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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

A tangent, but,

> “At Match Group, we constantly test new updates and features to offer convenience, control and choice to our users," Justine Sacco, a spokeswoman for Match, wrote in an email.

If that name sounds familiar, it's because she was the IAC PR person who was fired in 2013 after an ill-advised tweet she sent just before getting on a plane. Looks like she rebuilt her life and found a new calling as... PR at IAC.

I'm increasingly convinced that "Internet mobs ruin people's careers" isn't held up by the evidence.

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You have no evidence of that (and I totally disagree) and you just continued to drag her into this years later.

Just because someone has found employment is not much of a signal of how they are doing.

I think you should edit your post and at least remove her name so it’s not indexed. It’s not nice. I would flag it for the mods but don’t see a way to do that.

Not that I would recommend a flag in this case, but if you click on the post's timestamp, the flag link will be visible in the page that opens.

I just gave you evidence of that, and no, I'm not interested in censoring that evidence.

Except here we are, Internet stalking a person about a Tweet they sent 6 years ago?

I don't think it should count as internet stalking to google search the PR rep for a big company or organization. It's another matter to go around following her on every social media platform or publish her address on the internet, which isn't happening here.

For example if we were discussing a seed round or venture funding round for a startup and someone brought up that the founder of the startup was that one guy who got away with beating his girlfriend (twice) due to a mixture of lawyer trickery, evidence concealment and police errors, would that be internet stalking?

Right, because multiple assaults are somehow comparable to an insensitive tweet.

It's been six years. People who have committed DUIs are shown more mercy than this. How does it benefit us in any way that we might continue this charade?

We have more of a culture of forgiving someone who served time in jail for a crime they admit they committed than forgiving someone who made a bad tweet six years ago.

This was one of the major themes of Joe Rogan's interview with Sam Harris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA106wrMUe4&t=2760s

It would be exploiting mob mentality to damage someone who wasn't proven guilty of doing anything wrong, so yes, I would consider it internet stalking. Innocent until proven guilty exists for a reason, otherwise the behavior of a single crazy person could ruin your life forever.

"Innocent until proven guilty" is an important standard for justice (you can't jail someone without sufficient proof) but it's not something that applies to everyday life.

For example, if a child care provider is accused of abusing children, but the court does not convict them because of lack of evidence, I'm still free to stop sending my kids there.

I just want to be sure I understand: are you saying that it is right and just to lose our capacity to start our own companies because of false allegations?

All I'm trying to say is that if you want to earn people's trust, saying "I wasn't proven guilty" isn't going to be enough.

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