What a Sacco shit

“To be, or not to be? That is the question—whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and, by opposing, end them?" - This is deemed to be the most famous excerpt from all of Shakespeare’s works. It is poignant, provocative and palpably passionate. And it's concise. But not as concise as a "Tweet". Twitter users attempt to - and are expected to - develop unique and nuanced comical or meaningful thoughts and opinions all-the-while constrained within the reinforced concrete walls of a 140-character limit. Shakespeare had the freedom of over two-hundred characters with which to construct his literary masterpiece, and not an ounce of excess fat more. And therein lies the problem with Tweets. In modern culture, social media posts are treated to the same obsessive scrutiny which was once reserved for the Shakespeares of the world, causing a barrage of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, de-contextualization, over-sensitivities and backlashes. Twitter is a place where our language becomes both precious and precarious. 
A former twitter user who was exposed to this was a young woman named Justine Sacco who worked for InterActiveCorp, an American media and Internet company. Sacco was a successful PR agent until she shared a tweet to her 170 followers one of whom sent the tweet to a Gawker journalist: "Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm White!" Shortly after this tweet was posted she boarded the eleven-hour long flight and switched off her phone. As she slept, without a thought spared for the joke she had just shared, hordes of people began lighting the torches and sharpening their pitchforks. How dare a woman – of such privilege – state that Africa is a cesspit of AIDS, and furthermore that it is exclusive to the non-white population. The ignorance and abuse of privilege she displayed in twelve words was unforgivable. Justine Sacco was a rich, ignorant and malicious racist and it was the duty of the social media mob to ensure retribution. Every news outlet picked up the story – providing live updates, sharing public outrage and speculating on who Justine Sacco was. News began to spread that she was the daughter of South African mining billionaire, Desmond Sacco: with this came a new tsunami of outrage. Justine Sacco was a rich, spoilt mining heiress who had never struggled a day in her life. Of course she would be ignorant about the world; of course she would have no understanding of race, poverty or disease in Africa. She lived in her own comfortable little bubble and now it was social media’s opportunity to burst that bubble; to bring down a racist who abused her privilege; a woman who offended and degraded an entire continent; a woman who associated Africa solely with AIDS, and who had no sympathy for those who suffer. It only took twelve words for us to justify a brutal and public shaming; a career-ending rampage for social justice; and a vicious personal attack. 
The only problem is that we were all wrong.
How could we be wrong? Justine’s Tweet was a racist statement. Cut and dry. It took no time at all for the media to start referring to Justine’s joke as a statement. It took even less time for us to analyze it. She said AIDS; she said Africa; she said she was white. And as the outrage continued to mushroom, the ‘hashtag’, #HasJustineLandedYet, began trending on Twitter. We had all decided she was a racist heiress to billions of dollars. We Tweeted about our disgust. Some even sent death and rape threats; wishing AIDS upon Justine. Some snarked that she would need to go into hiding; that if she was ever seen in public again, violence and abuse would befall her. Some tried to calm the situation down, urging others to assess the situation further, to stop taking it all so personally and to exercise some rationality. These people were shouted down by the mobs and accused of being just as racist as Justine. And so, they kept quiet. They chose not to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”; and instead they stayed silent, and disappeared. That night, on Twitter, they chose ‘not to be’. The mob continued to wait for Justine’s plane to land. Now that the cathartic screaming had died down; now that all the validating pats-on-the-back and self-congratulations had been gobbled up, it was time to wait. It was time to see what we had all created. It was time to witness Justine Sacco’s destruction.
Why was it so exciting? Why did so many sit up all night to witness Justine Sacco’s destruction? As the Gawker journalist, who initially spread Justine’s Tweet, said: “It was delicious”. Twitter, it has been said, gave a voice to the voiceless. It allows those without a soapbox to stand up and be heard. It makes us feel like we have a platform – each of us. But, in time, saying whatever we wanted wasn’t enough. We all became bored with this innovative form of media which allowed us to be heard. We became reckless with this privilege. It wasn’t enough to just say things. Now we wanted to do things. To have an effect on the real world. In Justine Sacco’s case, we wanted to watch her life fall apart, looking on, pointing, and saying to ourselves, “I did that. I helped make that happen”. And the fact that we made it happen without leaving the house, without any effort, thought or cost didn’t matter. It didn’t sully the feeling of validation. We were marching in the streets, screaming about how moral and just we were – all the while trampling anyone who paused to reflect on the cause too deeply.
As Justine Sacco slept on board her long-haul flight, still unaware of what was happening, the excitement grew. Someone posted a link to a flight-tracker, showing exactly where she was. Hundreds of thousands of people watched Justine’s progress, waiting to deliver the final blow. Still, the outrage flew; the threats. One Twitter user stating that he hoped Justine was “raped by someone HIV positive”, to see if “her skin colour would protect her”. No-one batted an eyelid. Justine’s Tweet was defined as hate-speech against non-whites yet the rape-threats directed at her were never once defined as hate-speech against women. Because Justine Sacco was the daughter of a billionaire who had abused her privilege, and her abuser, in this instance, was standing up for social justice, wasn’t he? It was a little crass, but after what Justine Sacco said, she deserved it, didn’t she? Her privilege was going unchecked. She needed to be made aware of how very privileged she was. The aforementioned Gawker journalist’s full response to Justine’s destruction was actually, “It was delicious. But I’m sure she’s fine”. This sentiment was mimicked throughout Twitter. Justine Sacco was not fine. Her plane landed in Cape Town. She was made aware of the situation firstly when an old school friend e-mailed her the following: “I am so sorry that this is happening to you”. Justine Sacco realised what had happened. She hurried out of the airport, covering her face and speaking on a phone and met up with her South African father: the mining billionaire, Desmond Sacco. The man who would ensure that Justine would be fine; ensure that she’ll always be a privileged white woman. It became apparent, though, that the man Justine met with was not Desmond Sacco. Justine’s father, it transpired, was – and still remains – a carpet salesman. No major news outlets amended this error and, to this day, hundreds of articles can still be found online stating that Justine Sacco is the daughter of the mining billionaire Desmond Sacco, and many still believe this to be the case. The news outlets, and social media mobs, ceased to mention Desmond Sacco, but never corrected themselves. Never showed any humility. Why? Well, perhaps, if we faced the fact that we were wrong about Justine’s privilege, we would also have to consider that we were perhaps wrong about who she was, what she meant in her Tweet and why she said it. It was too late for rationale.
So, why do we tear each other apart like this? Justine Sacco’s life and career were decimated over twelve words she typed. She was lied about. She was threatened with murder and rape. She was shamed publically. And she never got over it. Our search for social justice has become meaningless. We no longer have the will, the energy or the concentration to take on those who truly deserve it because we’re scared of nuance. We’ve become melodramatic and long to be told in certain terms what is right and what is wrong. We all decided Justine Sacco was wrong, and any narrative which swerved from that opinion was to be treated with contempt. We’ve become infantile and simplistic. And the best thing about Justine’s destruction was that she had no means to defend herself; to offer an explanation. We had zero opposition to our narrative. And it is much easier for a dictator to tell us what to think than it is for a democratic culture to decide for itself. Alas, we destroyed a life that night. For fear of crossing the mob we joined it. For fear of being trampled we kept moving. For fear of being called racist, we kept silent. Social media was once a haven for free speech, now it is a police state, moderated by self-appointed beacons of justice, where saying the wrong thing can ruin your life. Justine Sacco is now alone. There are hundreds like her, and there will be hundreds more.
Justine Sacco did not deserve to be threatened with rape and murder; she did not deserve to lose her job; she did not deserve to have lies told about her; and she did not deserve to be shamed so brutally in public that she now lives, after all these months, with panic-attacks, insomnia, anxiety and suicidal impulses. But she abused her privilege, didn’t she? Even though it transpires that she was not a mining heiress, she still used her position of privilege as a high-paid white woman to degrade those socially and economically less than her. Or is it possible that after all the inconsistencies, fabrications and false-assumptions made about Justine, the intentions of her joke were being grossly misrepresented too? After all, she had been given no chance to defend her own words. Finally, Justine Sacco did explain her joke to the writer, Jon Ronson, after months of complete silence during which she made no effort to defend herself to the press, to her employers or to the public, because the events of that night had traumatized her so greatly. Justine explained to Ronson: “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”. Justine Sacco: an unknown PR manager with 170 followers on Twitter wrote a self-deprecating joke about her own privilege, mocking the fact that she has a secure life, acknowledging the fact that in her comfortable world people are ignorant about poverty, race and disease, and that she is privileged to live in such a world, but painfully self-aware of it, had her life destroyed by ordinary people like you and I because we were convinced that it was the right thing to do. We reconciled the lies with the truth, to make ourselves feel justified. We twisted a joke into a statement of white-supremacy. We invented a monster where one didn’t exist. We became despots, adamant to silence dissent. We ignored rape-threats because no-one told us to be offended by them. We congratulated ourselves on being hateful. We publically shamed a woman, unable to defend herself, until she was suicidal. We took pleasure in someone else’s despair. And, all the while, we were convinced that we were making the world a fairer place by doing so.