Jon Ronson

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

Jon Ronson is a journalist, a radio personality, the author of several books, and a documentary filmmaker. The following selections from his February 12, 2015, New York Times Magazine article capture his interviews of Justine Sacco, who was widely shamed on social media after posting a tweet that many considered racially offensive. The article was adapted from Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015).

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As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, thirty years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC [InterActiveCorp], 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:

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

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Then, during her layover at Heathrow:°

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

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

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

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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.

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8

Sacco boarded the plane. It was an eleven-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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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.

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Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show.“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 “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.” . . .

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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.”

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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. . . .

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[I]n 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. . . .

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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. Web sites 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.

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15

“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.

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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 naively imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Sacco . . . had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?

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“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 e-mail 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.”)

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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.

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“I cried out my body weight in the first twenty-four 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.

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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.”

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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.”

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“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.”

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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.

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“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.”

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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?”

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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.”

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

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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.”

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In January 2014, I received an e-mail 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 e-mail by saying that he had a feeling she’d be “fine eventually, if not already.”

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

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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

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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.”

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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.

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