Internet Mobs

A few days back, just before boarding her flight to Africa, Justine Sacco, the communications director for InterActiveCorp (IAC) tweeted:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

What happened next will make even warp speed seem like a crawl. “A mob with 140-character pitchforks” sprang up, as Nick Bilton described it. Her tweet “set off an avalanche of fury — on Twitter, on Facebook and in the news media across the globe”, as Jeff Bercovici put it.

12 hours later, IAC fired Sacco (12 hours was also the duration of her flight). That’s the pace of the Internet for you.

So many others tweet idiotic and offensive things. So why did Sacco evoke such a strong reaction? Mostly because she was not a nobody:

“Justine’s professional affiliation with billionaire Barry Diller and his well-known companies made her seem important, not just some random crank; a number of other ill-advised tweets provided fresh fodder and the outline of a caricature; her job as a communications professional lent the whole episode an irresistible irony.”

While the outrage and anger were justified, the online threats to rape, shoot, kill and torture her were not. So why did the reaction go so overboard? Mob mentality, says Tauriq Moosa:

“This default to hate, this automatic mockery and derision, needs to be viewed with the same hatred as Sacco’s tweet.”

Bilton points out the irony:

“Yet the people who threatened to rape and murder Ms. Sacco, who attacked her family and friends, aren’t held in contempt or fired from their jobs.”

Bercovici says part of the reason why people tweet such things is the very nature of Twitter. Or as Sacco herself told Bercovici:

“People seemed to like the tweets that were just a little bit risqué or outrageous.”

And because tweets are limited to 140 character lengths, “we leave out context that might make our meaning clear”. And because it is all real-time, “we shoot from the hip”.

As with any new communication medium, there is a learning curve, and as Bercovici notes:

“There will always be those of us who take the curve too fast and go plunging through the guardrail.”

Learning the medium aside, society might change and become more forgiving because, after all, as Bercovici says, making “a big stink of it each time would be mutually assured destruction”.