How one tweet can ruin your life | Jon Ronson

Translator: Albana Lapaj Reviewer: Helena Bedalli At first, Twitter was a radical anti-shaming place. People would admit embarrassing secrets about themselves and others would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." People without a "voice" understood that they had a voice, which was powerful and eloquent. If a newspaper published a racist or homophobic column, we realized we could do something about it. You can "catch". We could hit you with a weapon we understood and they didn't, shame on social media. Publishers would withdraw their advertising. When the powerful used their privileges, we rushed to catch them. It was like the democratization of justice, the Hierarchies were being confronted.

We will do the best for you. Very soon after that, a discredited popular science writer, Jonah Lehner, was caught copying and appropriating quotes, and was overcome with shame and remorse, he told me. He had the opportunity to publicly apologize at a Foundation luncheon. This was going to be the most important speech of his

life

. Maybe I can bring you some salvation. He knew before arriving that the foundation would broadcast the event live, but what he did not know until the moment of his arrival was that they had placed a giant screen next to his head where the Twitter posts were displayed. (Laughter) Another one on a monitor screen, in his line of sight.

I don't think the foundation did this because they were monstrous. I think they were not aware; I think this was a unique moment when the beautiful naivety of Twitter collided with an increasingly terrifying reality. These are some of the Tweets that were passing before his eyes, while he tried to apologize: "Jonah Lehner, bothering us until he apologizes." (Laughter) And "Jonah Lehner has not shown that he is capable of feeling shame." This must have been written by the greatest psychiatrist of all time to say this about such a diminutive figure behind the podium. And "Jonah Lehner is a fucking sociopath." The last word is a very human thing: dehumanizing the people we hurt.

It happens because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it. Imagine if this were a real trial, and the defendant was in the dark, looking for another possibility, and the jury shouted, "Boring! Sociopath!" (Laughter) You know, when we watch courtroom dramas, we identify with the defense lawyer, but he gives us the power and we become like the hanging judge. Power changes rapidly. We had told Jonah that we believed he had abused his privilege, but Jonah was down at the time and we were still shooting him and congratulating each other on the shots. And he began to feel empty and strange when there was no powerful person who had abused his privileges to which we were accustomed.

A day of no shame started to look like a day of biting

your

nails and "staying still." Let me tell you a story. It is about a woman named Justine Sacco. She was a PR from New York with 170 followers on Twitter, and she

tweet

ed them bitter jokes, like the one about a plane from New York to London: [Strange German: You're in first class. It's 2014. Use deodorant." -Internal monologue while sniffing. Thank goodness there are pharmaceuticals.] Justine chuckled and hit send and got no response, and felt that sad feeling we all get when the internet doesn't make us happy to be in a bad mood (Laughs) Dark silence when the Internet does not respond to us.

Then he arrived at Heathrow and had some free time before his last stop and thought of another bitter and funny joke: And he laughed to himself, sends the press. , got on the plane, got no answer, turned off the phone, fell asleep, woke up after 11 hours, turned on the phone as the plane was rolling down the runway, and immediately received a message from someone he hadn't spoken to. since high school, saying, "I'm sorry to see what's happening to you." And another message from a close friend: "You have to call me right away." You're the most talked about topic on Twitter in the entire world." (Laughs) What happened was that one of his 170 followers sent the Tweet to a Gawker reporter, and he re

tweet

ed it to his 15,000 followers: And then it went like a storm.

A few weeks later, I sent her an email asking how she was feeling, and then she added, "But I'm sure she's fine, but she wasn't completely fine, because while she was sleeping Twitter took control of her

life

." and rewarded her little by little. First it was the philanthropists: [If @JustineSacco's unfortunate words... worry you, join me in supporting @CARE's work in Africa.] Then comes the horrified: [...No. I have words for Justine Sacco's horrible, defamatory, racist tweet. I'm horrified.] Was anyone on Twitter that night? Did Justine's joke flood

your

Twitter page like it did mine, and I thought what everyone thought? that night was? "Wow, someone made a mistake!" Someone's life is getting horrible!" And I sat on my bed, put the pillows behind my head, and thought, I'm not entirely sure that joke was racist.

Maybe instead of flaunting his privilege, he was making fun of it. of this bragging rights. There's a tradition of that in comedy, like Colbert or Randy Newman. Maybe Justine Sacco's crime was that she wasn't as feminine as Randy Newman. Actually, when I met Justine a week later at a bar, she. She was devastated and I asked her to explain the joke to me and she said, "Living in America puts you in a bubble when it comes to what happens in the Third World." I was making fun of that bubble." Another girl on Twitter that night, a young writer, Helen Lewis, reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she posted a Tweet that night: "I'm not sure her joke was on purpose. . "Maybe you're a privileged bitch too." And, to her shame, she wrote, she stayed silent and watched as Justine's life began to get worse.

Even darker: Then demands began to have her fired. Thousands of people around the world decided it was their duty to say goodbye to her. The corporations got involved in hopes of selling her products behind her back out of nowhere Justine: [Next time you plan to do it. tweet something idiotic before you take off, make sure you catch a @Gogo flight!] (Laughs) A lot of companies were making a lot of money that night, you know, Justine's name was usually searched on Google about 40 times. one month. That month, from December 20 to the end of December, her name was searched on Google 1,220,000 times.

And an Internet economist told me that meant Google made between $120,000 and $468,000 on Justine's nothing, while those of us who directly shamed got nothing. (Laughs) We were like embarrassing, unpaid interns for Google. (Laughter) Then the jokes started: Someone else wrote about it: "Someone who is HIV positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS." And this person was allowed to pass. Nobody attacked him. We were all so eager to destroy Justine, and our shame brains are so simple, that we couldn't bear to destroy someone who was destroying Justine inappropriately.

Justine was rallying many desperate groups that night, from philanthropists to "shithole rapists." [@JustineSacco I hope you get fired! You're crazy... Let the world know you plan on riding bareback while you're in Africa.] Women always have it harder than men. If a man is ashamed, it is, "I will have you fired." When a woman feels ashamed, they say, "I'm going to have you fired, raped, and have your uterus removed." Then Justine's employers responded: [IAC for @JustineSacco tweet: This is an offensive and unacceptable comment. The employee in question is currently not available on international travel.] And then anger turned to excitement: [All I want for Christmas is to see @.

JustineSacco's face when her plane lands and he checks her inbox/voicemails. #epushuar] [@justinesacco will have the most painful moment turning on the phone when her plane lands.] [Because we're about to see @JustineSacco get fired from her before she does. She even knows she's going to be fired.] What we had was a beautiful story arc. We knew something he didn't know. Can you think of anything more critical than that? Justine was asleep on the plane, unable to explain herself. Twitter, we were crawling towards a gun. Someone managed to find exactly which plane she was on and linked it to a website that tracked trips.

A hashtag began to spread around the world. #akazbriturJustiney yet? [It's a little crazy to see someone self-destruct without being aware of what's happening to them. #akazbriturJustineende] [Seriously. I just want to go home and go to bed, but everyone at the bar is behind #akazbriturJustineende. I can't pretend I don't see it. I can't leave.] [Will anyone in Cape Town go to the airport to wait for her to get off? Give me Twitter! I want pictures.] And guess what? Yes, someone did. @JustineSacco actually landed in Cape Town International. And if you want to know what it looks like for someone who's just been torn apart by a misinterpreted liberal joke, not by some bastards, but by decent people like us, this is what it looks like: Why do we do those things?

I think some were really upset, but I think for other people, maybe because Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way as us and we approve of each other, and that is a very good feeling. And if someone interferes, we exclude them. And do you know whose opposite this is? It is the opposite of democracy. We wanted to show that we felt sorry for the people dying of AIDS in Africa. Our desire to be seen as compassionate is what drove us to this fundamentally uncompassionate action. As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote in the Boston REview: "This is not social justice, it's an alternative to catharsis." For the last three years, I have traveled the world meeting people like Justine Sacco and believe me, there are many people like Justine Sacco.

There are moments and more. And we want to think that they are very good, but they are not good. The people I met were crippled. They told me about depression, anxiety and insomnia and suicidal thoughts. A girl I spoke to who also told a joke that was taken badly, stayed home for a year and a half. Before that, she worked with adults with learning difficulties and was very good at her job. Justine was fired, of course, because social media demanded it. But it was worse than that. She was losing herself. She would wake up in the middle of the night and forget who she was.

She was attacked because she was perceived to be using her privileges. And it's definitely a much better reason to be censured than the other reasons we use, like having children out of wedlock. The phrase "abuse of privilege" is becoming a license to scam almost anyone we want. It is becoming a devalued expression, and it is making us lose the ability to empathize and distinguish between serious and frivolous offenses. Justine had 170 followers on Twitter and, for her to work, she had to become an unreal character. We discover that she was the daughter of mining billionaire Desmond Sacco. [Don't be fooled by #JustineSacco, her father is a mining magnate.

She has no regrets. Not even her father's.] I thought that was true about Justine, until I met her in a bar and asked her about her billionaire father and she said, "My father sells rugs." And I think back to the early days of Twitter, when people were admitting embarrassing secrets about themselves and other people were like, "Oh my God, I'm exactly like that." These days, the search for people's dirty secrets is on. We can live a good and ethical life, but a bad expression in a Tweet can turn everything upside down and become a secret evil signal inside you.

Perhaps there are two types of people in the world: those who prioritize man over ideology and those who prioritize ideology over man. I put the person before the ideology, but right now, the ideologues are winning and setting the stage for a constant contrived drama in which everyone is either an awesome hero or a boring villain, even though we know that's not true for people. What is true is that we are smart and stupid, what is true is that we are in the gray zone. The most powerful aspect of social media was giving a voice to the voiceless, but now we are creating a surveillance society where the smartest way to survive is to become voiceless again.

Let's not do this. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Jon. Jon Ronson: Thanks, Bruno. BG: Don't go. What surprises me about Justine's story is the fact that today you were searching for her name on Google, this story covers the first 100 pages in Google results, there is nothing else about her. In his book, he mentions another story of another victim who was taken over by a reputation management company and created blogs and publications. A nice and innocent story about her love for cats, vacations and other things managed to get the story out of the first pages of Google, but it didn't last long.

A few weeks later, they began to climb back to the top of the results. Is it a battle finally lost? Jon Ronson: I think the best thing we can do, when we see this kind of dishonest shaming, is to speak up, because I think the worst thing that happened to Justine is that no one called her.supported, everyone was against him, and that's deeply traumatizing to have hundreds, thousands of people tell you that you should leave. But if shaming happens and there are some zeroes, like in democracy, when people talk about it, I think this is much less harmful.

I think this is the way to progress, but it is difficult, because if you defend someone, it is terribly unpleasant. BG: Let's talk about your experience, because by writing this book you get a position. By the way, it's a must read for everyone, okay? You stop because the book focuses on the "embarrassments." And I think that on Twitter not only friendly reactions are allowed. JR: Some people didn't like it very well. (Laughs) I mean, I don't want to focus because a lot of people understood and were very kind to the book. But yes, for 30 years I have been writing stories about abuses of power, and when I say powerful people there in the army, or in the pharmaceutical industry, everyone applauds me.

As soon as I say "We are the powerful who are abusing our power." People tell me, "Then you must be racist too." BG: The day before yesterday we were having dinner and there were two discussions. On the one hand, you were talking to the people sitting around the table... and it was a nice, constructive conversation. On the other hand, every time I turned on the phone there was a string of insults. JR: Yeah, that happened last night. Last night we had a TED dinner. We were chatting and it was really nice and I decided to check Twitter.

Someone said, "You're a white supremacist." Then I went back and had a nice conversation with someone, then I went back on Twitter and someone said that my mere existence made the world a worse place. ik friend Adam Curtis said that maybe the Internet is like a John Carpenter movie from the '80s where, sooner or later, everyone will start yelling and shooting at each other, and at some point someone will run to safety, and I'm starting to do it. Think of it as a good option. BG: Thank you! JR: Thank you Bruno. (Applause)