How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life

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How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life

Postby admin » Wed Feb 25, 2015 2:25 am

HOW ONE STUPID TWEET BLEW UP JUSTINE SACCO'S LIFE
by Jon Ronson
February 12, 2015

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW B. MYERS. PROP STYLIST: SONIA RENTSCH.

As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel. There was one about a fellow passenger on the flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport:

“ ‘Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”


Then, during her layover at Heathrow:

“Chilly — cucumber sandwiches — bad teeth. Back in London!”


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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW B. MYERS. PROP STYLIST: SONIA RENTSCH.

And on Dec. 20, before the final leg of her trip to Cape Town:

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


She chuckled to herself as she pressed send on this last one, then wandered around Heathrow’s international terminal for half an hour, sporadically checking her phone. No one replied, which didn’t surprise her. She had only 170 Twitter followers.

Sacco boarded the plane. It was an 11-hour flight, so she slept. When the plane landed in Cape Town and was taxiing on the runway, she turned on her phone. Right away, she got a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school: “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.” Sacco looked at it, baffled.

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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW B. MYERS. PROP STYLIST: SONIA RENTSCH.

Then another text: “You need to call me immediately.” It was from her best friend, Hannah. Then her phone exploded with more texts and alerts. And then it rang. It was Hannah. “You’re the No. 1 worldwide trend on Twitter right now,” she said.

Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever.” And then one from her employer, IAC, the corporate owner of The Daily Beast, OKCupid and Vimeo: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.” The anger soon turned to excitement: “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail” and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”

The furor over Sacco’s tweet had become not just an ideological crusade against her perceived bigotry but also a form of idle entertainment. Her complete ignorance of her predicament for those 11 hours lent the episode both dramatic irony and a pleasing narrative arc. 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. Can’t look away. Can’t leave” and “Right, is there no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, Twitter! I’d like pictures #HasJustineLandedYet.”

A Twitter user did indeed go to the airport to tweet her arrival. He took her photograph and posted it online. “Yup,” he wrote, “@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town International. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.”

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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW B. MYERS. PROP STYLIST: SONIA RENTSCH.

By the time Sacco had touched down, tens of thousands of angry tweets had been sent in response to her joke. Hannah, meanwhile, frantically deleted her friend’s tweet and her account — Sacco didn’t want to look — but it was far too late. “Sorry @JustineSacco,” wrote one Twitter user, “your tweet lives on forever.”

In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it. The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

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

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. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.

One person I met was Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who posed for a photograph while mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. Stone had stood next to the sign, which asks for “Silence and Respect,” pretending to scream and flip the bird. She and her co-worker Jamie, who posted the picture on Facebook, had a running joke about disobeying signs — smoking in front of No Smoking signs, for example — and documenting it. But shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead. Worse, Jamie didn’t realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public.

Four weeks later, Stone and Jamie were out celebrating Jamie’s birthday when their phones started vibrating repeatedly. Someone had found the photo and brought it to the attention of hordes of online strangers. Soon there was a wildly popular “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page. The next morning, there were news cameras outside her home; when she showed up to her job, at a program for developmentally disabled adults, she was told to hand over her keys. (“After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client,” read one of the thousands of Facebook messages denouncing her. “Woman needs help.”) She barely left home for the year that followed, racked by PTSD, depression and insomnia. “I didn’t want to be seen by anyone,” she told me last March at her home in Plymouth, Mass. “I didn’t want people looking at me.”

Instead, Stone spent her days online, watching others just like her get turned upon. In particular she felt for “that girl at Halloween who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim. I felt so terrible for her.” She meant Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, who posted a photo of herself in her Halloween costume on Twitter. Lynch wore a running outfit and had smeared her face, arms and legs with fake blood. After an actual victim of the Boston Marathon bombing tweeted at her, “You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died,” people unearthed Lynch’s personal information and sent her and her friends threatening messages. Lynch was reportedly let go from her job as well.

I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif., when a stupid joke popped into his head. It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles. He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me. “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle. . . . It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”

Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph. He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture. It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming.

The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it. She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. Two days later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired.

“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” he told me. (Like Stone and Sacco, he had never before talked on the record about what happened to him. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further damaging his career.) “I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears, but” — he paused — “when I got in the car with my wife I just. . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”

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. Someone tweeted Richards’s home address along with a photograph of a beheaded woman with duct tape over her mouth. Fearing for her life, she left her home, sleeping on friends’ couches for the remainder of the year.

Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone had launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if Richards was fired. That same day she was publicly let go.

“I cried a lot during this time, journaled and escaped by watching movies,” she later said to me in an email. “SendGrid threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”

Late one afternoon last year, I met Justine Sacco in New York, at a restaurant in Chelsea called Cookshop. Dressed in rather chic business attire, Sacco ordered a glass of white wine. Just three weeks had passed since her trip to Africa, and she was still a person of interest to the media. Websites had already ransacked her Twitter feed for more horrors. (For example, “I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night,” from 2012, was unearthed by BuzzFeed in the article “16 Tweets Justine Sacco Regrets.”) A New York Post photographer had been following her to the gym.

“Only an insane person would think that white people don’t get AIDS,” she told me. It was about the first thing she said to me when we sat down.

Sacco had been three hours or so into her flight when retweets of her joke began to overwhelm my Twitter feed. I could understand why some people found it offensive. Read literally, she said that white people don’t get AIDS, but it seems doubtful many interpreted it that way. More likely it was her apparently gleeful flaunting of her privilege that angered people. 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. Sacco, like Stone, had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?

“To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.” (She would later write me an email to elaborate on this point. “Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. 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.”)

I would be the only person she spoke to on the record about what happened to her, she said. It was just too harrowing — and “as a publicist,” inadvisable — but she felt it was necessary, to show how “crazy” her situation was, how her punishment simply didn’t fit the crime.

“I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours,” she told me. “It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are.” She released an apology statement and cut short her vacation. Workers were threatening to strike at the hotels she had booked if she showed up. She was told no one could guarantee her safety.

Her extended family in South Africa were African National Congress supporters — the party of Nelson Mandela. They were longtime activists for racial equality. When Justine arrived at the family home from the airport, one of the first things her aunt said to her was: “This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.”

As she told me this, Sacco started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to improve the mood. I told her that “sometimes, things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense.”

“Wow,” she said. She dried her eyes. “Of all the things I could have been in society’s collective consciousness, it never struck me that I’d end up a brutal nadir.”

She glanced at her watch. It was nearly 6 p.m. The reason she wanted to meet me at this restaurant, and that she was wearing her work clothes, was that it was only a few blocks away from her office. At 6, she was due in there to clean out her desk.

“All of a sudden you don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” she said. “If I don’t start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself.”

The restaurant’s manager approached our table. She sat down next to Sacco, fixed her with a look and said something in such a low volume I couldn’t hear it, only Sacco’s reply: “Oh, you think I’m going to be grateful for this?”

We agreed to meet again, but not for several months. She was determined to prove that she could turn her life around. “I can’t just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself,” she said. “I’m going to come back.”

After she left, Sacco later told me, she got only as far as the lobby of her office building before she broke down crying.

A few days after meeting Sacco, I took a trip up to the Massachusetts Archives in Boston. I wanted to learn about the last era of American history when public shaming was a common form of punishment, so I was seeking out court transcripts from the 18th and early 19th centuries. I had assumed that the demise of public punishments was caused by the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual, I thought, because a person in the stocks could just lose himself or herself in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Modernity had diminished shame’s power to shame — or so I assumed.

I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to scroll slowly through the archives. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. I scrolled faster, finally reaching an account of an early Colonial-era shaming.

On July 15, 1742, a woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, had been found “naked in bed with one John Russell.” They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.” Abigail was appealing the ruling, but it wasn’t the whipping itself she wished to avoid. She was begging the judge to let her be whipped early, before the town awoke. “If your honor pleases,” she wrote, “take some pity on me for my dear children who cannot help their unfortunate mother’s failings.”

There was no record as to whether the judge consented to her plea, but I found a number of clips that offered clues as to why she might have requested private punishment. In a sermon, the Rev. Nathan Strong, of Hartford, Conn., entreated his flock to be less exuberant at executions. “Go not to that place of horror with elevated spirits and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there!” Some papers published scathing reviews when public punishments were deemed too lenient by the crowd: “Suppressed remarks . . . were expressed by large numbers,” reported Delaware’s Wilmington Daily Commercial of a disappointing 1873 whipping. “Many were heard to say that the punishment was a farce. . . . Drunken fights and rows followed in rapid succession.”

The movement against public shaming had gained momentum in 1787, when Benjamin Rush, a physician in Philadelphia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote a paper calling for its demise — the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” he wrote. “It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.”

The pillory and whippings were abolished at the federal level in 1839, although Delaware kept the pillory until 1905 and whippings until 1972. An 1867 editorial in The Times excoriated the state for its obstinacy. “If [the convicted person] had previously existing in his bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. . . . The boy of 18 who is whipped at New Castle for larceny is in nine cases out of 10 ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.”

At the archives, I found no evidence that punitive shaming fell out of fashion as a result of newfound anonymity. But I did find plenty of people from centuries past bemoaning the outsize cruelty of the practice, warning that well-meaning people, in a crowd, often take punishment too far.

It’s possible that Sacco’s fate would have been different had an anonymous tip not led a writer named Sam Biddle to the offending tweet. Biddle was then the editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s tech-industry blog. He retweeted it to his 15,000 followers and eventually posted it on Valleywag, accompanied by the headline, “And Now, a Funny Holiday Joke From IAC’s P.R. Boss.”

In January 2014, I received an email from Biddle, explaining his reasoning. “The fact that she was a P.R. chief made it delicious,” he wrote. “It’s satisfying to be able to say, ‘O.K., let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.’ And it did. I’d do it again.” Biddle said he was surprised to see how quickly her life was upended, however. “I never wake up and hope I [get someone fired] that day — and certainly never hope to ruin anyone’s life.” Still, he ended his email by saying that he had a feeling she’d be “fine eventually, if not already.”

He added: “Everyone’s attention span is so short. They’ll be mad about something new today.”

Four months after we first met, Justine Sacco made good on her promise. We met for lunch at a French bistro downtown. I told her what Biddle had said — about how she was probably fine now. I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib, but like everyone who participates in mass online destruction, uninterested in learning that it comes with a cost.

“Well, I’m not fine yet,” Sacco said to me. “I had a great career, and I loved my job, and it was taken away from me, and there was a lot of glory in that. Everybody else was very happy about that.”

Sacco pushed her food around on her plate, and let me in on one of the hidden costs of her experience. “I’m single; so it’s not like I can date, because we Google everyone we might date,” she said. “That’s been taken away from me too.” She was down, but I did notice one positive change in her. When I first met her, she talked about the shame she had brought on her family. But she no longer felt that way. Instead, she said, she just felt personally humiliated.

Biddle was almost right about one thing: Sacco did get a job offer right away. But it was an odd one, from the owner of a Florida yachting company. “He said: ‘I saw what happened to you. I’m fully on your side,’ ” she told me. Sacco knew nothing about yachts, and she questioned his motives. (“Was he a crazy person who thinks white people can’t get AIDS?”) Eventually she turned him down.

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. “It was fantastic,” she said. She was on her own, and she was working. If she was going to be made to suffer for a joke, she figured she should get something out of it. “I never would have lived in Addis Ababa for a month otherwise,” she told me. She was struck by how different life was there. Rural areas had only intermittent power and no running water or Internet. Even the capital, she said, had few street names or house addresses.

Addis Ababa was great for a month, but she knew going in that she would not be there long. She was a New York City person. Sacco is nervy and sassy and sort of debonair. And so she returned to work at Hot or Not, which had been a popular site for rating strangers’ looks on the pre-social Internet and was reinventing itself as a dating app.

But despite her near invisibility on social media, she was still ridiculed and demonized across the Internet. Biddle wrote a Valleywag post after she returned to the work force: “Sacco, who apparently spent the last month hiding in Ethiopia after infuriating our species with an idiotic AIDS joke, is now a ‘marketing and promotion’ director at Hot or Not.”

“How perfect!” he wrote. “Two lousy has-beens, gunning for a comeback together.”

Sacco felt this couldn’t go on, so six weeks after our lunch, she invited Biddle out for a dinner and drinks. Afterward, she sent me an email. “I think he has some real guilt about the issue,” she wrote. “Not that he’s retracted anything.” (Months later, Biddle would find himself at the wrong end of the Internet shame machine for tweeting a joke of his own: “Bring Back Bullying.” On the one-year anniversary of the Sacco episode, he published a public apology to her on Gawker.)

Recently, I wrote to Sacco to tell her I was putting her story in The Times, and I asked her to meet me one final time to update me on her life. Her response was speedy. “No way.” She explained that she had a new job in communications, though she wouldn’t say where. She said, “Anything that puts the spotlight on me is a negative.”

It was a profound reversal for Sacco. When I first met her, she was desperate to tell the tens of thousands of people who tore her apart how they had wronged her and to repair what remained of her public persona. But perhaps she had now come to understand that her shaming wasn’t really about her at all. Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own — a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.

Join the conversation about this story and others by following us @NYTmag.

Correction: February 19, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the time frame in which Adria Richards, an employee at SendGrid, a Colorado-based email delivery service, was let go from the company. She was terminated the same day a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) was launched against SendGrid’s website, not the day after.

Jon Ronson is the author of many nonfiction books, including “The Psychopath Test,” “Lost at Sea,” “Them: Adventures With Extremists” and “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” This article is adapted from the book “So You've Been Publicly Shamed,” to be published in March from Riverhead.
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Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life

Postby admin » Wed Feb 25, 2015 4:32 am

Justine Sacco Is Good at Her Job, and How I Came To Peace With Her
by Sam Biddle
12/20/14

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


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Image by Jim Cooke

The internet is a mountain, and if you climb that mountain, waiting for you at the top will be the person with whom you need to make peace. I climbed my mountain and a woman named Justine Sacco was there.

One year ago today, Justine Sacco was the global head of communications for the digital media conglomerate IAC. Getting on a plane for a trip to South Africa, to visit family, she published a tweet: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm White!"

At the time, I was editing Valleywag, Gawker's tech-industry blog. As soon as I saw the tweet, I posted it. I barely needed to write anything to go with it: This woman's job was carefully managing the words of a large tech-media conglomerate, and she'd worded something terribly.

It was a natural post. Twitter disasters are the quickest source of outrage, and outrage is traffic. I didn't think about whether or not I might be ruining Sacco's life. The tweet was a bad tweet, and seeing it would make people feel good and angry—a simple social and emotional transaction that had happened before and would happen again and again. The minimal post set off a 48-hour paroxysm of fury, an eruption of internet vindictiveness.

Sacco was in the air, unable to realize what she'd done or apologize it, and as the tweet garnered retweets and faves and the first drafts of think pieces, eager observers tracked her flight across the Atlantic. A hashtag trended: #HasJustineLandedYet. Several hours later she emerged into an unfathomable modern multimedia hell-nightmare and was quickly and summarily fired.

Nearly as quickly, the righteous Twitter mob moved on. There were other social media morons and marketing employees to hold accountable: Trayvon Martin blackface costumes (338,000 page views), ill-conceived brand tweets, the Auschwitz selfie teen (179,000 page views), racist radio hosts (291,000 page views), and so on.

Some of them were pernicious, some were stupid. Each time, each slap, was the same: If we could only put one more wrongheaded head on a pike, humiliate one more bigoted sorority girl or ignorant Floridian, we could heal this world. Each, next outrage post was the one that would make a difference.

Sacco-related hashtags went dark; blog posts were pushed down the page. The "Justine Sacco" of headlines and links faded into a blur with those racist 12 Years a Slave posters. Remember those? Of course not—and I didn't think much about Justine Sacco after that, either.

Six months later, I got an email. The subject was "Justine Sacco here." I almost had a stroke. Yes, there was a period after "here." Justine Sacco, here. Where? Right here—fuck. There was a ghost speaking directly into my Gmail inbox.

Was Justine Sacco typing to me from the grave? Was she typing from the bottom of a sewage pit? Had she lost everything? I realized suddenly that I felt very guilty about having—I assumed—destroyed another person on what was basically a professional whim. It had only taken half a year to kick in!

She was asking me if I'd be willing to meet for drinks. Putting aside worries of a murder-suicide, I said OK.

Not long after, the two of us shared dinner and margaritas, and I looked up at a face I'd only ever seen on a screen, tweeted and repeated by people who hated that face. I've never been star-struck, but my stomach knotted. Justine Sacco had a face that wasn't made up of pixels.

And, as it turned out, Justine Sacco is not a racist monster. She is a kind and canny woman who threw back cocktails, ate delicately, and spoke expertly about software. She was friendly, very funny, instantly relatable, and very plainly not a cruel sicko. We talked about college, jobs, home, family, and work—she'd recently landed on her feet as the communications boss for a small New York startup, and seemed to be happily rebuilding her career.

I was severely nervous throughout. It was like a first date, only it's not a date and also the person has a really good reason to hate you, and has had half a year to stew over that reason. For about an hour, we talked about anything else; we gossiped about our respective industries, her treatment in the press, and cheery career goals.

Maybe it was the third drink, or months of piling, compressed guilt, but midway through our meal I had to say sorry. An apology to Justine Sacco had been itching at my throat from the moment I saw her. I was afraid to say it—because who knows what else I should be sorry for?—but the itching was worse.

So I did it: I said I was sorry posting her tweet had teleported her into a world of media scrutiny and misery. I'd tried not admitting even to myself that I was sorry, toying with various exculpatory principles like a child's wooden blocks: posting her tweet had been media criticism, industry watchdoggery, social justice, karma.

I'd managed to half-convince myself what I'd done was right, but then I saw her face. How often do you get to say you're sorry to someone you ruined on the internet? I was in a daze.

"I was so naive," she said. She had never expected the tweet would be interpreted the way it was.

To her, the entire thing had been plain:

She was flying to South Africa, where she has family.

This trip, she explained, made her think about how so many westerners consider HIV/AIDS an "African thing," when of course there is a domestic AIDS epidemic.

Her tweet was supposed to mimic—and mock—what an actual racist, ignorant person would say.

Ergo, tweeting that thought would be an ironic statement, a joke, the opposite of what it seemed to say. Not knowing anything about her, I had taken its cluelessness at face value, and hundreds of thousands of people had done the same—instantly hating her because it's easy and thrilling to hate a stranger online.

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KiTana@_iam_mscarter: Justine Life is ruined what a dumb bitch
Rod TBGWT@rodimusprime: Holy shit RT WELCOME TO SOUTH AFRICA AND BLACK TWITTER BITCH!
Sophie Caley@sophiecaley: So long, racist bitch.
daniel_thecuban@daniel_thecuban: Where oh where is this vile bitch?
JunesiPhone@junesiphone: and that's how an ignorant bitch insulted Africa .. I say we hang her!
The Sassi Wench@sassiwench: IAC neds to fire this racist, stupid bitch!
#Puzzles@youngfamous_mj: I repeat! Fuck #JustineSacco who gives a damn about your white ass bitch
Dub Daniels@ckdub: i ri evrytime RT WELCOME TO SOUTH AFRICA AND BLACK TWITTER BITCH!


Sacco was not depressed, or even slightly bitter, and said she bore no resentment towards me at all. She'd only wanted to meet up, she explained, because I owed it to her. I should get to know her before ever writing about her again. There was no catch, no setup, no tricks—she just wanted me to consider her a person, and not a meme.

How could someone who tweeted something so stupid be so emotionally perfected? How could she not hate me? She was serene, decent, and despite the continued existence of Twitter, hopeful: "Someday you'll Google me and my LinkedIn will be the first thing that pops up." That part was heartbreaking.

Justine and I stayed in touch, mostly through email and IM, and I consider her a friend. I never thought I'd write (or think much) about her again.

And then, this past October, while sitting distracted and tired at my desk, riffing on the twisted online movement against "social justice warriors" in video games, I wrote a tweet of my own: "Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we've known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission."

Impulsively, and sort of laughing to myself, I added another, saying that we should "Bring Back Bullying" to counter this rising tide of web militancy. It was insincere and over in an instant, to me at least.

But within a few hours, thanks in part to my similarly trigger-happy and trolly editor Max Read, I watched a whirlpool of spleen and choler swelling till it had sucked in most of my energy and attention, along with that of many of my coworkers. Hundreds of people tweeted or emailed me or my editors; blogs and minor internet personalities sprang into action to challenge me. Their demands started with my firing and escalated from there.

Many of these people were disingenuously seizing on my tweet to direct a right-wing campaign against my employers. But it seemed clear that some portion of the outraged mass I was now facing genuinely believed that I was advocating for middle school-style bullying.

How could anyone have misread my irony? It made no sense. The question How could anyone think I was seriously condoning bullying? was exactly as clear in my mind as How could anyone think I was seriously making light of AIDS in Africa? had been in Sacco's.

Structurally, we had made the same sort of joke: Here is what a truly horrible person—a person whose attitudes were entirely opposite from mine and those of the people who know me—would say. You could argue that hers was worse, conjuring a real and pernicious attitude that had resulted in systemic historical oppression and mass death. But the impulse was the same, and so were the reactions.

The internet became unbearable, unreadable for me, a constant ringing and roaring in my ear. There was no point in defending myself; any attempt at explaining my joke would cause those who were gleefully offended by it to redouble their efforts. GamerGate had turned itself into something more despicable and retrograde than I'd ever intended to point out with my little joke, but there was no one who wanted to listen to that. There wasn't any conversation to be had, no objective to reach or conclusion to draw. Smashing a pinata isn't just for the candy—it feels great to swing your arms and feel a thud, and so they'd clobber me no matter what, even when it was clear there wasn't much sport left in it for GamerGate, either.

Twitter is a fast machine that almost begs for misunderstanding and misconstrual—deliberate misreading is its lubricant. The same flatness of affect that can make it such a weird and funny place also makes it a tricky and dangerous one. Jokes are complicated, context is hard. Rage is easy.

That's been a boon for social media platforms and digital publishers, as any blogger will tell you.

But in 2014 context means basically nil, anyway. Every time I say something online, there's a significant chance it will either be interpreted by committee on Twitter, or stumbled over by post-lobotomy brand managers. If, instead of making a facetious statement about bullying, I'd said "Gamergate is a group of shit people," they would've claimed I was making light of feces-borne illness fatalities. Does Adobe stand against dysentery?

I've been asked many times if I would post Sacco's tweet all over again, and I still don't know how to answer. Would I post the tweet again? Sure. Would I post the tweet knowing it's going to cause an incredibly disproportionate personal disaster for Justine Sacco? No. Would I post the tweet knowing it could happen? Now we're in dicey territory, and I'm thinking of ghosts: If you had a face-to-face sit-down with all of the people you've posted about, how many of THOSE would you do again? We're wading through swamps and thorns, here.

Justine Sacco has a PR job she enjoys now, but she deserves the best and biggest PR job, whatever that may be. Give it all to her. In the depths of the Gamergate blues, Sacco IMed me to ask how it was all going, and offered one piece of advice: "Just don't engage." Without any discussion, she knew the only divine truth of the internet: Do nothing. Never tweet. Never apologize. Never say anything at all. Be an inert bundle of molecules and let the world tear itself apart around you.

This is the one thing no one in public relations—pretty much a sham industry anyway, sure—has figured out, or is smart enough to put into practice. When you fuck up on the internet, do nothing. Say nothing. Remain motionless as best you can, no matter how much you want to explain, or argue, or contextualize. Shut up! Just shut up. It's what someone would have said to Sean Parker if he weren't so alienated in a big tumor of tech money.

Anyone working on any endeavor needs someone smart enough to tell them to just shut up, which is why Justine Sacco is the most qualified person in her entire field. She has the expertise of ten lifetimes when it comes to dealing with bad press. She survived a genuine personal crisis. She's unkillable, and smart, and she will tell you to shut up, idiot, it can't get any worse.

But I digress and you grow impatient. Lured here with the magic phrase “Streisand Effect,” you’ve been treated to a civil rights lecture drenched in noir. So let us onward to the obvious.

The very term “Streisand Effect” is a Rapeutationist trick — taking over a great name, associating it with an idea the Rapeutationists want to advance, and destroying its prior beneficial association with the great person. “Streisand” was associated with the stirring love songs dear to the generation that came to adulthood in the sixties. She gave enjoyment and meaning to life for millions of people. Even I remember singing along to “People” with great enjoyment when I was an adolescent.

Now, because Barbra did what — acted litigiously in one circumstance of her life — her achievements are obscured by the howlings of a chorus of digital hyenas? She is a laughing-stock?

Well, in the minds of those who take what is written by Rapeutationists as true — yes. And one of the nation’s most loved and lauded singers is, first, a signal idiot, and second, a musical footnote. Why? Because she resisted. Take it from one of my own Rapeutationists, Robert Stacy McCain, whose sage advice is as follows:

Look: If you are ever in a situation where your stupidity makes you a target, the correct thing to do is . . . nothing. Don’t react. Don’t try to defend yourself. Don’t lash out at your tormenters. Just ignore it until it is over. Learn your lesson, avoid repetition of the error, and be glad it wasn’t worse. People who merely describe your stupidity — however mocking and sarcastic their descriptions — have done you no wrong.”

McCain’s advice, being so solidly-grounded in an assumption that people being publicly shamed will immediately admit their “error” and submit to the demands of mass-mind, is imbued with the effrontery of the habitually victorious. But I have always been slow to accept that large numbers of people are smarter than I, since the tests I was given by psychologists clearly showed otherwise. Just because you are bigger than me doesn’t make you right.

As I stumbled through the gauntlet of my DIRA facing each hate-contorted visage shrieking ill-will in my face, I of course tried to maintain a manly posture. My profession is to prevail in adversity, and I answer only to myself and the laws. How insulting to the mass! No cowering. No apologies. No concession to their wisdom. How dare I sue Matt Inman! Indiegogo! All the saints in the Cyber-Temple!

In this, I may have resembled Rodney King early in the engagement, when he twice confronted his tormenters in a post-TASER rage. You always hope, that just for a second, they were afraid. But anyone watching the video knows they’re not afraid. They’re turned on. The idea that Rodney was going to grab a gun from one of them? Absurd. The first one to think that would’ve backed up, unholstered his gun, and taken aim. Rodney had no chance. Nor did I. It’s like watching an avalanche hit a ski lodge. No survivors.

So “Streisand Effect” does not, in fact, describe anything that arises due to the conduct of a Rapeutation victim. “Streisand Effect” is simply a description of an unrelieved assault by a distributed Internet mob, i.e., a DIRA. The idea that “Streisand did it to herself” is patently absurd. She did not launch, maintain, or participate in her own Rapeutation.

Like the LAPD cops who beat Rodney, the Rapeutationists get paid to launch, maintain and participate in DIRAs. It lends to a Rapeutationist’s credibility that he appear to be employed. Merely claiming “tech employment” in the Rapeutation-sphere is sufficient to make you a tech expert, at least enough to join in a scorn-a-thon against an object of hatred that has become au courant. In moments of mass hate, few will quibble with the grammar of your hate-speech. So in one sense it is an environment of universal goodwill, in which the Streisand Effect is born.

Mike Masnick is generally given credit for stealing Barbra Streisand’s name and turning it into a stalking horse for unbridled sadism. How’s that work, you say? You still need more lessons? Let’s go right to the fount of DIRA wisdom, shall we? A poster at Popehat puts it all in the right light in a post that explains why it took two trials to convict any of Rodney King’s tormentors:

“[I]f you really really really want to follow someone on the street, burst into their home, pull a gun, and shoot them to death, I suggest the following two-step process:

1) be a police officer with union representation.

2) say repeatedly “I thought he was going for a gun”. Even when no gun is ever found, keep saying this.

The post is, from a statistical point of view, unimpeachable. Fear of nonexistent guns by police is a widespread phenomenon, and they will kill you for it. And when they do, they do not go to jail.

This is because homicide is justified by reasonable fear, and it is not unreasonable to fear guns in a gun-riddled society. So to get away with murder, the killer almost always has to blame the victim.

Masnick knew what he was doing when he stole the name Barbra had burnished with a lifetime of work and used it as a weapon to blacken her. He gave the DIRA mob, and all future mobs, a convenient way to blame the victim, and argue that their Rapeutation was due to their own [general stupidity, Internet-idiocy, fill-in-the-blank-epithet]. “Streisand Effect” is a term applied retrospectively to explain a DIRA, in other words, it is a rhetorical device for allocating blame away from the obvious source of the action. For this type of thing, Masnick deserves payment. I don’t know what would be appropriate, but I’m thinking along the lines of what that gangster at the end of Pulp Fiction has in mind — gettin’ Medieval on his ass.

--"Streisand Effect" or "King Syndrome"?, by Charles Carreon
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Re: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life

Postby admin » Thu Apr 14, 2016 4:14 am

Excerpt from "So You've Been Publicly Shamed"
by Jon Ronson
Copyright © 2015 by Jon Ronson

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Four: God That Was Awesome

During the months that followed, it became routine. Everyday people, some with young children, were getting annihilated for tweeting some badly worded joke to their hundred or so followers. I'd meet them in restaurants and airport cafes-spectral figures wandering the earth like the living dead in the business wear of their former lives. It was happening with such regularity that it didn't even seem coincidental that one of them, Justine Sacco, had been working in the same office building as Michael Moynihan until three weeks earlier when, passing through Heathrow Airport, she wrote a tweet that came out badly.

***

It was December 20, 2013. For the previous two days she'd been tweeting little acerbic jokes to her 170 followers about her holiday travels. She was like a social media Sally Bowles, decadent and flighty and unaware that serious politics were looming. There was her joke about the German man on the plane from New York: "Weird German Dude: You're in first class. It's 2014. Get some deodorant.-Inner monolog as I inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals." Then the layover at Heathrow: "Chili-cucumber sandwiches-bad teeth. Back in London!" Then the final leg: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"

She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter.

"I got nothing," she told me. "No replies."

I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this-that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back. She boarded the plane. It was an eleven-hour flight. She slept. When the plane landed, she turned on her phone. Straightaway there was a text from someone she hadn't spoken to since high school: ''I'm so sorry to see what's happening."

She looked at it, baffled.

"And then my phone started to explode," she said.

We were having this conversation three weeks later at-her choice of location-the Cookshop restaurant in New York City. It was the very same restaurant where Michael had recounted to me the tale of Jonah's destruction. It was becoming for me the Restaurant of Stories of Obliterated Lives. But it was only a half coincidence. It was close to the building where they both worked. Michael had been offered a job at The Daily Beast as a result of his great Jonah scoop, and Justine had an office upstairs, running the PR department for the magazine's publisher, lAC-which also owned Vimeo and OkCupid and Match.com. The reason why she wanted to meet me here, and why she was wearing her expensive-looking work clothes, was that at six p.m. she was due in there to clean out her desk.

As she sat on the runway at Cape Town Airport, a second text popped up: "You need to call me immediately." It was from her best friend, Hannah. "You're the number one worldwide trend on Twitter right now."

"In light of @JustineSacco disgusting racist tweet, I'm donating to @CARE today," and "How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!" and "No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified," and ''I'm an lAC employee and I don't want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever," and "Everyone go report this cunt @Justine Sacco," and from lAC: "This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight," and "Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It's global and she's apparently *still on the plane,*" and "All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail," and "Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning- on moment ever when her plane lands." A hashtag began trending worldwide: #hasjustinelandedyet. "Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can't look away. Can't leave" and "It is kinda wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it. #hasjustinelandedyet" and "#hasjustinelandedyet may be the best thing to happen to my Friday night." Somebody worked out which flight she was on, and they linked to a flight tracker website, so everyone could watch its progress in real time. "Looks like @JustineSacco lands in about 9mins, this should be interesting" and "We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she's getting fired" and "Right. Is there no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, Twitter! I'd like pictures #HasJustineLandedYet" and then, after she frantically deleted the tweet, "Sorry @lustineSacco-your tweet lives on forever" and so on for a total of a hundred thousand tweets, according to calculations by the website BuzzFeed, until weeks later: "Man, remember Justine Sacco? #HasJustineLandedYet. God that was awesome. MILLIONS of people waiting for her to land."

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture-like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.

Over the years, I've sat across tables from a lot of people whose lives had been destroyed. Usually, the people who did the destroying were the government or the military or big business or, as with Jonah Lehrer, basically themselves (at least at first with Jonah-we took over as he tried to apologize). Justine Sacco felt like the first person I had ever interviewed who had been destroyed by us.

***

Google has an engine-Google AdWords-that tells you how many times your name has been searched for during any given month. In October 2013, Justine was googled thirty times. In November 2013, she was googled thirty times. Between December 20 and the end of December, she was googled 1,220,000 times.

A man had been waiting for her at Cape Town Airport. He was a Twitter user, @Zac_R. He took her photograph and posted it online. "Yup," he wrote, "@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. She's decided to wear sunnies as a disguise."

Image
Justine Sacco (in dark glasses) at Cape Town Airport. Photograph by @Zac_R, reproduced with his permission.

Three weeks had passed since Justine had pressed send on the tweet. The New York Post had been following her to the gym. Newspapers were ransacking her Twitter feed for more horrors.

And the award for classiest tweet of all time goes to ...

"I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night." (February 24, 2012)


-- "16 TWEETS JUSTINE SACCO REGRETS," BuzzFEED, DECEMBER 20, 2013


This was the only time Justine would ever talk to a journalist about what happened to her, she told me. It was just too harrowing. And inadvisable. ''As a publicist," she e-mailed, "I don't know that I would ever recommend to a client that they participate in your book. I'm very nervous about it. I am really terrified about opening myself up to future attacks. But I think it's necessary. I want someone to just show how crazy my situation is."

It was crazy because "only an insane person would think that white people don't get AIDS." That was about the first thing she said to me when she sat down. "To me, it was so insane a comment for an American to make I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was a literal statement. I know there are hateful people out there who don't like other people and are generally mean. But that's not me."

Justine had been about three hours into her flight -- probably asleep in the air above Spain or Algeria-when retweets of her tweet began to overwhelm my Twitter feed. After an initial happy little "Oh, wow, someone is fucked," I started to think her shamers must have been gripped by some kind of group madness or something. It seemed obvious that her tweet, whilst not a great joke, wasn't racist, but a reflexive comment on white privilege-on our tendency to naively imagine ourselves immune from life's horrors. Wasn't it?

"It was a joke about a situation that exists," Justine e-mailed. "It was a joke about a dire situation that does exist in post-apartheid South Africa that we don't pay attention to. It was completely outrageous commentary on the disproportionate AIDS statistics. Unfortunately, I am not a character on South Park or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform. To put it simply, I wasn't trying to raise awareness of AIDS, or piss off the world, or ruin my life. 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."

As it happens, I once made a similar-albeit funnier-joke in a column for The Guardian. It was about a time when I flew into the United States and was sent for "secondary processing" (there was a mafioso hit man on the run at the time with a name that apparently sounded quite a lot like Jon Ronson). I was taken into a packed holding room and told to wait.

There are signs everywhere saying: "The use of cell phones is strictly prohibited."

I'm sure they won't mind me checking my text messages, I think. I mean, after all, I am white.


My joke was funnier than Justine's joke. It was better worded. Plus, as it didn't invoke AIDS sufferers, it was less unpleasant. So mine was funnier, better worded, and less unpleasant. But it suddenly felt like that Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter when Christopher Walken puts the gun to his head and lets out a scream and pulls the trigger and the gun doesn't go off. It was to a large extent Justine's own fault that so many people thought she was a racist. Her reflexive sarcasm had been badly worded, her wider Twitter persona quite brittle. But I hadn't needed to think about her tweet for more than a few seconds before I understood what she'd been trying to say. There must have been among her shamers a lot of people who chose to willfully misunderstand it for some reason.

"I can't fully grasp the misconception that's happening around the world," Justine said. "They've taken my name and my picture, and have created this Justine Sacco that's not me and have labeled this person a racist. I have this fear that if I were in a car accident tomorrow and lost my memory and came back and googled myself, that would be my new reality."

I suddenly remembered how weirdly tarnished I felt when the spambot men created their fake Jon Ronson, getting my character traits all wrong, turning me into some horrific, garrulous foodie, and strangers believed it was me, and there was nothing I could do. That's what was happening to Justine, although instead of a foodie she was a racist and instead of fifty people it was 1,220,000.

Journalists are supposed to be intrepid. We're supposed to stand tall in the face of injustice and not fear crazy mobs. But neither Justine nor I saw much fearlessness in how her story was reported. Even articles about how "we could all be minutes away from having a Justine Sacco moment" were all couched in "I am NO WAY defending what she said," she told me.

But as vile as the sentiment she expressed was, there are some potential extenuating circumstances here that don't excuse her behavior but might mitigate her misdeed somewhat. Repugnant as her joke was, there is a difference between outright hate speech and even the most ill-advised attempt at humor.

-- ANDREW WALLENSTEIN, "JUSTINE SACCO: SYMPATHY FOR THIS TWITTER DEVIL," Variety, DECEMBER 22, 2013


Andrew Wallenstein was braver than most. But still: It read like the old media saying to social media, "Don't hurt me."

Justine released an apology statement. She cut short her South African family vacation "because of safety concerns. People were threatening to go on strike at the hotels I was booked into if I showed up. I was told no one could guarantee my safety." Word spread around the Internet that she was heiress to a $4.8 billion fortune, as people assumed her father was the South African mining tycoon Desmond Sacco. I wrongly thought this was true about her right up until I alluded to her billions over lunch and she looked at me like I was crazy.

"I grew up on Long Island," she said.

"Not in a Jay Gatsby-type estate?" I said.

"Not in a Jay Gatsby-type estate," Justine said. "My mom was single my entire life. She was a flight attendant. My dad sold carpets."

(She later e-mailed that while she "grew up with a single mom who was a flight attendant and worked two jobs, when I was twenty-one or twenty-two, she married well. My stepfather is pretty well off, and I think there was a picture of my mom's car on my Instagram, which gave the impression that I'm from a wealthy family. So maybe that's another reason why people assumed I was a spoiled brat. I don't know. But thought it was worth bringing up to you.")

Years ago I interviewed some white supremacists from an Aryan Nations compound in Idaho about their conviction that the Bilderberg Group-a secretive annual meeting of politicians and business leaders-was a Jewish conspiracy.

"How can you call it a Jewish conspiracy when practically no Jews go to it?" I asked them.

"They may not be actual Jews," one replied, "but they are .. ." He paused. "... Jewish."

So there it was: At Aryan Nations, you didn't need to be an actual Jew to be Jew-ish. And the same was true on Twitter with the privileged racist Justine Sacco, who was neither especially privileged nor a racist. But it didn't matter. It was enough that it sort of seemed like she was.

Her extended family in South Africa were ANC supporters. One of the first things Justine's aunt told her when she arrived at the family home from Cape Town Airport was: "This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you've almost tarnished the family."

At this, Justine started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to say something hopeful to improve the mood.

"Sometimes things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense," I said. "So maybe you're our brutal nadir."

"Wow," Justine said. She dried her eyes. "Of all the things I could have been in society's collective consciousness, it never struck me that I'd end up a brutal nadir."

A woman approached our table-a friend of Justine's. She sat down next to her, fixed her with an empathetic look, and said something at such a low volume I couldn't hear it.

"Oh, you think I'm going to be grateful for this?" Justine replied.

"Yes, you will," the woman said. "Every step prepares you for the next, especially when you don't think so. I know you can't see that right now. That's okay. I get it. But come on. Did you really have your dream job?"

Justine looked at her. "I think I did," she said.

***

I got an e-mail from the Gawker journalist Sam Biddle-the man who may have started the onslaught against Justine. One of Justine's 170 followers had sent him the tweet. He retweeted it to his 15,000 followers. And that's how it may have begun.

"The fact that she was a PR chief made it delicious," he e-mailed me. "It's satisfying to be able to say 'OK, let's make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.' And it did. I'd do it again."

Her destruction was justified, Sam Biddle was saying, because Justine was a racist, and because attacking her was punching up. They were cutting down a member of the media elite, continuing the civil rights tradition that started with Rosa Parks, the hitherto silenced underdogs shaming into submission the powerful racist. But I didn't think any of those things were true. If punching Justine Sacco was ever punching up-and it didn't seem so to me given that she was an unknown PR woman with 170 Twitter followers-the punching only intensified as she plummeted to the ground. Punching Jonah Lehrer wasn't punching up either-not when he was begging for forgiveness in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed.

A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It's all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people. What rush was overpowering us at times like this? What were we getting out of it?

I could tell Sam Biddle was finding it startling too-like when you shoot a gun and the power of it sends you recoiling violently backward. He said he was "surprised" to see how quickly Justine was destroyed: "I never wake up and hope I get to fire someone that day-and certainly never hope to ruin anyone's life." Still, his e-mail ended, he had a feeling she'd be "fine eventually, if not already. Everyone's attention span is so short. They'll be mad about something new today."

***

When Justine left me that evening to clear out her desk, she got only as far as the lobby of her office building before she collapsed on the floor in tears. Later, we talked again. I told her what Sam Biddle had said-about how she was "probably fine now." I was sure he wasn't being deliberately glib. He was just like everyone who participates in mass online destruction. Who would want to know? Whatever that pleasurable rush that overwhelms us is-group madness or something else-nobody wants to ruin it by facing the fact that it comes with a cost.

"Well, I'm not fine," Justine said. ''I'm really suffering. I had a great career and I loved my job and it was taken away from me and there was a lot of glory in that. Everybody else was very happy about that. I cried out my body weight in the first twenty-four hours. It was incredibly traumatic. You don't sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are. All of a sudden you don't know what you're supposed to do. You've got no schedule. You've got no"-she paused-"purpose. I'm thirty years old. I had a great career. If I don't have a plan, if I don't start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself. I'm single. So it's not like I can date, because we google everyone we might date. So that's been taken . away from me too. How am I going to meet new people? What are they going to think of me?"

She asked me who else was going to be in my book about people who had been publicly shamed.

"Well, Jonah Lehrer so far," I said.

"How's he doing?" she asked me.

"Pretty badly, I think," I said.

"Badly in what way?" She looked concerned-I think more for what this might prophesy about her own future than about Jonah's.

"I think he's broken," I said.

"When you say Jonah seems broken, what do you mean?" Justine said.

"I think he's broken and that people mistake it for shamelessness," I said.

People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, like he was something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it's no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt-before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it's known as cognitive dissonance. It's the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we're kind people and the idea that we've just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior. It's like when I used to smoke and I'd hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read SMOKING CAUSES AGING OF THE SKIN instead of the pack that read SMOKING KILLS -- because aging of the skin? I didn't mind that.

Justine and I agreed to meet again, but not for months, she told me. We'd meet again in five months. She was compelled to make sure that this was not her narrative. "I can't just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself," she said. I think Justine wasn't thrilled to be included in the same book as Jonah. She didn't see herself as being anything like Jonah. Jonah lied repeatedly, again and again. How could Jonah bounce back when he'd sacrificed his character and lied to millions? Justine had to believe that there was a stark difference between that and her making a tasteless joke. She did something stupid, but she didn't trash her integrity.

She couldn't bear the thought of being preserved within the pages of my book as a sad case. She needed to avoid falling into depression and self-loathing. She knew that the next five months were going to be crucial for her. She was determined to show the people who had smashed her up that she could rise again.

How could she tell her story, she thought, when it was just beginning?

***

The day after my lunch with Justine, I caught the train to Washington, D.C., to meet someone I had prejudged as a frightening man-a fearsome American narcissist-Ted Poe. For the twenty or so years he was a judge in Houston, Poe's nationally famous trademark was to publicly shame defendants in the showiest ways he could dream up, "using citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd," as the legal writer Jonathan Turley once put it.

Given society's intensifying eagerness to publicly shame people, I wanted to meet someone who had been doing it professionally for decades. What would today's citizen shamers think of Ted Poe-his personality and his motivations-now that they were basically becoming him? What impact had his shaming frenzy had on the world around him-on the wrongdoers and the bystanders and himself?

Ted Poe's punishments were sometimes zany-ordering petty criminals to shovel manure, etc.-and sometimes as ingenious as a Goya painting. Like the one he handed down to a Houston teenager, Mike Hubacek. In 1996, Hubacek had been driving drunk at one hundred miles per hour with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK, and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash site, and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send ten dollars every week for ten years to a memorial fund in the names of the victims, and to observe the autopsy of a person killed in a drunk-driving accident.

Punishments like these had proved too psychologically torturous for other people. In 1982 a seventeen-year-old boy named Kevin Tunell had killed a girl, Susan Herzog, while driving drunk near Washington, D.C. Her parents sued him and were awarded $1.5 million in damages. But they offered the boy a deal. They would reduce the fine to just $936 if he'd mail them a check for $1, made out in Susan's name, every Friday for eighteen years. He gratefully accepted their offer.

Years later, the boy began missing payments, and when Susan's parents took him to court, he broke down. Every time he filled in her name, he said, the guilt would tear him apart: "It hurts too much," he said. He tried to give the Herzogs two boxes of prewritten checks, dated one per week until the end of 2001, a year longer than was required. But they refused to take them.

Judge Ted Poe's critics-like the civil rights group the ACLU-argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao's China and Hitler's Germany and the Ku Klux Klan's America-it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person being shamed. How could Poe take people with such low self-esteem that they needed to, say, rob a store, and then hold them up to officially sanctioned public ridicule?

But Poe brushed the criticisms off. Criminals didn't have low self-esteem, he argued. It was quite the opposite. "The people I see have too good a self-esteem," he told The Boston Globe in 1997. "Some folks say everyone should have high self-esteem, but sometimes people should feel bad."

Poe's shaming methods were so admired in Houston society that he ended up getting elected to Congress as the representative for Texas's Second Congressional District. He is currently Congress's "top talker," according to the Los Angeles Times, having made 431 speeches between 2009 and 2011, against abortion, illegal immigrants, socialized health care, and so on. He always ends them with his catchphrase: "And that's just the way it is!"

"It wasn't the 'theater of the absurd.''' Ted Poe sat opposite me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. I'd just quoted to him his critic Jonathan Turley's line-"using citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd"-and he was bristling. He wore cowboy boots with his suit-another Poe trademark, like the catchphrase and the shaming. He had the look and mannerisms of his friend George W. Bush. "It was the theater of the different," he said.

The Rayburn building is where all the congressmen and congresswomen have their offices. Each office door is decorated with the state flag of the congress person who is inside: the bald eagles of Illinois and North Dakota and the bear of California and the horse's head of New Jersey and the strange bleeding pelican of Louisiana. Poe's office is staffed by handsome, serious-looking Texas men and tough, pretty Texas women who were extremely nice to me but totally ignored all my subsequent e-mail requests for clarifications and follow-up interviews. Although Poe ended the interview by warmly shaking my hand, I suspect that the moment I left the room he told his staff, "That man was an idiot. Ignore all future e-mail requests from him."

He recounted to me some of his favorite shamings: "Like the young man who loved the thrill of stealing. I could have put him in jail. But I decided that he had to carry a sign for seven days: I STOLE FROM THIS STORE. DON'T BE A THIEF OR THIS COULD BE YOU. He was supervised. We worked all the security out. I got that down to an art for those people who worried about security. At the end of the week the store manager called me: 'All week I didn't have any stealing going on in the store!' The store manager loved it."

"But aren't you turning the criminal justice system into entertainment?" I said.

"Ask the guy out there," Ted Poe replied. "He doesn't think he's entertaining anybody."

"I don't mean him," I said. "I mean the effect it has on the people watching."

"The public liked it." Poe nodded. "People stopped and talked to him about his conduct. One lady wanted to take him to church on Sunday and save him! She did!" Poe let out a big high-pitched Texas laugh. "She said, 'Come with me, you poor thing!' End of the week, I brought him back into court. He said it was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him. It changed his conduct. Eventually, he got a bachelor's degree. He's got a business in Houston now." Poe paused. "I have put my share of folks in the penitentiary. Sixty-six percent of them go back to prison. Eighty-five percent of those people we publicly shamed we never saw again. It was too embarrassing for them the first time. It wasn't the 'theater of the absurd,' it was the theater of the effective. It worked."

Poe was being annoyingly convincing, even though he later admitted to me that his recidivism argument was a misleading one. Poe was far more likely to sentence a first-time offender-someone who was already feeling scared and remorseful and determined to change-to a shaming. But even so, I was learning something about public shaming today that I hadn't anticipated at all.

It had started earlier that morning in my hotel room when I telephoned Mike Hubacek, the teenager who had killed two people while driving drunk in 1996. I had wanted him to describe the feeling of being forced to walk up and down the side of the road holding a placard that read I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK. But first we talked about the crash. He told me he spent the first six months after it happened lying in his prison cell, replaying it over and over.

"What images did you replay?" I asked him.

"None," he replied. "I had completely blacked out during it and I don't remember anything. But I thought about it daily. I still do. It's a part of me. I suffered a lot of survivor's guilt. At the time, I almost convinced myself I was in a living purgatory. I lived to suffer. I went more than a year and a half without looking in a mirror. You learn to shave using your hand as a guide."

Being in purgatory, he said, he had resigned himself to a lifetime of incarceration. But then Ted Poe unexpectedly pulled him out. And he suddenly found himself walking up and down the side of the road holding that placard.

And there on the side of the road, he said, he understood that there was a use for him. He could basically become a living placard that warned people against driving drunk. And so nowadays he lectures in schools about the dangers. He owns a halfway house-Sober Living Houston. And he credits Judge Ted Poe for it all.

"I'm forever grateful to him," he said.

My trip to Washington, D.C., wasn't turning out how I'd hoped. I'd assumed that Ted Poe would be such a terrible person and negative role model that the social media shamers would realize with horror that this was what they were becoming and vow to change their ways. But Mike Hubacek thought his shaming was the best thing that had ever happened to him. This was especially true, he told me, because the onlookers had been so nice. He'd feared abuse and ridicule. But no. "Ninety percent of the responses on the street were 'God bless you' and 'Things will be okay,''' he said. Their kindness meant everything, he said. It made it all right. It set him on his path to salvation.

"Social media shamings are worse than your shamings," I suddenly said to Ted Poe.

He looked taken aback. "They are worse," he replied. "They're anonymous."

"Or even if they're not anonymous, it's such a pile-on they may as well be," I said.

"They're brutal," he said.

I suddenly became aware that throughout our conversation I'd been using the word they. And each time I did, it felt like I was being spineless. The fact was, they weren't brutal. We were brutal.

In the early days of Twitter there were no shamings. We were Eve in the Garden of Eden. We chatted away unselfconsciously. As somebody back then wrote, "Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." Having funny and honest conversations with like-minded people I didn't know got me through hard times that were unfolding in my actual house. Then came the Tan Moir and the LA Fitness shamings 00 shamings to be proud of-and I remember how exciting it felt when hitherto remote evil billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump created their own Twitter accounts. For the first time in history we sort of had direct access to ivory-tower oligarchs like them. We became keenly watchful for transgressions.

After a while, it wasn't just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot. And the rage that swirled around seemed increasingly in disproportion to whatever stupid thing some celebrity had said. It felt different to satire or journalism or criticism. It felt like punishment. In fact, it felt weird and empty when there wasn't anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt like days picking at fingernails, treading water.

I'd been dismayed by the cruelty of the people who tore Jonah apart as he tried to apologize. But they weren't the mob. We were the mob. I'd been blithely doing the same thing for a year or more. I had drifted into a new way of being. Who were the victims of my shamings? I could barely remember. I had only the vaguest recollection of the people I'd piled onto and what terrible things they'd done to deserve it.

This is partly because my memory has degenerated badly these past years. In fact, I was recently at a spa-my wife booked it for me as a special surprise, which shows she really doesn't know me because I don't like being touched-and as I lay on the massage table, the conversation turned to my bad memory.

"I can hardly remember anything about my childhood!" I told the masseur. "It's all gone!"

"A lot of people who can't remember their childhoods," she replied, as she massaged my shoulders, "it turns out that they were sexually abused. By their parents."

"Well, I'd remember THAT," I said.

But it wasn't just the fault of my lousy memory. It was the sheer volume of transgressors I'd chastised. How could I commit to memory that many people? Well, there were the spambot men. For a second in Poe's office I reminisced fondly on the moment someone suggested we gas the cunts. That had given me such a good feeling that it felt a shame to interrogate it-to question why it had beguiled me so.

"The justice system in the West has a lot of problems," Poe said, "but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don't have any rights when you're accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It's worldwide forever."

It felt good to see the balance of power shift so that someone like Ted Poe was afraid of people like us. But he wouldn't sentence people to hold a placard for something they hadn't been convicted of. He wouldn't sentence someone for telling a joke that came out badly. The people we were destroying were no longer just people like Jonah: public figures who had committed actual transgressions. They were private individuals who really hadn't done anything much wrong. Ordinary humans were being forced to learn damage control, like corporations that had committed PR disasters. It was very stressful.

"We are more frightening than you," I said to Poe, feeling quite awed.

Poe sat back in his chair, satisfied. "You are much more frightening," he said. "You are much more frightening."

We were much more frightening than Judge Ted Poe. The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places. The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us.

It felt like we were soldiers making war on other people's flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.

***

Eleven: The Man Who Can Change the Google Search Results

In October 2012 a group of adults with learning difficulties took an organized trip to Washington, D.C. They visited the National Mall, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Smithsonian, Arlington National Cemetery, and the U.S. Mint. They saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At night they sang karaoke in the hotel bar. Their caregivers, Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie, did a duet of "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

"They had the greatest time on that trip," Lindsey Stone told me. "We were laughing on the bus. We were laughing walking around at night. They thought that we were fun and cool."

Lindsey was telling me the story eighteen months later. We were sitting at her kitchen table. She lives down a long lane near a pretty lake in a seaside town on the East Coast of the United States. "I like to dance and I like to do karaoke," Lindsey said. "But for a long time after that trip I didn't leave the house. During the day, I'd just sit here. I didn't want to be seen by anybody. I didn't want people looking at me."

"How long did that last?" I asked her.

"Almost a year," she said.

Lindsey didn't want to talk to me about what had happened on that trip to Washington, D.C. I had written to her three times and she had ignored each of my letters. But a very peculiar circumstance had made it necessary for her to change her mind.

***

Lindsey and Jamie had been with LIFE-Living Independently Forever-for a year and a half before that trip. LIFE was a residence for "pretty high-functioning people with learning difficulties," Lindsey said. "Jamie had started a jewelry club, which was a hit with the girls. We'd take them to the movies. We'd take them bowling. We got the company to purchase a karaoke sound system. We heard a lot from parents that we were the best thing that ever happened to that campus."

Off duty, she and Jamie had a running joke-taking stupid photographs, "smoking in front of a NO SMOKING sign, or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington we saw the SILENCE AND RESPECT sign. And inspiration struck."

Image

"So," Lindsey said, "thinking we were funny, Jamie posted it on Facebook and tagged me on it with my consent because I thought it was hilarious."

Nothing much happened after that. A few Facebook friends posted unenthusiastic comments. "One of them had served in the military and he wrote a message saying, 'This is kind of offensive. I know you girls, but it's just tasteless.' Another said 'I agree' and another said 'I agree' and then I said, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa! It's just us being douchebags! Forget about it!'"

Whoa whoa whoa . . . wait. This is just us, being the douchebags that we are, challenging authority in general. Much like the pic posted the night before, of me smoking right next to a no smoking sign. OBVIOUSLY we meant NO disrespect to people that serve or have served our country.

-- LINDSEY STONE'S FACEBOOK MESSAGE, OCTOBER 20, 2012


After that, Jamie said to Lindsey, "Do you think we should take it down?"

"No!" Lindsey replied. "What's the big deal? No one's ever going to think of it again."

Their Facebook settings were a mystery to them. Most of the privacy boxes were ticked. Some weren't. Sometimes they'd half notice that boxes they'd thought they'd ticked weren't ticked. Lindsey has been thinking about that "a lot" these past eighteen months. "Facebook works best when everyone is sharing and liking. It brings their ad revenues up." Was there some Facebook shenanigan where things just "happen" to untick themselves? Some loophole? "But I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I don't know if Jamie's mobile uploads had ever been private."

Whatever: Jamie's mobile uploads weren't private. And four weeks after returning from Washington, D.C., they were in a restaurant celebrating their birthday-"We're a week apart" -when they became aware that their phones were vibrating repeatedly. So they went online.

"Lindsey Stone hates the military and hates soldiers who have died in foreign wars," and "Die cunt," and "You should rot in hell," and "Just pure Evil," and "The Face of a Typical Feminist. Fifty pounds overweight? Check. Sausage arms and little piglet fingers? Check. No respect for the men who sacrificed? Check," and "Fuck You whore. I hope I die [sic] a slow painful death. U retarted cunt," and "HOPE THIS CUNT GETS RAPED AND STABBED TO DEATH," and "Spoke with an employee from LIFE who has told me there are Veterans on the board and that she will be fired. Awaiting info on her accomplice," and "After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client. Woman needs help," and "Send the dumb feminist to prison," and, in response to a small number of posters suggesting that maybe a person's future shouldn't be ruined because of a jokey photograph, "HER FUTURE ISN'T RUINED! Stop trying to make her into a martyr. In 6 months no one except those that actually know her will remember this."

"I wanted to scream, 'It was just about a sign,'" Lindsey said.

Lindsey doesn't know how it spread. "I don't think I'll ever know," she said. "We have a feeling that somebody at work found it. We had kind of revitalized that campus. There was animosity that came from that. They saw us as young, irreverent idiots."

By the time she went to bed that night-"which was admittedly at four a.m." -a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes. Lindsey read every comment. "I became really obsessed with reading everything about myself."

The next day camera crews had gathered outside her front door. Her father tried talking to them. He had a cigarette in his hand. The family dog had followed him out. As he tried to explain that Lindsey wasn't a terrible person, he noticed the cameras move from his face down to the cigarette and the dog, like they were a family of hillbillies-smoking separatists down a lane with guard dogs.

LIFE was inundated with e-mails demanding their jobs, so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn't allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the parking lot and told her to hand over her keys.

"Literally, overnight everything I knew and loved was gone," Lindsey said.

And that's when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year.

***

COMPANY PRAISED FOR FIRING WOMAN WHO TOOK DISRESPECTFUL PHOTO NEXT TO SOLDIER'S GRAVE

A company is being applauded for firing a woman who made a vulgar gesture next to a soldier's burial site, sparking nationwide outrage ... Vitriol toward Lindsey Stone hasn't relented since she lost her job ... Commentators suggested "she should be shot" or exiled from the United States ...

Stone, who issued a statement of apology, has refused to show her face since the backlash, her parents told CBS Boston.

-- RHEANA MURRAY, NEW YORK Daily News. NOVEMBER 22, 2012, AS SEEN ON PAGE ONE OF THE GOOGLE.COM RESULTS FOR THE SEARCH TERM "LINDSEY STONE"


During the year that followed the Washington, D.C., trip, Lindsey scanned Craigslist for caregiving work, but nobody ever replied to her applications. She lurked online, watching all the other Lindsey Stones get destroyed. "I felt so terrible for Justine Sacco," she said, "and that girl at Halloween who dressed like the Boston Marathon victim."

And then her life suddenly got much better. She was offered a job caring for children with autism.

"But I'm terrified," she said.

"That your bosses will find out?"

"Yeah."

Psychologists try to remind anxiety sufferers that "what if" worries are irrational ones. If you find yourself thinking, What if I just came across as racist? the "what if" is evidence that nothing bad actually happened. It's just thoughts swirling frantically around. But Lindsey's "what if" worry-"What if my new company googles me?"-was extremely plausible. In the tempest of her anxiety attacks there was no driftwood to hold on to. Her worst-case scenario was a likely one. And the photograph was everywhere. It had become so iconic and ubiquitous among swaths of U.S. veterans and right-wingers and antifeminists that one man had even turned it into patriotic wallpaper, superimposing onto the wall behind Lindsey's shrieking face and upturned finger a picture of a military funeral, complete with a coffin draped in the American flag.

Image

Lindsey had wanted the job so much she'd been "nervous about even applying. And I wasn't sure how to address it on my resume. Why the abrupt departure from LIFE? I was conflicted on whether to say to them, 'Just so you know, I am this Lindsey Stone.' Because I knew it was just a mouse click away."

Before the job interview, the question had haunted her. Should she tell them? She was "insanely nervous" about making the wrong decision. She left it until the moment of the interview. And then the interview was over and she found that she hadn't mentioned it.

"It just didn't feel right," she said. "People who have gotten to know me don't see Arlington as a big deal. And so I wanted to give them the opportunity to know me before I say to them, 'This is what you'll get if you google me.'''

She's been in the job four months, and she still hasn't told them.

"And obviously you can't ask them, 'Have you noticed it and decided it's not a problem?'" I said.

"Right," said Lindsey.

"So you feel trapped in a paranoid silence," I said.

"I love this job so much," Lindsey said. "I love these kids. One of the parents paid me a really high compliment the other day. I've only been working with her son for a month and she was like, 'The moment I met you, seeing the way you are with my son, and the way you treat people, you were meant to work in this field.' But I see everything with a heavy heart because I wait for the other shoe to drop. What if she found out? Would she feel the same way?" Lindsey could never just be happy and relaxed. The terror was always there. "It really impacts the way you view the world. Since it happened, I haven't tried to date anybody. How much do you let a new person into your life? Do they already know? The place I'm working at now-I was under the impression nobody knew. But someone made a comment the other day and I think they knew."

"What was the comment?"

"Oh, we were talking about something and he tossed off a comment like 'Oh, it's not like I'm going to plaster that all over the Internet.' Then he quickly said, 'Just kidding. I would never do that to somebody. I would never do that to you.'''

"So you don't know for sure that he knew."

"Exactly," Lindsey said. "But his hurried follow-up ... I don't know." She paused. "That fear. It impacts you."

But now, suddenly, something had happened that could make all Lindsey's problems vanish. It was something almost magical, and it was my doing. I had set in motion a mysterious and fairy tale-like set of events for her. I'd never in my life been in a situation like this. It was new for both of us. It felt good-but there was a chance it wasn't good.
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