A PR professional should have known better. But mistakes can have serious, disproportionate consequences enacted by vigilante mobs. It may not be fair, but labeling it unfair doesn’t undo the consequences.
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!”
via NYTimes.com.
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Will Gayther liked this on Facebook.
Fascinating article. Holy smokes.
Ha, exactly. :-)
Posting an offensive tweet and brutalizing a guy who’s minding his own business on a public sidewalk are mistakes of a vastly different order!
Yeah it’s something to watch out for, but people not having any empathy or sympathy is not quite the same as “consequences”. When you “accidentally” attack an indian man out for a walk and bash his head into the ground and he ends up paralyzed – that’s a consequence you can’t undo.
But maybe if you write one stupid tweet out of a million where it’s really offensive when you read it a different way than you (stupidly) were not thinking about when you wrote it, maybe a genuine apology could suffice. Or something short of being publicly shamed as a horrible person and fired.
It just seems like the proportion of the response in some cases gets out of control.
Agreed. Empathy for the win.
It’s a good look at the phenomena. For me, it’s about not reading as we would want to be read. Not that I’m going to do a tweet of the sort Sacco did. But a little more empathy all around wouldn’t hurt.