By Michael W. Harris

Justine Sacco might be the unintentional poster child for our digital communications era. Over Christmas vacation in 2013, while travelling to South Africa, she tweeted a joke and then boarded an eleven hour flight from London to Cape Town. By the time she landed, the then director of corporate communications for IAC was in the middle of a public relations nightmare. Just the sort of thing she would normally be in charge of managing the fallout from. Despite her meager 170 Twitter followers, her tweet had resulted in a worldwide trending hashtag, a feverish watch of #HasJustineLandedYet, and an internet mob piling onto her simple, albeit incredibly insensitive and racist, joke of: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The fact that she was completely unaware of what was going on in real time while her plane was traversing the length of the continent she had insulted with her tweet created the perfect storm for internet schadenfreude. Continue reading “On Shaming and Harassment: The Limits of Speech in the Digital World” →