As dislikable as the tweet's content is, it's truly frightening how quickly an incredibly large pitchforks-and-torches mob can come to life via the internet.
I think what's more frightening to me is how non-systematic this sort of thing is. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to who wins the "doxing lottery". I was looking at my own Facebook and Twitter feeds and realized that I (and maybe most of us, unless we live a pristine life) could just as easily have been Justine Sacco.
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.
It matters because making an offhand joke parodying a stupid person is something that we've all done. This example shows that if you make a little parody joke like that in the wrong medium, your life could permanently pivot 180 degrees for the worst.
> This example shows that if you make a little parody joke like that in the wrong medium, your life could permanently pivot 180 degrees for the worst.
Definitely. But my point was, whether it was racist or not, her life pivoted for the worse—and whether it was racist or not, she didn't deserve what happened to her.
This is the saddest thing. It's so trendy to have offended narcissistic egos today that people don't even recognize when someone is on YOUR side, defending YOUR cause with sarcasm!
The tweet is clearly a quip about western white privilege. Her tweet caused no harm, but the blithering mass of bullying social justice warriors continually ruins lives.
