![]() “She got a new job after a year.” Nice people like us had effectively sentenced Justine Sacco to a year’s punishment for the crime of some poor phraseology in a tweet – as if some clunky wording had been a clue to her secret inner evil. “After a year,” I thought when I read that one. He sells carpets.) “That tweet didn’t ruin her life,” someone added. “I’m not too worried about her.” (Her father isn’t a billionaire. ![]() “Her dad is a billionaire,” someone replied. I’ve been keeping a diary of what happened next.Ĭondemnation began hesitantly at first, a little uncertain, like a consensus waiting to form: “The article did nothing but bring her back into the spotlight when we’d all moved on,” somebody tweeted. The chapter was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. I recounted her story in my book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Justine was fired, her reputation mangled. She became the worldwide number one trending topic that night: “We are about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch get fired, in real time, before she even knows she’s being fired”, and “Everyone go report this cunt and so on, for a total of 100,000 tweets. ![]() ![]() I’m white!” The joke was intended to mock her own bubble of privilege, but while she slept on the plane Twitter took control of her life and dismantled it. ![]() I n December 2013 a PR woman called Justine Sacco tweeted to her 170 Twitter followers: “Going to Africa. ![]()
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