Read Online So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson - Free Book Online Page B

now.”
    â€œIn 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 “No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified,” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever,” and “Everyone go report this cunt @Justine Sacco,” and from IAC: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight,” and “Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It’s global and she’s apparently *still on the plane,*” and “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 “Looks like @JustineSacco lands in about 9mins, this should be interesting,” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired,” and then, after Hannah frantically deleted Justine’s Twitter account, “Sorry @JustineSacco—your tweet lives on forever,” and so on for a total of a hundred thousand tweets, according to calculations by the website BuzzFeed, until weeks later: “Man, remember Justine Sacco? #HasJustineLandedYet. God that was awesome. MILLIONS of people waiting for her to land.”
    â€”
    I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture—like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.
    â€”
    Over the years, I’ve sat across tables from a lot of people whose lives had been destroyed. Usually, the people who did the destroying were the government or the military or big business or, as with Jonah Lehrer, basically themselves (at least at first with Jonah—we took over as he tried to apologize). Justine Sacco felt like the first person I had ever interviewed who had been destroyed by
us
.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    G oogle has an engine—Google AdWords—that tells you how many times your name has been searched for during any given month. In October 2013, Justine was googled thirty times. In November 2013, she was googled thirty times. Between December 20 and the end of December, she was googled 1,220,000 times.
    â€”
    A man had been waiting for her at Cape Town Airport. He was a Twitter user, @Zac_R. He took her photograph and posted it online. “Yup,” he wrote, “@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.”
    Justine Sacco (in dark glasses) at Cape Town Airport. Photograph by @Zac_R, reproduced with his permission.
    Three weeks had passed since Justine had pressed send on the tweet. The
New York Post
had been following her to the gym. Newspapers were ransacking her Twitter feed for more horrors.
    And the award for classiest tweet of all time goes to . . .
    â€œI had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night.” (February 24, 2012)
    â€”“ 16 T WEETS J USTINE S ACCO R EGRETS ,”B UZZ F EED ,D ECEMBER 20 , 2013
    This was the only time Justine would ever talk to a journalist about what happened to her, she told me. It was just too harrowing. And inadvisable. “As a publicist,” she e-mailed, “I don’t know that I would ever recommend to a client that they participate in your book. I’m very