How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is where I did something particularly dumb. I created the account to the non-existent user and posted a few comments on it - then quickly switched back to my Ta bu Shi da Yu account to say what I'd done and explain the impact it was likely to have.
It was a bad, bad judgement call. I got such a massive lynching that I seriously regretted what I'd done - but there was no way of undoing it. Eventually, I started getting depressed - I mean, my entire reputation was in tatters. None of the work I'd done - not the hours and hours of fighting trolls, extensive article writing, innovative strategies for dealing with referencing or organizing the admins via the board, nor the work on featured article candidates, peer review, articles for deletion, vandalism fighting, meeting up with Sydney people interested in Wikipedia, made any difference at all.
I left the project and asked to be desysopped. About a year or so later, I created an account Tbsdy lives and tried again. I managed to get my admin status re established (I readily admitted it was a bad judgement call), but still I was told I'd left "under a cloud", by none other than Brad Fitzpatrick - their legal counsel.
What's the moral of this? Online communities suck. If you make even one minor error in judgment, be prepared to be lynched. If you get depressed, just exit at this point and don't look back. It's not worth it. It doesn't matter how much time you put into a project - you're going to get judged, and you'll never make your way back.
If you don't think it can't happen, then ask Ben Noordrius how he felt when Bryan Cantrell called him an arsehole and said he should have been fired because he reverted a personal pronoun. That did the Node.js community a lot of good now, didn't it?
Regarding Bryan Cantrill, never forget this post (a one-line reply at the bottom):
http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
Which I link not to shame him for what he wrote as a recent college grad 20 years ago, but to say that everyone does dumb, borderline offensive things sometimes, and what matters is that you are not obstinate in your dumbness.
Maybe Bryan would have fired the person he was then; that's fine. We need both effective, meaningful punishment, and also effective rehabilitation. It should be possible to go from Bryan Cantrill in Sun to Bryan Cantrill in Joyent. It should be possible to go from Ben Noordhuis in Node to Ben Noordhuis in io, or Justine Sacco in IAC to Justine Sacco wherever she is now, or Sam Biddle to chastened empathetic Sam Biddle, or whatever.
The reason I was annoyed about it was because signatures are the way you see who is saying something in a conversation thread. Back then you'd click on the person's username and get easy access to their pages, talk page, block links, contributions, etc. it also made it really hard to see what they had contributed. I was also concerned that someone would go what I in essence did - which was a really dumb move on my part, like I say.
You seem to be a super bright guy who experienced a momentary lapse in judgement fuelled by emotion. We all do this, it's just not always public.
Also- I don't know how old you were at the time this story occurred but according to neuroscience, the frontal lobe doesn't develop until we are 25-27 years old (males develop later than females) and this is exactly the type of mistake the frontal lobe prevents us from making.
I hope you've recovered from this incident and have learned to not take these mistakes too personally...
Even calculators make mistakes.
I've been pretty open in that situations probably get exacerbated for me because I have a mental illness - anxiety, depression and adult ADD (I refuse to call it ADHD, I'm not hyperactive!). I manage these better now, but it still leaks into my life. I'm extremely lucky I have a supportive wife and two small children who keep my mind off things and let me focus on what's important :-)
I really appreciate your kind words, btw.
Seems a bit like sect behavior to me (arbitrary rules and punishments).
Wikipedia in a nutshell.
To paraphrase the famous comic from the New Yorker, "On the Internet, no one knows that you have nuance"
I think it's much more likely that people revel in seeing someone go down; the article clearly alluded to this sadistic aspect I think. As soon as there is enough critical mass for a public shaming, people will jump on the bandwagon.
What needs to change is that this kind of public shaming on the internet should be looked down upon in the future, just at is now in real life. The first step is for employers not to be so spineless to immediately fire an employee that is talked about.
This is possible. But I think it's less about this and more about status marking. Joining the pile on is often a quick, cheap way to demonstrate that you care about the right things.
Personally, this just shows that maybe people shouldn't be broadcasting their every thought out to the entire world. If you're not comfortable with it being on the front page of the New York Times, don't tweet it.
Is being cynical and self-deprecating really such an unacceptable packaging of the message that someone should be fired over it?
Here's Louis CK doing a bit about being so disgusted by a gay guy rollerblading that proclaims "go skate into an AIDS tree, you motherfucker."
There's an easy solution to this (if one isn't an idiot). If there's a reasonable explanation that doesn't imply bad intentions, just err on the side of that one. The "principle of charity" honestly has pretty much no downside, and pretty huge upside. One of the real shocks I got coming into adulthood was finding out that more people don't act this way. Somewhat tangentially, it also removes a lot of stress from your life: when a service worker fucks up badly, people I'm with are often pretty pissed at them (whether or not they express that directly) while my reaction is "eh shit happens, people make mistakes, why get worked up".
Maybe it's a situation where working on the 8th floor makes most people more likely to take an elevator than if you worked on the 2nd floor, but if you do keep taking the stairs you quickly become very good at it.
Yes all the tweets quoted in the article were obnoxious and leveraged stereotypes but I don't think people should be flogged for being like that.
I remember all the obnoxious Polish jokes growing up. They were terrible. But I don't agree that they should be censored. Demanding this mind of self censorship is a sign that a society is fragile rather than robust. A robust society can take the jokes.
It's like with friendships. With good friends you can nettle them; say terrible things and we know that's it's all in good fun, a ritual of sorts. With so so friends you don't make bad jokes because the friendship is too fragile. It's a sign of an immature or fragile society when bad jokes upset the cart.
Edit. An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.
Ken White has quite a few posts about freedom of speech vs the Internet. I think this quote is apropos to that type of comment.
Speech Is Not Censorship: Put another way, as we often say here, speech is not tyranny. Freedom of speech does not (and cannot, under any coherent legal or philosophical approach) involve freedom from criticism. Free speech does not mean "I have a right to say whatever I want without social consequences." [0]
[0] - https://www.popehat.com/2012/10/16/a-few-words-on-reddit-gaw...
And, as others have noted. On the past these idiotic social indiscretions and letting off of steam were for the most part quickly forgotten, people went on with life. People say all kinds of idiotic things in ordinary speech for many reasons. Few of those reasons are malicious.
For cornering people's though like this is not productive. It's like whack-a-mole. People will let steam out some other way. You can't change society and its mores by force of on-line bullying. Many many times those calling offense don't understand the context.
It's like one day calling out people who when they have sex have a disposition to say nasty things. I can see it rationalized right now. Don't say b c* d* etc. Even as re playing as that unconsciously has an effect on people....
No. Fuvk no. I've come to the conclusion that only allowing the ugliness to surface can we call ourselves free. Anything else is a sanitized life. The thing is who decides what is healthy?
If you published something similarly obnoxious in a newspaper before the Internet, I'm sure you'd get a similarly angry response from some people, and quite possibly have someone harass you in person if they knew where to find you.
If you stood on top of a soap box and shouted offensive crap at the public, you might have stuff thrown at you.
The only things that have changed - it's easier to publish things online, you're publishing for a global audience rather than a national or a local one, it's easier to find other people who find those publications obnoxious online, and it's a two-way medium rather than the traditional one-way medium of newspapers.
Basically, the masses finally have a voice. If that's a problem, perhaps free speech has never actually had a chance of working?
Not only is it easier to publish things, it is also easier to attack people. The only thing needed to begin a shaming, is a large list of followers and the ability to tell a narrative.
Read the article again... some of the lynch mobs weren't even factually correct about what they mobilized for. The attempt to implicitly pull in the "well, they sorta deserved it defense" fails on the grounds that you're leaving the determination of who deserved it up to a mob.
Hi, I'm one of your friendly neighborhood HN libertarians, and everyone take note, I'm about to defend government here. If someone does something seriously deserving of that level of opprobrium, firings, and social tarring-and-feathering, they deserve the protections that government processes can bring to bear to try to do our best to make sure that we only fire the big guns at people who, to the best of our knowledge, have been determined to deserve it by processes with a longstanding historical pedigree and centuries of back-and-forth tuning. There's a reason we have trials and such, a deep and important one.
Do not be so hurried to give up that social standard because, let's not mince words here, you're playacting at being offended because that's what your social group expects. Let's not pretend that anybody was actually offended at the statement of someone with 170 twitter followers, and if anybody really, truly was somehow "offended" it was only after the actions of the lynch mob itself! They're the ones who actually spread it around... maybe they're the ones we should lynch. Without trial, of course.
That's so. But if society frequently inflicts severe extralegal punishment for unpopular speech, then you don't really have free speech. You just have First Amendment rights. They aren't the same thing.
As a thought experiment, imagine Person X said something deemed offensive and society responded in a uniform manner - by constant public humiliation, refusing to do business with them, refusing to even speak to them, etc. All this is well within our legal rights (with maybe some exceptions) but life for such a person would be very difficult, if not impossible - they'd probably end up starving in the streets. That's not a very free society even if there are no legal consequences whatsoever for any speech.
I think it's very important to affirm that even if someone says something offensive that the response should be measured.
Angry mobs petitioning people to be fired from their jobs for bad jokes or unfavorable political donations don't violate the First Amendment, but they certainly discourage speaking freely.
Sure, but you don't magically make society robust by telling racist jokes. The healthy society comes first; the fact that these jokes no longer sting is just a pleasant side effect.
Let me rephrase that:
> A robust society requires everyone in the minority to shut the fuck up when anyone in the majority makes them feel invisible
> An irony is that many of the people calling offense don't realize their own transgression in becoming part of a self-righteous mob meting out punishment at the speed of thought.
There's a difference between pointing out someone acting obnoxiously and couch-fainting.
Societies need to allow the free flow of ideas. We can't be choosy about what we consider proper or not, desirable and not. We have to allow everything.
I used to be a dreamer growing up and thought why not make these bad thoughts illegal, racism cured. No. That was naive. It has too many negative collateral consequences.
Aristotle
Based on my (admittedly very limited) experience with French culture, this is definitely the most important difference.
America has become extremely politically correct. People in France are much more relaxed about saying things Americans might construe as offensive. In particular, Americans tend to be much more wary of speaking about perceived victim groups (certain racial groups, homosexuals, etc.).
Unless they are saying something conceivably pro-Nazi?
I think Europe has a keener sense of the history of this activity, because the artifacts of prior historical mobbing are abundant. You only have to take a walk through Prague, Budapest, Berlin to see just how this is reflected in European sensibilities - whereas in the US, its a less overt historical fact. Americans are very loud about things, Europeans often very reserved and conservative, but there is fundamentally no difference between the cultures: both are capable of succumbing to cannibalistic, collective-reactive urges. I witnessed this factor countless times in my experience living in the US (I'm not American), most severely during the Rodney King riots. People form a kind of super-being in a mob, a near God-like entity, which can perform powerful acts - go to the moon, solve humanitarian crises, and so on. But it can also turn vicious and heinous as well, and there seems to be some sort of scale upon which the tone of activity can be plotted. I don't think there is a difference in scales for European versus American societies; just that the fact of observation of the energy of the mob is louder in some cultures that have evolved to profit from that loudness - America, in this case. Celebrity/Entertainment culture being what it is in the US, I think its just a brighter shade of pale than, for example, the French may be used to - but its the same basic color.
This kind of mobbing and over reaction do happens in France as well and I don't deny that. Recently 3 millions get down the street because 18 peoples has been killed. So I acknowledge that over-reaction is not just an american thing. It's more on the employer side that I'm surprised. If an employer is not stupid why would he fire someone on these bases?
One of the reasons I love Germany and Germans. They like to solve the root problem rather than trying to pretend to.
I'd hardly call NASA or UNICEF a mob.
This feels like the main issue here. Barring substantial improvements in everyone's maturity, you won't be able to prevent random people on the Internet from focusing on you for whatever reason. The actual individual actions that follow, however (the employer arbitrarily sacking you, people refusing you service, people harassing you, etc.) are what crosses the line, in my opinion.
just one example...
I believe that it will soon become necessary for some sort of online bill of rights which protects one's identit(y,ies) and privacy.
Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received,
one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”
Post anything online and there's a chance you'll be someone's next fix.
Simply put, a great deal of what drives the extremist behavior on the internet is straight up narcissism. The people participating in pile-on internet bullying campaigns feel good about themselves when they do so, and receive praise (from the internet mob that they have aligned with) for doing so.
We could argue that people shouldn't make posts like these, but in doing so, we ignore our own humanity. We're not robots. Humor is an essential cognitive mechanism for building neural structures so that we can understand the world around us. It helps us to recognize and make sense of subjects that otherwise would be too emotionally difficult to face head-on. This is part of the reason I think that faux news shows like the Colbert Report have been so successful. By denying this sort of expression, we are essentially denying an important cognitive tool for understanding.
Did you read the article? By thinking for a few seconds, the point of the tweet is obviously not racist. Not a smart tweet, in retrospect, but. Here's her explanation from the article:
> I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal. (...) 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.
Honestly, does it even matter? Say it was a racist tweet, and she was a racist. Does that mean she deserved what happened to her? Definitely not.
Mind you, such caution used to be common sense behavior for everyone. Then Facebook[1] happened. The second Eternal September.
It also seems to have become common for professionals to promote themselves under their real names without keeping separate, anonymous accounts for non-business activities.
When it goes well they're growth-hacking (puke) their careers, using all their twitter followers and likes and GitHub projects or whatever to market themselves and/or their services and/or products they're paid to sell. When it goes poorly we get stories like this. Live by the sword, die by the sword. (I don't know that that applies in this case, but it has in others)
The situation in the article is really shitty, of course, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm just puzzled that throwing your real name on every corner of the Internet stopped drawing derision and advice to cut it out, at some point. It's why the calls for reducing online anonymity to end online harassment by strangers strike me as such a strange approach—the absolutely undisputed solution used to be more anonymity! It's a major cultural shift from the very recent past, but I don't see it brought up very often.
[1] Not just Facebook, obviously, but the timing fits.
It could obviously backfire. You say something that you think is fine, someone else gets offended, and they know exactly who you are. But generally, I think using your real name makes people more accountable for what they say online.
You might want to rotate your current one a little sooner ;-)
Separation is good opsec.
I'm not entirely sure of what "Social Justice" means in the US, or how can such a thing be negative, but it seems to me that it's about enforcing social norms. If the social clock was set back a few decades earlier, you would get the same pitchfork mob if you tweeted something in favour of homosexuality. Just look at what happened to Adria Richards.
My personal theory is that people like to see blood flowing. We don't get our bread and circus any more, pogroms and lynchings have gone out of fashion, but we still have the Internet to get our kicks.
The phrase "social justice" in this context usually refers to things like this:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=social+justic...
Someone brought up the example of Ben Noordhuis and node.js elsewhere in this thread. Assuming for the sake of argument that Ben's behavior was something that you didn't want in the world, it's not enough to message him in private and say "Hey, this was wrong for these reasons." That gets you change within the node community (well, provided it's Ben acting), but not anywhere else. Meanwhile, if you object in public and write a blog post about it... do you think io.js is going to risk rejecting a pull request about gendered pronouns now? Or any other equally large, somewhat-overlapping language community?
I would definitely agree with the criticism that the blog post should have tried harder not to look like an attack on Ben as a person. But it reads to me like it wasn't the intention; it was an attack on anyone who acts in the same way.
The case of dongle-gate at PyCon is a good example to talk about. We should now understand that attempting local solutions outside of social media is far preferable. Individuals (on either side of an issue) should not be cannon fodder for social causes. Inviting/creating that sort of public ostracism is extremely irresponsible. I hope that we (collectively) are learning that lesson.
Maybe protecting individuals from social media attacks can be seen as a social justice cause? The most vulnerable minority is the minority of one.
Perhaps the possibility that the means of choice are toxic should be considered.
Point is: It's a joke. Learn the difference.
"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."
This is delusional slacktivism. Overthrowing power structures and hierarchies by retweeting. How more delusional can you get?
OTOH, if you've got a PR job or a shitty position where you'd get fired for saying such stuff, you really ought to be ever so careful. Why are people posting this stuff with their real names attached? Unless you've got FU money or are in a career track that's mostly immune to this kind of harassment, just use a separate personal account. FFS, does anyone think the general public wants your tweets?
When can you get 15,000 people to hate something you've decided is worth hating, its quite a buzz.
Once I saw a T-Shirt in tshirthell.com that said something like "arrest black babies before they become criminals". I don't remember the exact words. THAT is obviously and ridiculously over the top.
I gather many youtube commenters have a Twitter account and an attitude.
Offensive people who do offensive things and then defend them saying 'it was just a joke, bro!'
Wow, this almost makes it sound as if HN is a bunch of MRA losers :( A pity it's so sloppily worded (unless it's true, in which case, ugh).
But there are a bunch of MRA losers on HN. How many, it's hard to tell; maybe a few that are very vocal, maybe a few with many sockpuppets, maybe a lot. If you ever get involved in a thread about any issue about women in technology, programs for encouraging women in technology, or the like, you will see them come out of the woodwork (and such threads will frequently drop off the front page as the long comment threads trigger HN's algorithm that try to discourage flamewar topics).
So I'd say it's MRA-loserville-adjacent.
While the original joke was childish, I cannot think of one adult working in any industry who's never said something in a similar vein (or pointing out someone else's phasing might have a double meaning, and so on). It really has nothing to do with gender politics, she was just on a quest and picked up any small examples she could find.
Nobody should have been fired. That's on the employers. However if anyone was going to be fired she deserved it the most, simply because she started this ball rolling on purpose, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Torch mobs are an atrocity. They were against a gentleman making a lame but benign joke. They are against someone posting some random thought-crime tweet. They are against the people who send the torch mobs in fast pursuit.
And equally to blame are people in positions of power who bend so easily to torch mobs. If you immediately fire someone for something that would be at most a warning, all because a mob demands it, you are the problem, and a coward to boot.
HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago. Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind.
There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.
This much is true.
> HN is in general no longer held with the same regard it was a couple of years ago.
This may be true in some circles, but I don't think its generally true. Its probably true that HN is seen by some who participated in it earlier as less of an exclusive club of like-interested folk as it has gained popularity, but that's going to happen with any narrow forum over time that doesn't have an exclusionary wall for membership (and exclusive walls of membership have their own problems which will can erode the image of a forum over time in different ways.)
> Note the number of progressive, well-respected regulars who've left this place behind.
Such as...?
> There are other avenues to discuss tech and tech issues without ancaps, MRAs, and anti-SJW crusaders trying to internet-fight you at every turn.
Well, I suppose you could have a forum with a political litmus test for membership or heavy-handed pre-publication moderation of comments, but given how much the tech community overlaps with the ancap, MRA, and anti-SJW crusader communities -- and, perhaps more importantly, the reaction many outside those communities would have to the kind of approaches necessary to eradicate the unwanted comments -- you'd probably lose some value for actual tech and, particularly, tech issues discussions.
But where do you see those better alternatives?
It's amazing how self-described "progressives" can come in here and happily defend this kind of behaviour. I hope you find a nice new website and never have your views challenged again.
Please tell me where? I've noticed the same irritating trends here. At this rate, I might just go back to Slashdot.
I've actually given a lot of thought to things like this, having worked with someone whom I despised due to a complete lack of tact and decorum. Despite the fact that I would never ever want to work with or be associated with this person again in any way, he still has the right to earn a living and contribute his skills to society. In fact, I would argue that most if not all the people he has offended over the years would not actually feel good about "justice" being served if he were fired and/or out of work.
This is also why I've never had twitter, never will, and only use facebook passively. There is no upside; anything you say can and will be used against you.
If you're a band announcing a tour date, or a food truck sharing your location, sure, but if you are trying to be a commentator or funny guy to gain a following, it will probably just blow up in your face like this eventually.
The good news is that you don't have to use twitter. This is only a problem if you allow it to be one for you. There are plenty of other effective means of communication.
Had no one seen what mobs of angry people do?
This is getting worse, not better. We will see this kind of anger junkie mob mentality explode into real violence. And then the violence will escalate.
Good news. We are seeing the end of the nation state. Just like they said. It is being replaced with niche mobs of worldwide scope.
"It may be so, but think of putting it so bluntly into print. In print everything ought to be decorous; there ought to be ideals, while instead of that...
Say it indirectly, at least; that's what you have style for. But no, he doesn't care to do it indirectly. Nowadays humour and a fine style have disappeared, and abuse is accepted as wit. I do not resent it: but God knows I am not enough of a literary man to go out of my mind..."
btw I guess it was a throwaway comment, but.."We are seeing the end of the nation state" Where do you see that? (I see multi-level governance.)
But on the net, I am only limited by my degree of outrage. Somebody does something stupid -- then each additional commenter takes it on themselves to "up the ante" and make the stupid person pay.
Right now we're just ruining people's lives (!). But as we start seeing these lynch mobs physically start acting out, then the state will no longer have the monopoly on force. Whether or not that's an existential question depends on your comfort level with chaos, I imagine. Whatever your personal view, the state as we know it in many cases will no longer exist.
> 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.
Is this really what we've come to? We have all this technological progress so you could stalk someone you're butthurt over and try to get at them?
> Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received
So that others who have nothing better to do could pile on this?
> 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.
Wake up! Who ever gave a damn about some tweet? Be it corrupt mega-corp or a media figure.
> I didn’t want people looking at me
Well, now that's a cool story you better tell everyone on twitter :)
> The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance
Ah, nothing like snooping in on the conversation that isn't meant for your damn ears and then getting all butthurt about it.
> <Story about people who can't take the, admittedly, offensive joke, a person who's not smart enough to not crack that joke on the net>
It's not the tweet that is stupid, it's people using the platform in such ways and maybe even the platform itself. Come on, we can do better than that after all this time.
TL;DR She got exactly what she deserved in this context, but that doesn't mean that community is some righteous force - quite the contrary, it's simply poisonous.
same as it ever was, now with a lot less effort from the mob
Here, it's just ridiculous.
1) For any given case, yeah, there's probably no protection. This is because we love freedom. No, really. Well, if you can get an honest answer from politicians and CEOs that's not the reason, but to the average "man on the street" who's against stronger worker protections, that's the reason. That or unemployment scaremongering. Really.
2) On the off chance that there is a law, and you know there is, can you afford to be without work and to pay lawyers long enough to fight to have it enforced? Do you even know where to begin? If not, nothing happens. (think minimum wage workers)
3) Is it worth even a small risk of a de facto blacklisting in your industry, permanently limiting your future employment options (and therefore how much you earn)? If not, nothing happens. This is related to the "everyone Googles you these days" thing mentioned in the article. (professionals, skilled trades)
In the end it's riskier for to individuals, on average, to fight these things than it is for businesses to break the law, so little is ever done. That's assuming there was even a law to be broken.
Collective action (class action lawsuits, for example) can help but is nearly impossible to organize effectively without unions, which we've been successfully convinced to hate on principle. Every so often there's a lawsuit, businesses are slapped with fine that's a rounding error in their account books, everything goes on as normal.
But the actual reason why these people are getting fired is because employers are scared shitless of these digital lynch mobs. To them, _not_ immediately firing a person who makes an offensive joke means the employer tacitly approves of the employee's behavior and thus the _employer_ becomes a target.
Apparently, you can also be fired in Germany for "disturbance of the general working environment"
Very few things count as legally protected classes. Its generally limited to race, religion, and gender. Even then the fired worker would have to prove that they were fired because of their membership in a protected class and not for some different reason. This means, at minimum, a lawsuit and I'm sure you can imagine how lopsided lawsuits between well funded corporations and your average private citizen are.
Imagine this: Someone says something unfortunate or offensive at a crowded street corner. Another person hears it and launches into a righteous indignation frenzy. I'll call him the Lead Bully. He stirrs up others. Very soon this turns into a physical attack and the speaker ends up in the hospital with serious injuries.
In this case anyone would easily conclude that the Lead Bully and a number of others should be brought to justice and suffer financial damage for their transgressions.
Well, a lot of these online attacks are not far from my hypothetical scenario. They are launched and stoked by a Lead Bully and stoked by them and perhaps a small group of friends and followers. These attacks result in serious and significant damage spanning from physical and emotional to financial.
According to the article, in Justine Sacco's case the Lead Bully was Sam Biddle, editor of Valleywag. This person single-handedly unleashed the hordes on Sacco. Given his position and following it is impossible to imagine he did not understand the potential consequences of his actions. He ruined this woman's life and quite possibly scarred her for a long time, if not for life.
Much like the street corner beating scenario, he ought to be liable for his decision to affect someone's life. He had at least two choices in front of him. He took the one he knew would stirr-up a hornet's nest.
The case of the guys at the tech conference is similar. Adria Richards decided to be the Lead Bully and, as a consequence, cost a father of three kids his job and caused much pain. I happen to also have three kids. If you are single you have no idea what that man felt at that moment. You can guess, but you can't know. It's horrible.
Did these people say stupid things? Probably. The way to deal with them isn't to ruin their lives. In most cases at a street corner they would be ignored.
When I was younger a mentor said something to me that stuck. He said: Having freedom and being free does not mean having freadom or being free from the responsibility for your actions or what you say.
This cuts both ways. The person who utters or tweets a potentially insensitive remark deserves to be responsible for what they said IN PROPORTION to the nature, degree and context of the statements. The people choosing to eviscerate them using social media ought to also be responsible in proportion to the consequences of their actions. That would be just and fair all around.
Think before you act.
You'd be surprised to find out just how many times the Lead Bully turns out to be Sam Biddle.
It is not stripping away the other's anonymity. It is not convincing their employer to fire them. It is not ostracizing them and all their immediate associates from civil society.
If someone tells a horribly offensive joke, there are several acceptable responses. One is "We are not amused." Another is "The Aristocrats!" Grabbing torch and pitchfork, and marching to the castle to demand that the monster be let go--and without even a letter of recommendation--is not.
Think before you act, yes. Think before you speak? That seems a rather lofty expectation, even in 2015. There is no ill-considered thought so swift that it cannot be hunted down with a remorseful apology.
To illustrate, if your message randomly spread to cause a response to 100k people, and on average each person dedicates 1 minute on it due to offense/indignation/etc, collectively ~1600 hours or 70 days will be spent on it. If a single person is the target of this effort, it can be disastrous.
I don't think we're going to have any less effective social media in the future (nor should we); neither do I believe in the near term people will be much more enlightened as to collectively avoid strong reactions directed at individuals.
So the only way to be strongly opinionated in public online is through anonymity (or through being a "brand" -- a celebrity, a comic, etc, but not the case for the average person). Major companies (facebook,google,...) fail to see this fundamental aspect of the internet: anonimity is a basic tool. We need the hierarchy where our personal communications are more transparent and the more public they become the more anonymous we can be.
I can tell you for a fact I'm sure things on my Twitter account could likely be taken out of context as I can sometimes be a bit of a "Larry David" with my public observations that I can't help but share.
CJ John Roberts knew from a young age he wanted to be Chief Justice. (Overachiever, but lots of us on HN are overachievers.) He kept his record very clean. He never even got a speeding ticket.
And I totally see understand why: he was aware of how the media pick apart people, and who knows what one tiny thing might spiral out of control.
But it means the CJ, when making ruling about police stops, has never actually experienced something the majority of Americans have, and the Court loses some bit of useful perspective.
Believe it or not this mob response is exactly what is meant to keep speech in check, of course the Court's verbiage is not mob rule, rather "the market place of ideas." The law only cares about the Government not prohibiting speech, otherwise the Court's generally expect the speech itself to be accepted/promoted or rejected in the market place of ideas.
One example of accounting for ones words which didn't rise to the level of Court Ordered public shaming, is Lincoln's ridiculing local politicians through anonymous letters. On one occasion when Lincoln's true identity was found out, Lincoln was challenged to a dual. Lincoln himself did not want to dual, and was lucky enough that on the day of the dual the dual was cancelled. From that point forward Lincoln never wrote a critical letter of anyone, and made it a point never to criticize anyone for anything. This is a story that is more fully described in How to Win Friends and Influence People.
The issue is that up until the development of the internet (and particularly the social internet), most people weren't subject to this degree of anonynous public exposure. Before twitter and facebook, news outlets were the only exposure, and because of scalability issues, they typically only targeted 'noteworthy' individuals to catch them off guard. So those people learned to hide behind PR individuals, and carefully guard their words and actions when in the public eye.
Sadly, there will never be a lack of self-confidence, which means that there will never be a shortage of these sorts of things happening.
I wish humanity was better than this.
I think this idea is well-reflected in the movie Precious, when Precious's mother is put on the spot for abusing Precious and is forced to confront her motivations:
> Mary Lee Johnston: But, those... those things she told you I did to her? Who... who... who else was going to love me? Who else was going to touch me? Who else was going to make me feel good about myself?
If you think about it, this rather makes sense. Why should centralized agencies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google determine how I interact with my personal friends?
Before I really struggled with the issue. It goes against my values to shut up, but I know it is probably wiser to do so.
I almost wonder if the best way to handle a scenario like this is to go FULL TROLL MODE and up the ante. Blow out your own credibility so that people realize they are wasting their energy on nonsense.
I have a twitter accout that I set up through TOR and a VPN. I use a username I have never used elsewhere. I dont post anything controversial but I would be pretty happy that I could not be traced without someone obtaining a court order requiring twitter to hand over my IP address, even then it would point to a VPN that (supposedly) does not keep logs.
I do have a problem with one getting fired over a joke - debatable how "funny" it is - on a personal Twitter account. Would a tenured professor be fired over it? Nah....
Who are these people? Really nothing better to do than that? I just don't understand.
"Don't use Twitter."
And on the smaller side is "Don't upload shit to social media."
"The loose ball was snatched up by a Chicago lawyer and sold at an auction in December 2003. Grant DePorter purchased it for $113,824.16 on behalf of Harry Caray's Restaurant Group. On February 26, 2004, it was publicly detonated by special effects expert Michael Lantieri.
In 2005, the remains of the ball were used by the restaurant in a pasta sauce."
(That's my impression anyway; I don't have statistics)
Well, if I'm wearing a Nike hat, Nike t-shirt, Nike running pants, Nike shoes, and a Nike employee badge and make a joke in poor taste at a bar / mall / airport / etc, and the crowd turns to look at me with contempt for the humor in poor taste, it might reflect bad on Nike. The personal humiliation part is being called out in public on making a bad joke. She wasn't just personally humiliated, she was professionally humiliated. Job in PR = maybe know about PR...at least the "Do's and Don'ts" for survival.
It happens, which is why I suppose my Dad taught me early on that if I make a joke at the expense of somebody who is bigger, stronger, and angrier at the world than me, they might punch me out. Can happen in a bar, a grocery store, a parking lot, a motel lobby...it's life. That seems to apply to the internet as well, albeit with some caveats...never let your private thoughts wave around a company banner...
(Late D. F. Wallace, Infinite Jest)
(Sorry to use a French term; I'm not intending to be pretentious, it's just that the term "journalism" has been debased to the point where it is now casually used to refer to advertising).
There's seems to be a lot of piggybacking/freeloading off of original reporting. I was involved with a project that got a big splashy NYTimes write up and it was astonishing in the coming days to see how many joker press outlets basically crimped off the Times' original reporting. They'd include a link and all that but they'd lift the juciest quotes/content and the only thing they'd contribute was some usually sassy commentary.
Here's a really vivid example-- great write up about Target detecting a pregnancy from purchase data: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...
It's a great little news nugget- provocative, interesting, yadda yadda.
And then before you know it, all these "summary"/"reaction" stories get published which didn't exactly contribute much or move the ball down the field:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...
http://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-s...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102859/How-Target-k...
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-t...
I'm not sure if this is a real problem or not, but it seems kind of lame that those other groups get to sit on their cans and pontificate while others get out of their offices.
> In his book Flat Earth News,[3] the British journalist Nick Davies reported a study at Cardiff University by Professor Justin Lewis and a team of researchers[4] which found that 80% of the stories in Britain's quality press were not original and that only 12% of stories were generated by reporters.[1]
Not to worry: put the emphasis on the second syllable and it's an English term as well.
"Pukka sushi compadre" is an English sentence. Even my spell-checker mostly agrees. The word origins are Hindi, Japanese and Spanish, respectively.
England gave up her empire, but kept all the words.
It's essentially online bullying by people that want to silence you for having an opinion that is different than their own.
The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit.
I see this especially in many of the open source and tech communities, which is why I no longer contribute.
I also don't post anything political on my Facebook account. A future employer may look at this and judge me before I'm even hired..and decide not to hire me. Just looking at my list of friends, most people don't seem to realize that this may be a problem.
The same power that gives special interest groups and individuals the ability to launch campaigns to get people fired gives companies the power to not hire you based on your lifestyle or personal beliefs.
Now that FOSS is established, and there are developers that have grown up with FOSS existing unchallenged in society, political agnosticism isn't seen as important.
In contemporary Western culture, ideology seems to be taking the place of religion in terms of regulating morality. Social media has been instrumental in this transition. We're now seeing the emergence of global, ideological tribes that can communicate in realtime. Those who have power within these tribes are largely untouchable within the sphere of social media: they have the power to direct followers to lobby against others for perceived abuses, yet the power they wield intimidates many who would criticize them for abuse of power.
You are either highly naive about FOSS or you've just defined all the vicious politics in FOSS as being just and righteous -- and that is exactly the justifications that the lynchmobs and their leaders in this article hold towards their victims as well.
At least on Facebook you can elucidate your thoughts, defend your opinions, and otherwise make an effort too look like a person who appreciates nuance, rather than someone whose entire intellectual capacity is captured in 140 characters.
It's not dissimilar to traditional news media in that respect -- "if it bleeds, it leads" and all that. Humans like to pay attention to other humans, and are fascinated by bad behaviour and messy accidents. Newspapers and TV channels are always after something that provokes their readers and gets them emotionally engaged at a fight/flight level. And twitter and other social media that permit unrestricted engagement play to this -- that's precisely why they've grown so big.
(Facebook is in no way an improvement unless you lock it down to friends-only. After all, the difference between 4000 characters and 140 isn't that great, when you're trying to discuss complex issues, especially if you're not very articulate or thoughtful in the first place.)
There are people on both sides of an issue who are genuinely, mistakenly trying to have conversations. On Twitter, where the UI is designed to strip context away.
Imagine you are at a party of 100 people, all having their own small conversations in of two to five people. Then imagine someone throws a switch and every single thing said is heard by everyone in the room, but only fleetingly and with no time to imagine the context.
And sometimes Twitter's culture makes it really hard to find context. If someone responds directly to a tweet, you can see that in the conversation, but a manual RT destroys that chain.
The real solution is that we have to recognize that our lizard brains love beating the shit out of people. We've put on a layer of civilization that stops us from doing that in person, but it's just as bad to do it online. Once we recognize that we can be monsters, we can figure out how to stop doing it, or at least do it less.
Communicating with friends? fine, perfectly acceptable, PM or share with some reduced circle.
Trying to be funny in the world where someone could get butthurt over a joke that was snooped from the conversation not intended for their ears? You're asking for it (for the lack of better wording).
And yes I do realize the irony about this comment, feel free to downvote for 'victim blaming' if you don't understand the message.
Twitter & FB aren't the problem. A lack of awareness and judgement is.
It's kind of weird to think that Brendan Eich is still active in the web standards community, even though he's been forced to leave Mozilla. A man without a company.
Imagine if someone with a lot of twitter followers interpreted the statement you just made here as a veiled death threat, unleashing a raging mob against you, ultimately leading the utter destruction of your life as you knew it. Would you say that you were being held accountable for what you just said and that any society that did not do that to you had to be one where no one was being held accountable for anything they say?
Demanding that people should be held accountable for what they say is so generic that it allows for any kind of reaction to just about anything anyone could ever say. The islamists who killed the Charlie Hebdo caroonists could have said the exact same thing.
Proportionality is important.
Also, Sacco's case clearly shows that there are always lots of people out there who are waiting for an opportunity to bully others, regardless of how contrived and intellectually disingenuous the pretext may be. Portraying a joke about racism or race relations as a racist joke is just daft. I can't believe that many people honestly felt that Sacco was being racist. They just wanted to bully someone.
The problem is just the reaction of a mob of arm chair vigilantes thinking they are each delivering some unique tiny bit of justice with their comments, emails or calls. It's a death by a thousand cuts, not to mention the nut-cases who send horrible threats of violence and worse.
It's obviously something ingrained in our DNA, it reminds me of nature documentaries - watching a group of apes attack one of their own who they perceive as weak.
Threats of violence, loss of job, weeks long campaigns -- none of that is an appropriate response.
You have to appreciate the difference between actionable speech and expressing an opinion.
Or just go and post on 4chan anonymously.
I will still post economic or political-ish things, under my real name, but they're generally not very controversial, they're references to articles, book or blogs ( usually that I'd like to see read a bit more ).
It's essentially online bullying by people that want to
silence you for having an opinion that is different than
their own.
The equivalent comparison to Eich would be if he made a joke ending with "... Oh wait, I'm not gay" or something.
(And wasn't a lot of the Mozilla thing really a disguised way at getting back at him for JavaScript?)
Maybe he shouldn't have participated in an offline bullying campaign against an entire segment of the population.
No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions.
Clearly, you do interpret her statement to be an offensive, racist remark, but by her own admission, she instead was commenting on how "[l]iving 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."
Whether or not her explanation for the off-color is truly genuine is up for debate, but scuttling somebody's life and career for something that only might have been a racist remark doesn't seem all that fair to me and (it would appear) a significant fraction of commenters here.
I've done plenty of really f*cking stupid things in my time. I'm very thankful most of them were offline or pre-internet.
And yet if she was a writer for SouthPark or Family Guy, we'd all be laughing at the joke.
I mean presumably you don't think it was a repugnant thing to have posted, but then neither did Justine Sacco.
Didn't G.W. Bush say something similar about people who criticized the Iraq war?
Hahahahahahaha no. Eich paid money to political campaigns to ensure that some of his own employees and fellow citizens would not have basic human rights. Then, he refused to apologize for it and dodged the question when asked if he would do it again. That's not "expressing an opinion," that's nearly sociopathic. He was clearly working against his employees' best interest. Even ignoring his employees' feelings, he was bad for the company. Many productive employees threatened to quit because they didn't want to be represented by a person who explicitly expressed hatred towards them or their friends.
That kind of person does not belong in a position of power, full stop. Expressing homophobia in 2015 is going to close doors, the same way expressing racism or sexism does and should. There was no "bullying campaign" except the one supported and perpetrated by Eich.
Forcing someone to apologize for something that is not universally considered to be wrong is a good example of bullying. As is calling publicly his behaviour "sociopathic".
> He was clearly working against his employees' best interest.
This is hardly considered to be a firing offense for a CEO -- in fact, in many cases this is considered to be good by many people, e.g. by anti-tradeunionists when CEOs fights with unions.
> Many productive employees threatened to quit because they didn't want to be represented by a person who explicitly expressed hatred towards them or their friends.
Saying that he explicitly expressed hatred towards anyone is misrepresenting the facts, and is another example of bullying.
That position of power, and Mozilla as a whole, would likely never have existed without Eich.
There are a lot of people who are hungry enough to signal how righteous they are to their peers that they'll immediately jump to the least-charitable interpretation of anything anyone says, and Justine was their target for 24 hours.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those words in and of themselves. They’re only words. It’s the context that counts. It’s the user. It’s the intention behind the words that makes them good or bad. The words are completely neutral. The words are innocent. I get tired of people talking about bad words and bad language.
Bullshit! It’s the context that makes them good or bad. The context. That makes them good or bad. For instance, you take the word “Nigger.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with the word “Nigger” in and of itself. It’s the racist asshole who’s using it that you ought to be concerned about. We don’t care when Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy say it.
Why? Because we know they’re not racist. They’re Niggers! Context. Context.
We don’t mind their context because we know they’re black.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pksx_IAHDE
In this case, people know the context of Daniel Tosh's words, therefore they don't mind. They minded here, because a Tweet has no context.
Posting anything on the Internet, whether it's public or not (or rather, you think it's public or not) that you wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with the whole world is just stupid. Maybe people will realize this at some point. Hell, I'm worried about my home NAS that's not connected to the outside world, is behind two firewalls, and is encrypted. Of course, if it's that sensitive, it doesn't belong in any digital form.
We are descendants of 40% of males and 80% of females. As religious and legally enforced monogamy decline across all societies, we will see increasingly vicious status wars across all human societies.
This writer is double dipping for his status points, as not only did he specialize in attacking the status of others, but is now acting as the merciful lord who has chosen to forgive those sinful peasants. Clever.
Monogamy was an aberration and an affront to nature, because it forced average females to mate with average males, robbing them of their desire for the highest status male's genetic material. In the past, male resource provisioning was important, but the state has nullified that variable by providing for all.
Status reigns supreme. Defend yours at all costs. Oh, and the best defense is a great offense. Ah homo sapiens...such a fascinating species.
Single males and females are different, in that females hold out for the absolute highest status man for as long as possible, whereas males try to poach any female who meets their minimum fertility requirements. Both end up frustrated as dimorphic sexes have different sexual optimization strategies which are impossible to satisfy simultaneously.
What's important to note is the psychological state of singleness, and its resulting anxiety, is far more damaging than the actual lack of intercourse. In the past, religious and social institutions attempted to prevent this by encouraging early marriage and enforcing it with strict penalties. In the past few decades, all of this has changed rapidly along with the development of effective contraception.
This confluence of factors has thus lead to fiercer competition for each sex as they double down on their strategies, both of which involve status as the main currency. Males attempt to hoard status, and females attempt to attract it. As such, we see far more ruthless status posturing and attacking, of which this article lists many examples.
I did not believe my comments to be controversial, as any cursory glance of the relevant scientific literature will reveal the mundane facts I've stated. However, it appears my statements trigger an immune response in a group of HN readers, for reasons that I can only guess involve discomfort with the somewhat disturbing reality of man's evolutionary origins and predispositions.
I commend you for asking a question rather than reflexively recoiling in disgust. I do believe we will have to confront our natures eventually. Running from the mirror rarely works long term.
She made two racist comments in 1 tweet on her own will. That is not something that should be taken lightly, no matter what the platform.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not commenting on whether firing her was fair or not, but rather how her completely intentional tweets makes Twitter the bad guy.
"Stop the planet. I want to get off."
That sort of absolutism of policing thought just doesn't end well, ever.
To translate it away from Twitter: imagine you're at a public space, such as a mall, and you happen to be walking by a table of people leaning together just as one makes a racist joke.
Is your response a) give them a sort of disgusted look and go on about your day or b) call everyone you know and repeat the joke to them, along with the location of the table in hopes you can whip up a mob of people to shout obscenities at them, continuing to follow them around for the day, and eventually form a mob outside of their office building, continuing to shout at them until their employer fires them?
Most of us would go with 'a' and not 'b', because we realize that what happened doesn't really fit the extreme response. It's interesting to me that people feel that more extreme response is okay, as long as they don't feel personally too involved with it (eg, they can shout remotely).
Rather, imagine her shouting it out at a mall on a day when the mall is relatively empty. (So that she had reason to believe the audience tiny, but still broadcast it) Unfortunately for analogy-world Justine, a news crew was downstairs shooting B roll for background and she's there clearly visible and audible in the corner of the screen, and the clip got leaked. That's the analogous real-life situation.
> but may be overheard accidentally by others
There is nothing accidental about tweeting in public. If she wanted to limit the exposure, she could have used the "protected tweets" feature.
Mob justice mentality certainly sucks though, imagine someone simply inspects one of your tweets, rewrites it and posts it somewhere and says "hey this person's racist, call their employer #{employer-number}".
But, don't you think it's interesting that out of all the countless racist and sexist comments on twitter, that those who are chosen for pillory fit an obvious demographic pattern.
People's names become toxic. Note that the Donglegate guy wouldn't let his name be used, and another woman in the article wouldn't do a followup interview.
"In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."
"aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"
"Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron."
And arguably the worst, for a freaking CTO:
"Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn."
Would you hire that guy to represent your company?
For what it's worth, some VCs did want to fund Glimpse. We didn't follow up on that while Pax was on board, for various reasons. A significant A raise would likely have helped Pax rebrand positively in a mainstream way.
Pax is now publicly pro-gamer gate (as you can see on his Twitter feed and with his most recent startup ExposeCorrupt.) I understand why that would have an impact on marketability.
As much as we talk about diversity in technology, there are some ideas and some kind of people that are simply not welcome. I worry about this a bit because I think it hurts a lot of people, not just neo-reactionaries.
I believe that ostracizing people - without the possibility of giving them second chances - is ultimately bad for everyone. It takes folks who have messed up and disenfranchises them so that they no longer have a stake in their reputation and participation in the community.
She wasn't being racist, she was lampooning American insularity. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't get that it was a joke, and/or didn't get the joke, and she paid the price.
I'm sorry you can't feel sympathy for her for the bad things that happened to her. None of us are perfect, we all act badly sometimes—but we're not comic book supervillains, either. Even bad people deserve sympathy when bad things happen to them.
Should she have lost her job? Yeah probably being in such a high profile position. But should she be reviled as an truly awful person when her only crime was an ill-conceived tweet? I don't think so personally, and it scares me that we are willing to judge and condemn people for so little.
Me too! That's why I try my absolute best to exercise caution and be thoughtful about what I say in a public forum. I don't disagree that the reaction was overkill; but that's the way the world is, even if I think it's wrong.
- She was jobless for a period of time, and there's a lot of stress that comes with that.
- Her family seemed to be set on disowning her for tarnishing their name.
- She can't date without someone Googling her and most likely being turned off by what they find.
Anyone for whom something even remotely resembling this can be said certainly has had a thick mat of privilege to land on, even if the experience were difficult, as it seems to have been.
The biggest challenge we faced was that google dramatically changes your search results based on who you are, and where you are.
My point is - Justine Sacco isn't even on the first page of Justines for me. Maybe google just thinks Sacco is the best Justine for you, but it's probably not as bad as a "global uri".
I think you and I have very different definitions of what "fine" means.
2) It's very easy to pass off casual racism as a joke or a misunderstanding of the medium after it blows up in your face.
These comments call out and critique the people who only care about Africans when someone says something that can possibly be interpreted to be offensive to them. Of course, privileged white people then use the alleged racism as a shield to hide their own hypocrisy behind and make blanket statements to the effect that there is some universal, writ-in-stone definition of what's offensive.
Now that the mob has doled out justice and protected all the Africans from a menace like Saccio, they go back to Whole Foods after their yoga classes and continue right on not giving a damn about how shitty things are in Africa.
If you find that tweet offensive, perhaps you should pause for a moment and consider that maybe, just maybe, it feels that way to you because you were the intended target.
>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.
Her comments that followed seemed to agree with your second point.
It was offensive to you. It also wasn't offensive to some other people. Offensiveness isn't an objective property; the fact that something offended you doesn't make it "an offensive thing".
It's great to push back against casual racism, but I don't think anything is gained by turning it into a lottery where any given tweet has a one-in-a-million chance of provoking a national-scale, life-destroying burst of outrage, and the rest are ignored.
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The danger comes when you misunderstand your core audience, or alienate them. If you go off brand at the same time as you write something dangerous, you risk offending your own audience. That can be deadly.
From this article:
>>> They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.”
This was year 1742.
From the web (http://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/raif-badawi-to-be-p...)
>>>HE IS brought before the crowd and whipped relentlessly 50 times with a long, hard cane.
This is year 2015.
But you can notice the similarity in punishments.
We need to understand that society in every country evolves over time at its own pace. This evolution can take centuries of time in some cases because societies has to understand and readjust peacefully as much as they can.
I guess American political leadership needs to understand and remember these parts of their history before pointing out and shaming/preaching other countries on human rights,intolerance...etc.