc.

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