He’s fired. Who’s next?
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Adria Richards was the one who tried to start a witch hunt by talking photos of the two individuals who were just minding their own business joking around.
Just imagine this. Think of all the jokes you share with your close ones in your private time, off the record. Say one day, a random person suddenly takes photo of you and declare you a racist, sexist, rapist etc for overhearing what's supposed offensive to them. No matter how harmless the joke is, the damage is done. You'll be branded as whatever the person says you are.
Is this the type of behavior we want to promote by saying this is just action? Think really carefully before you defend such action. It can really ruin lives.
Do you shame them back? Like, "EXCUSE ME, I WILL NOT SLEEP WITH YOU"
Do you ignore them?
Perhaps, do you challenge them in court with a slander/libel charge?
What is the appropriate response in dealing with people (well, mainly feminists) who do these attacks?
There's something to be said to not post things on Social Media. Unfortunately for the 2 guys at PyCon, even that would not have helped them, as it was posted on someone else's social media account. So, how does one challenge a he-said/she-said in the time of Youtube/Twitter judgements?
The appropriate response to Adria Richards' overreaction and subsequent public-shaming (which violates PyCon's code of conduct) -- and her continued insistence that she did the right thing -- is to remove her from the situation. Until she can own up to the fact that she escalated too far, she shouldn't be a "developer evangelist" at tech conferences, and the rest of us shouldn't trust her judgment when it comes to appropriate public behavior. (I don't think she should be unemployed, just that she shouldn't be working in a public-facing position.)
The appropriate response is, "Hey guys, your sex jokes are disrupting peoples' concentration. Can you quiet them please?" And if they don't, ask them to leave. We're all mature here, or should be.
But that all goes to naught when the hivemind on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and the like take hold. It doesn't matter if it's false. Doesn't matter if it's been photoshopped. All that matters is someone poked a stick in the hornet's nest, and the sting means you lose your job, your income, your name, and your way of life.
Absent any 4chan backlash or overreaction by the companies in question, it would have been two dudes cracking tasteless jokes and someone pointing out how she didn't think it was cool. You probably see that on Facebook every day.
The fact that anyone got fired over this is what made this moment infamous.
Now, maybe that was the right way to do it. Maybe it wasn't. And I don't know if she "tried to start a witch hunt." But she did put it into the public sphere. And people reacted.
Publicly shaming someone on twitter isn't trying to start a witch hunt? Maybe it wasn't her intention, but sending that tweet is a knew-or-should-have-known type of situation. I have 6 tweets to my name in 7 years, and even I know how these things go down. Someone innocently or "innocently" mugs for the camera about something they like/don't like and their followers overreact.
Publicly shaming someone on twitter isn't necessarily trying to start a witch hunt. Most tweets do not start a witch hunt and it can be quite difficult to predict in advance the size of the reaction to any particular set of comments. Furthermore someone who is regular tweeting and used to sharing inconsequential thoughts has been lulled into a sense of banality since they have many many tweets that don't provoke an over reaction.
"Trying", no. But Twitter is (and has been for a while) The Great Internet Outrage Machine, so I think someone with any level of Twitter chops at all would realize that any public shaming (especially on a hot button topic) would likely result in someone kicking off a witch hunt just because.
I don't think she was trying to start the fire, but she /did/ bring the matches.
edit: and just for clarification, I don't necessarily think her public shaming was wrong, but I do thing the resultant witch hunt was.
The wider you spread an issue, the less it remains under your control. Turning around and saying semi-privately "could you guys tone it down" means the issue can potentially be resolved immediately, with no fallout, and with nobody knowing beyond those who could already hear the initial comment. Bringing in a couple of conference officials means the issue can potentially be resolved after a short investigation, and that any issues that arise at that time can be de-escalated. Posting to your 9,000 twitter followers means there are 9,000 people all passing judgment in their own way, 9,000 people who have the opportunity to escalate the issue or spread it even wider. It's very hard, once you've put someone's photo and "this person is behaving badly" in front of an audience of thousands, to completely resolve the issue in everyones' minds. It may not have been intended to be a witch hunt, but it had all of the right elements to become one, and it didn't need to.
Adria was complaining on twitter about some sexist jerks. Those jerks are back to work and fine, and Adria is still unhireable for daring to complain about shitty behaviour.
As I recall it was a joke between two men about "forking" a male speaker's repo and the size of said speaker's "dongle." I'm not sure how that's sexist. Crass, yes. Sexist? Please inform me.
> Adria is still unhireable for daring to complain about shitty behaviour
Her job was basically a public relations role ("developer evangelist"), such an incident does a couple of things:
- Destroys any goodwill she had in the developer community.
- Shows that she's ineffective in dealing with public relations.
Also, in the middle of the incident she started using her employer's name to back her actions (e.g. she said that SendGrid "stands behind her)" and I'm pretty sure no one at the company gave her any approval to make such statements. That's another public relations no-no.
Also,
> Adria was complaining on twitter
This isn't exactly true.
1. One of the big reasons it blew up is that she turned it into a blog post on her personal blog.
2. She signed her blog post with "Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard" (though she later removed this from the post). (This Ars Technica article quotes the line[1]).
3. Several times she likened herself to Joan of Arc for making the Twitter post.
I'm not saying that she deserved to have her life ruined, but she had an active role in the initial push that gave this incident greater publicity.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-...
Friends don't let friends drink and talk to reporters.
That is some disingenuous and biased reporting. Many would say that Adria Richards wasn't fired because she stood up for what's right, but rather because she was defending what was wrong - her interpretation of the guys' joke, that is. (Not to mention the creepshot she took of the developers behind her and the public shaming she engaged in.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667
I think the thing that made people side with mr-hank over Adria Richards was that he came across as someone who would have responded well if she'd turned around and said "hey, can you guys tone down the innuendo?" whereas she came across as defending a mentality of rapid escalation. As one comment said, "It really is unfortunate that Adria didn't just reach out to you... you didn't intend harm; alas, it seems she did" (marden928)
There were also minor things -- Adria Richards had previously made a twitter joke about freaking out TSA agents by stuffing socks down one's pants, her playing Cards Against Humanity at the same event, her defending her decision [0] "based on the PyCon code of conduct" when PyCon's code of conduct would have had her privately approach PyCon officials and let them try to resolve the issue, and not publicly post a picture of the individuals in question. [EDIT] Not to mention her trying to use back channels to remove mr-hank's comment that he'd been fired. [/EDIT]
mr-hank being fired for being overheard saying something privately would be a great example for this article. Adria Richards' firing is an anti-example [1]. She sought the attention and continued to defend her overreactions, including a non-apology-apology -- and, furthermore, she was in a very public-facing position ("developer evangelist"). mr-hank was a run-of-the-mill employee saying something off the record that got back to the employer; Adria Richards was the opposite.
[0] subthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047
[1] SendGrid's explanation: http://sendgrid.com/blog/a-difficult-situation/
> Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise
> up on your back?” she asked me.
> “You felt fear?” I asked.
> “Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
> Which was why, she said, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took
> three photos.” She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said.
> Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third
> tweet was the [conference's] code of conduct.”
> “You talked about danger," I said. "What were you imagining might...?"
> “Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them
> and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she said.
> I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She
> had, after all, been in the middle of a tech conference with 800 bystanders.
> “Sure,” Adria replied. “And those people would probably be white and they
> would probably be male.”
[1] http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/books/7933/exclusive-extrac...
> “Sure,” Adria replied. “And those people would probably be white and they
> would probably be male.”
It's sad that people think being vulgar is funny.
It's sad that people get carried away with what's funny and feel they need to be cool.
It's sad that people are rearing to jump on anyone who is but a symbol of something the masses disprove of, again, mainly not out of being a good citizen, but out of trying to be cool. The defender of the faith.
It's sad that people's alcohol fueled idiocy -not crime,but idiocy, becomes public and has repercussions in real life.
It's sad these vigilantes one day will also make fools of themselves, this is inevitable, one can hope the pitchforks will not come out for them, but they probably will.
It's sad people and companies don't have the wherewithal to separate private from public lives. If I were to become an employer one day, what you say on your time is your province, not mine. When you're representing the company, that's different.
Maybe not a "crime" by the definition of the law, but a lot of things that aren't crimes, such as sexual harassment, are grounds for losing your job. If you display such behavior in public, you should be willing to face the consequences, especially if you work as a government (publicly-funded) employee.
> It's sad these vigilantes one day will also make fools of themselves, this is inevitable, one can hope the pitchforks will not come out for them, but they probably will.
I've heard this argument before. Despite what some people think, not everyone harbors racist, sexist, or otherwise wholly objectionable thoughts in the recesses of their mind and of those who do, certainly most of them know better than to spout such things to a public audience.
In other places people get accused of burning religious books. It's all puerile revenge, not really much to do with social justice. Sometimes social justice is a nice cover, when it coincides.
He, the vulgar firee, should sue the province for illegal sacking --unless he displayed similar behavior toward coworkers or customers.
I'll agree that "not everyone speaks such things publicly." The issue here is that jokes that are funny or at least "okay" in one context are incredibly offensive out of that context, and social media makes it easy for jokes to be taken out of context.
But everyone, everyone has something in their mind that someone else finds objectionable. This is human nature. Even if those thoughts are not voiced or acted on, they are still there. The internet is so large with so many different views that inevitably someone will offend someone else without meaning to; even views that one person does not consider "sexist" could be "sexist" to someone else.
People hate A, other people hate (not) A, and plenty of people on both sides hate those who don't pick a side.
In the end there is no stance that does not offend someone. So, I don't think we can use offending someone as a reasonable rule for anything.
I'm waiting to see their kid. They're so beautiful, maybe I want to fuck their kid, I don't know. I'm not saying I would kill a kid and fuck him, … (continued for another moment or two)
Why would that change anything? I assume these things would fall below the 'objectionable thoughts' umbrella in your list. Would I deserve to be attacked for that? Fired for that?
followed by
I wouldn't fuck a kid. I wouldn't do that. Maybe a dead kid. Who are you hurting? He's _dead_. Who are you hurting?What if you said a similar type comment, but on camera to a television reporter who decided to ask you a question to clarify the "joke" (remember that the general public does not consider this a joke, nor does it consider it funny), and you involved the reporter or their child in the joke (e.g. similar to the "vibrator" comment)?
But this thread and the article talk about other cases as well and I'd argue that the PyCon case was merely a private conversation that someone overheard. I'd expect to be able to say the lines above to a friend and bystanders have nothing to do with it.
What about the guy that had the racist blog? Would you be ok with that type of public internet behavior from your employee? Even if they identified themselves as your employee and had a picture online posing in front of the office?
In the FHRITP case, the man worked for a public (provincial government) organization, so I'm not surprised that there was outrage that someone who behaves in that way in public was on the public payroll.
There is a big difference between blurting out drunken nonsense and soberly, premeditated publishing under a personally identifiable account, especially if it is part of your job to be the public face of the company.
On-camera, being interviewed by a television reporter who was not hiding the fact that she was recording, and he was responding directly to her questions and under no obligation to answer. You consider that "anonymously"?!
Let me guess, he was drunk and thus should not be accountable for any of his actions.
If you were to record surreptitiously everything people said under all circumstances, you'd have a whole bunch of people to castigate and berate. More than you can imagine.
I don't need my employees to think like me, act like me, or or like any particular brand of "acceptable" as defined by me or the company. I do not need to know nor care if any of my employees thinks FHRITP is funny.
I absolutely _do_ expect all of them to not go on television and demonstrate this level of bad judgement. By extension, I would now have two issues: first of all I'd question what other bad judgement comes into play in that employee's work product, secondly I'd be aware that _my_ judgement now comes into play as the responsible hiring manager.
I'm extremely sensitive to separation of work and family life. I demand the same from my employer. But I am wise enough to know that no matter what I do in the privacy of my own home, once I take that on a television news broadcast, I am in effect representing anything and everything the viewing public can now associate me with, whether it be my cycling club, my church, my darts team, my family, or my employer. (I only have the last two of those five, I'm straining for examples as I don't go out much...)
In short, where the conversation seems to be "OMG corporate thought police" it is in fact "seriously, keep that to yourself".
noun: judgement - the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions.
The whole #FHRITP "meme" if you can call it that is a great example of how you really don't want adults behaving. And since their parents aren't around to teach them, we get employers (or schools) doing that.
Learning that all of your actions have consequences is a ritual of growing up. And the older you get, the bigger the consequences.
Either way, I have found very very few people who will never have spouted something magnanimously stupid at one occasion or other. Most of these people didn't "mean" it. Didn't outwardly believe such thing, though some did out of ignorance, or differing social contexts.
Still, I hold people should have the right to segregate public from private life. What does it matter to you if someone does not pay the taxes the should self report from internet commerce? That's not your business's business. Nor is it their business if someone is a religious bigot, or racial bigot, etc., outside of work. If the were a problem, you'd have lots of employees who'd fail. Whites and non whites, blacks and non blacks, male and female and other sexual genders.
Holding people to this "idiocy" standard, no doubt, would affect the least educated in "the proper received" way to communicate.
Maybe let's abolish heavy metal, rap, hip hop, rock, etc., and anyone who listens to those music genders because they are so misogynistic, anti authoritarian and generally promote bad thoughts through normalization of such.
I'm not sure I have this thought out well enough to write down but I'm going to try. I love the Internet, I love the Web. I love the new communications these technologies allow and empower. However, I have long been worried about the perceived anonymity of the Web, from both perspectives of (1) "hey you really shouldn't think you are anonymous" and (2) "wow, you are a complete moron when you think you're anonymous". I have also witnessed an inexorable degradation of personal content and personal speech on the Web, largely due (in my opinion) to this perceived anonymity.
Maybe it's my British upbringing, but I for one would welcome a few more people being held to account publicly for that which they say in public. For many of us, there existed a world before this one that was less generally rude, more consequential. As a child and a young man, I knew that the people around me might see me acting in a given unsociable manner and report to my parents/aunts/uncles/cousins/whomever. This seems to have been forgotten online.
I'm not certain how far to take this thought, but it seems to me that it wasn't all that long ago that in smaller, more defined communities, more people were similarly held to account by their community for their speech and actions. Our collective community has grown from village and town and city to worldwide, is this not perhaps simply the social mores and expectations finally beginning to catch up? If so, is that entirely a Bad Thing (TM)?
Could it, should it lead to a more polite, more respectful online community of humanity?
People can easily misidentify a person, and have the wrong one get the brunt. But mainly, all people should have the right to private time where they can hold and express unpopular views.
I've known lots of "progressives" who in private will produce quire rude comments on those who don't align with their world views. It's a kind of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy isn't the villain. The thought we know what's right and we're gonna learn them a lesson on the internet is the mob condition which is wrong.
This is the modern stockade and public shaming.
This is the scary part. Basically Big Brother is your source of income. Most employees are not compensated to be on-guard 24x7 and video edits, twitter size limits, and misreporting make matters worse.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - source disputed but very true these days.
Is the Twitter hate army going to fact check it? Hardly!
So again, I ask, how do you defend against these kinds of attacks?
For example the "Donglegate" incident I, to this day, don't feel like they said anything directly sexist or with sexist intent. They were making, admittedly lame/off-color, private jokes and were overheard. If I had heard these 2 guys I would have just ignored it if not finding "I'd fork his repo" a little funny (Really, we are going to crucify someone for making a slightly-dirty joke when we use sex to sell everything from bail bonds to web servers??? Where is the Godaddy outrage? Yes I know it exists but no one is losing their job over that AFAICT) and understanding the actual meaning of that statement. At this point I still see no fireable offence. What she did next, tweeting an image and getting them kicked out, was stupid on her part. She was in a dev relations position and by getting devs kicked out of a dev conference for joking amongst themselves she might as well have signed her pink slip. The developer should not have been fired from his job IMHO and I'm glad he has since found work.
This whole thing terrifies me, to know that a single off-color joke, drunken mistake, or similar in my off-duty time could cost me my job. I'll agree to that when I start getting paid 24/7...
I also think that what this fan did was not comparable to the PyCon incident as he went out of his way to make these comments (drunk or not) to the reporter while the PyCon dev's were talking privately and were overheard. That said we are setting a dangerous precedent here. Don't get me wrong "FHRITP" is terrible but the alternative is that we all start self-censoring everything we say for fear of it being misinterpreted or taken out of context. It's all well and good when we all agree on what's right/wrong but not too long ago supporting gay marriage and/or being gay could have the same argument made to fire someone "We are a company built on values and we cannot employ people who support something like gay marriage or the gay lifestyle". Today we might laugh at that or ready our pitchforks if it actually happened but 10-20 years ago? It could be viewed just as bad (if not worse) than FHRITP.
I'm terribly conflicted on the whole Brendan Eich situation. On one hand how can you lead a company (containing homosexuals) that promotes openness while having donated to stop those homosexuals from marrying? At the same time it wasn't like he directed Mozilla money to it (COUGH Chick-fil-a), it was his personal money. The issue I took was that he obviously hadn't changed his mind or he would have simply blogged about how he held those views at that time but had since revised his way of thinking and no longer stood by the decision to donate/support that cause. I was one of the many that called for him to be sacked and I felt sure it was the right thing to do and by and large still do, leadership is different than just any employee. If the president of my company comes out anti-gay then I'm probably going to start looking for a new job, if an employee does I don't assume the entire company feels that way and I'm going to ignore them and get on with my life. Now if they bring it up all the time, make it focal point of discussions, or actively campaign in the office for their views then I might take issue. So what I'm saying is I still think I was right because leadership is different than just any employee. But then it becomes "where do you draw the line?" is it just the CEO? Is it all senior management? There isn't a good line. Also the line of "representing the company" continues to blur further and further or I'd just say "If you are in a position that you obviously represent a company then you need to watch what you say and what personal views you display". For examples does a dev at a conference represent their company? I think it in part comes down to "did your company send/pay for you?" but at the same time these developers did not go into PR so why should we expect them to behave as such?
It's a very complicated topic and like I said, I'm very divided on it and truly I'm not sure what to think, I've asked way more questions than I've answered and at the end of the day I feel like making the "pornography argument": "I can't describe it but I know it when I see it" which I 100% understand is a cop out on top of it being a HUGELY biased to the person who "know's it when they see it".
Why would you say something really stupid like "FHRITP" to a reporter with a microphone? Or defend someone else saying that? Especially to a NEWS reporter?
Sure, blah blah blah, alcohol. If you're out of college and can't be drunk without saying some really monumentally stupid shit in a very public manner, that's worrisome. Are you going to act that way in front of a client or business partner if you go out drinking with them one night? Are you also going to say stupid shit like that at the company holiday party?
Admittedly some of these are out-of-context tweets or photos. That sucks to have your inside jokes taken out of context, for sure. At first, I think many of us internalize things like Twitter as "public-but-not-really", until things like this happen that remind us: If you don't intentionally make it private, social media like Twitter is VERY public. You probably wouldn't make that joke while giving a public speech - probably shouldn't make it on Twitter, unless you're extremely careful about the context.
For the same reason people yell or minimize the yelling of "baba booey baba booey howard stern's penis."
It injects vulgar childish nonsense into a framework that presents itself as straitlaced uptight and self-serious. The primary offense dealt is not sexist, it's narcissistic injury.
Which I guess proves my point even further - if you can't see the difference between the two and then decide to go on and vocalize this ignorance in front of a television reporter (rather than just keeping it contained to your social circle), maybe you shouldn't be in charge of anything important.
Well, that depends. There is a chance it could get laughed off (are you black and joking about athleticism, or did you roll up wearing a hood?). It rests on if the audience chooses to see what was said as racial or racist? Just like my previous post was largely about who interpreted FHRITP as sexist, vs just sexual.
if you can't see the difference between the two [...]
Of course you don't want someone that disagrees with you over X making decisions on Y and Z. They don't share your value system and perspective.
Everyone is going to draw their interpretations from different value systems, and place their boundaries on sexist/sexual and acceptable/unacceptable boundaries at different points. The conversations that result over these topics are largely rote and boring. Where someone finds their personal lines is going to correlated to the set of cable networks they watch.
I don't know if it really does in this case, because...
> are you black and joking about athleticism
To extend our metaphor, the guy in the article is not black. He's very white and making a joke about segregation. To a public audience. While drunk. Then he decides to slip in a little slavery joke (i.e. the "you're lucky he didn't put a vibrator in your ear" part).
Again, if an adult is unable to see why it's a dumb decision to make that joke to a public, anonymous audience, then that person probably shouldn't be allowed to make any important decisions. They're clearly severely lacking in situational awareness.
> Of course you don't want someone that disagrees with you over X making decisions on Y and Z... Everyone is going to draw their interpretations from different value systems...
Ah, the old moral relativism argument. I think we're done here if that's what it's coming down to. You're right: That is a boring conversation to have.
Simoes was fired for acting rudely on his personal time in a venue where such behavior is common.
Richards was fired for launching an unprovoked public attack against software developers. SendGrid was paying her to be there representing the company.
Both of the did act like assholes. He apologized, she refuses to do so.
Yet Gillis makes Richards out to be the victim.
Reading all the different articles, it's possible to see hints of how orchestrated the entire process was and how the same stories get pushed into different contexts to provide relevancy to different audiences.
Execution wise, all this took a fuckton of work by absolute professionals and I'd love to read a behind the scenes post-mortem of the work once it's completed. There's sure to be lessons from this campaign that would be valuable to anyone working in or needing PR.
PS: Please don't post a link to Paul Graham's submarine piece yet again. It's not a bad piece of writing but it's become the de facto piece on understanding PR which is all kinds of tragic. If the submarine piece is the best piece of writing you know of on PR, then it's likely you know almost nothing about the field and should refrain from commenting as if you do.
Justine Sacco wrote a remark criticizing racism, and got fired for appearing to be a racist.
As Cardinal Richelieu said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
"Sexist buffoonery cost Shawn Simoes his job. But you could lose yours for a lot less. Welcome to the creeping corporate takeover of our private lives."
It's not corporate takeover of our private lives. It's people choosing to make public what should never be public. That woman, Justine Saccos, said something stupid that might have been considered funny amongst a small group of friends. But to the whole world it made her look like a buffoon. (subsequent interviews she comes across as a reasonable person)
(the article is all over the place)
When I've tried to hire people I've been given summaries of their social media and I think it's a completely valid part of the hiring process. In my experience using things like facebook, twitter, (g+, orkut, friendster, etc), has more potential negatives than positives. People are always looking for negative things about other people on social media, whether it's stalking, hiring, or dating.
That said, I have used Facebook in the past as a corporate promotional tool, having interns take care of my personal Facebook page and the company's. I've never actually used Facebook myself though.
"That man" and "him".
That statement would be just as true without the "on social media" reference. People are no different on Facebook as they are in real life. They're worse on the likes of Twitter because they can hide behind a veil of anonymity, but the overwhelming majority of people are still pretty decent. Don't ignore the fact that hundreds of millions of social media posts are posted daily, and on a typical day none of them make headlines.
Agreed entirely
> If some people are stupid enough to make it public on social media -- well, they deserve their fates.
I disagree. I think we'd save a lot of collective energy if we stepped back for a second and asked if the stupidity displayed contained any actual hate. If the answer is "no" it's time slap a wrist, and move along.