What did Justine Sacco write in her infamous tweet? How did the public react to her comment?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On December 20, 2013, Justine Sacco posted the following tweet before getting on a flight to Africa: \u201cGoing to Africa. Hope I don\u2019t get AIDS. Just kidding. I\u2019m white!\u201d Justine Sacco’s tweet was meant to be a comment on white privilege: white people have an easier time feeling like they\u2019re immune to certain issues. But people misunderstood it and shamed Sacco for being racist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here goes the story of how Justine Sacco’s tweet became the world’s top story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
In December 2013, Sacco was traveling for the holidays. Justine Sacco tweeted caustic, clueless jokes about people on her flight and the cities she laid over in. Half an hour before getting on her flight to Africa, she posted her tweet about Africa. She didn\u2019t get any responses before she got on the flight and was offline for the eleven hours she was in the air.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of Sacco\u2019s 170 twitter followers sent the tweet to <\/strong>Gawker <\/em><\/strong>journalist <\/strong>Sam Biddle. Biddle thought the tweet was gold\u2014usually, powerful people can get away with things that regular people can\u2019t, but here was a PR chief being publicly and openly racist, and the internet had the opportunity to hold her accountable. Biddle and others retweeted Justine\u2019s tweet, and it tore around the internet, inspiring massive shaming. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n People assumed Sacco was a privileged, racist, spoiled brat because she shared a surname with Desmond Sacco, an African mining tycoon. In fact, she wasn\u2019t related to Desmond and wasn\u2019t rich or very privileged. However, she seemed <\/em>close enough, so people rewrote her identity. Likely, many of the people who joined in the shaming thought that by calling her out, they were doing good. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n According to BuzzFeed, a hundred thousand tweets appeared in response to Sacco\u2019s post. Some called Sacco racist, a bitch, or a cunt. (Many people find it most effective to shame people by calling for the worst things that could possibly happen to them, which for women tends to be sexaul assault because it\u2019s massively degrading.) Her employer, IAC, tweeted that her comment was offensive and other employees tweeted about how they didn\u2019t want to work with her. Many people tweeted about how she was going to feel when she turned on her phone and realized what was going on. Someone invented the hashtag #HasSaccoLandedYet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Biddle hadn\u2019t expected such a response but he thought it was justified because Sacco was racist. <\/strong>He also expected everyone would get over it eventually. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ronson also encountered the tweet while Sacco was in the air and his first reaction was a little bit of glee that someone was \u201cfucked<\/em>.\u201d Shortly after, though, he wondered if Twitter was<\/p>\n\n\n\n suffering from some sort of crowd theory because though the tweet wasn\u2019t a very good joke and was badly worded, it wasn\u2019t actually racist. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sacco didn\u2019t find out what was happening until she landed and her phone exploded. Some of the messages she received were sympathetic: Someone she\u2019d known in high school texted her that they were sorry for what she was going through, and her best friend Hannah explained that she was the number-one trend worldwide. However, mainly, the messages were shaming. One Twitter user even went to the airport to take a photo of her and tweeted it with a message about how she was wearing sunglasses to hide. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sacco issued an apology statement. It didn\u2019t stop the shaming. She had to leave Africa early\u2014her South African aunt told her she\u2019d almost tarnished the family name and people who worked at hotels Sacco had reservations at threatened to go on strike. Her safety was in danger. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Sacco got back to New York, the New York Post <\/em>followed her to the gym and other papers went through her Twitter feed to try to dig up more offensive posts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reporting about the tweet was cautious. Writers acknowledged that lots of people write stupid things on Twitter that have the potential to be misinterpreted and blow up, but also made sure to not defend what Sacco had said. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Google made money off Sacco\u2019s ruin\u2014Jonathan Hersh, an economics researcher, conservatively estimates $120,000<\/strong>. According to Google Adwords, in the two months before the tweet, Sacco was googled thirty times a month. Between December 20th and 31st 2013, she was googled over a million times, and Google makes money in ad revenue every time anyone searches for anything. (Even if no advertisers linked their product to Sacco\u2019s name, it\u2019s likely that people who wouldn\u2019t have otherwise been using Google at the time searched for her and then rabbitholed to a site that did use Google\u2019s advertising.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the wake of the shaming, Sacco was fired. She had loved her job and felt like she\u2019d lost her identity and purpose. <\/strong>Her personal life was affected too\u2014she couldn\u2019t date or meet new people because if anyone were to Google her, they\u2019d find evidence of the shaming and cut contact. <\/strong>She cried often and struggled to sleep.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sacco didn\u2019t want to talk to journalists\u2014the experience was so harrowing that she didn\u2019t want to relive it. <\/strong>She also didn\u2019t really want to be in Ronson\u2019s book because this might open her to new criticism. However, she thought it was important that people see what had happened to her and how \u201ccrazy\u201d her situation became, so she interviewed with him three weeks after the tweet went viral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sacco thought her situation was crazy because she thought it was obvious that she wasn\u2019t being literal with her tweet. She didn\u2019t understand how anyone could believe that anyone else actually <\/em>thought that white people didn\u2019t get AIDS. She was trying to make fun of the bubble white Americans live in and the fact that they aren’t aware of serious situations elsewhere. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ronson thought the tweet was badly written, and because Sacco\u2019s whole feed was acerbic, it wasn\u2019t surprising that people had thought she was racist. On the other hand, he thought that people must have realized what she was trying to say and had chosen to misunderstand her. <\/strong>Ronson thinks that we use social media for drama since our regular lives tend to be plodding. On social media, everyone\u2019s a flatter, less complicated version of themselves and can be easily slotted into hero or villain categories for our entertainment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sacco hoped that over time her situation would turn out differently from Lehrer\u2019s because he had lied and comprised his integrity, but she had just done something stupid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Almost immediately after the shaming, Sacco was offered a new job with a yachting company in Florida, which she thought was odd as she had no experience with yachts. She was worried the company employed people who <\/strong>actually <\/em><\/strong>thought white people couldn\u2019t get AIDS and didn\u2019t take the job. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n After rejecting the job offer, Sacco went to Ethiopia for a month to volunteer <\/strong>with an NGO that worked towards lowering maternal mortality rates. She enjoyed the experience, but it wasn\u2019t her calling, and she returned to New York. She got some temporary work in PR, but her career hadn\u2019t recovered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: In 2018, Sacco got a new job with the company that had fired her for the tweet.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What did Justine Sacco write in her infamous tweet? How did the public react to her comment? On December 20, 2013, Justine Sacco posted the following tweet before getting on a flight to Africa: \u201cGoing to Africa. Hope I don\u2019t get AIDS. Just kidding. I\u2019m white!\u201d Justine Sacco’s tweet was meant to be a comment on white privilege: white people have an easier time feeling like they\u2019re immune to certain issues. But people misunderstood it and shamed Sacco for being racist. Here goes the story of how Justine Sacco’s tweet became the world’s top story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":29462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,33],"tags":[277],"class_list":["post-34200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-communication","category-people","tag-so-youve-been-publicly-shamed","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nImmediate Aftermath<\/strong> <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Long-Term Consequences<\/strong> <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n