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.
"Stop the planet. I want to get off."
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).
> 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.
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).
If only she wasn't wearing /that dress/ in public...
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.
Gotta thicken up that skin, friend.
Come on.
Was it a somewhat insensitive joke? Sure. But you can't take the statement at face value.
If an accountant got caught stealing in her off hours should she expect to find herself still employed?
Pssst...Africa is a continent, not a nation.
Edit: Maybe I'm not being clear. What I mean is can you point to any harm done by her tweet besides hurt feelings?
And in any case, no crime deserves the horrific public shaming she got.
Am I the only one that "got" what she was saying?
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.
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}".
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.