She was mocking racism, people confused it for racism. The reactionaries remind me of the people who wrecked this Banksy: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/01/banksy-m...

Exactly. I thought hacker news was a relatively smart crowd, but it seems there are people in this thread that don't even get that.

"Stop the planet. I want to get off."

I don't like the extremism behind the idea that we should fire someone from their job over a off-color joke which is intended for a small audience, but may be overheard accidentally by others.

That sort of absolutism of policing thought just doesn't end well, ever.

To translate it away from Twitter: imagine you're at a public space, such as a mall, and you happen to be walking by a table of people leaning together just as one makes a racist joke.

Is your response a) give them a sort of disgusted look and go on about your day or b) call everyone you know and repeat the joke to them, along with the location of the table in hopes you can whip up a mob of people to shout obscenities at them, continuing to follow them around for the day, and eventually form a mob outside of their office building, continuing to shout at them until their employer fires them?

Most of us would go with 'a' and not 'b', because we realize that what happened doesn't really fit the extreme response. It's interesting to me that people feel that more extreme response is okay, as long as they don't feel personally too involved with it (eg, they can shout remotely).

I think if you want to use the appropriate analogy, you have to include that it was fundamentally a public thing to do, even though she believed her audience tiny. Your analogy as presented gets confused because of the social conventions against eavesdropping, even in a public place. A tweet is fundamentally meant to be a broadcast to the world, not just your immediate followers.

Rather, imagine her shouting it out at a mall on a day when the mall is relatively empty. (So that she had reason to believe the audience tiny, but still broadcast it) Unfortunately for analogy-world Justine, a news crew was downstairs shooting B roll for background and she's there clearly visible and audible in the corner of the screen, and the clip got leaked. That's the analogous real-life situation.

I'm not saying firing her was fair or unfair - the company has to respond to public reaction too. I'm saying how is Twitter the bad guy here.

> but may be overheard accidentally by others

There is nothing accidental about tweeting in public. If she wanted to limit the exposure, she could have used the "protected tweets" feature.

There's nothing accidental about being in public when you're at a table at the mall, either, and yet we accept that people make communications in such spaces, which because of the medium carry beyond their party, that were really only meant for their group. In the same sense that voices carry in a public space, Tweets can be seen by a larger group than was intended.

It's a sad state of affairs if our only option for having semi-open communications on the internet - things that friends of friends can see without having to sign up to a walled garden - is if we only say things that are acceptable to everyone possible, for fear of mobs semi-randomly forming, or worse, forming at the behest of a for-profit company driving the mob in a frenzy to get ad revenue (which is the case for times companies like Gawker have stirred the mob up).

Sounds like victim-blaming to me.

If only she wasn't wearing /that dress/ in public...

She's a victim because the consequences were completely out of proportion to her transgression.

Really? She mocked a whole nation, and used a disease that has killed over a million people as a joke in a public forum.

She was being ironic - making fun of herself by pretending to be a ditzy, entitled white girl who though that she could never get AIDS. Unfortunately, in her absence, people took her literally and assumed she was serious.

She has plenty of reason to now explain it as being ironic, but we'll never know if that was her original intent, will we? Her other tweets from the same period strike me immature and mean-spirited.

So you choose to believe she meant she literally cannot get AIDS?

Come on.

My point is, it's natural for her to say afterwards that it was meant ironically now that the backlash has happened. Maybe she's just a jerk who got caught being a jerk.

My point is, either she was saying it ironically or she was saying it seriously. She can't possibly have said it seriously.

Was it a somewhat insensitive joke? Sure. But you can't take the statement at face value.

Since, we'll never know the context, better call her a racist, publicly shame her. and get her fired!

She publicly broadcasted something that was, at best and assuming one gives her the benefit of the doubt, extremely insensitive and in any case indicative that she is perhaps not the best choice to be a communications director.

If an accountant got caught stealing in her off hours should she expect to find herself still employed?

> She mocked a whole nation, and used a disease that has killed over a million people as a joke in a public forum.

Pssst...Africa is a continent, not a nation.

Yes, exactly, as a joke. The amount of backlash she got is far greater than the atrocity of making a bad joke.

The joke was supposed to be on her ignorant statement not on the nation, the disease or the victims. Unfortunately, no one got the joke.

You're right, she should probably be executed for that joke. /s

You should, in general, stay away from the internet -- especially twitter -- people make these joke things about "serious" stuff all the time.

Gotta thicken up that skin, friend.

I think the issue is that the response is disproportionate to the sin. Littering is socially undesirable but randomly executing 1 out of every 10,000 people who litter is probably excessive. In the same way, racist tweets are undesirable, but lynching randomly people who make them seems unproductive and does nothing more than fill people's want for something to self-righteous about.

It looked like a harmless joke to me. wtf is wrong with ppl.

People get offended, you might think that's right, wrong or whatever but it happens. And you certainly wouldn't make that joke outside of your close circle of friends.

Mob justice mentality certainly sucks though, imagine someone simply inspects one of your tweets, rewrites it and posts it somewhere and says "hey this person's racist, call their employer #{employer-number}".

Racist jokes are never harmless.

In an open and democratic society, free speech is a value that is foundationally the core value that underpins everything. Free speech is there to protect the offensive and inappropriate... not civil discourse.

Supporting an environment where it's acceptable to respond to some perceived slight (which changes over time) with an crazy overreacting mob isn't OK in an open society ever. You're very sensitive to racist statements... how do you feel 10 years from when the "offensive statement of the day" is an anti-war statement? Or a statement offensive to a particular religious doctrine?

History is littered with people who do awful things while believing that they are righteous. Nobody in colonial Massachusetts was pro-witch. Nobody in 1950 America was pro-communist.

Please point out the racism in her satire-laden joke about how america perceives the rest of the world?

Am I the only one that "got" what she was saying?

Please elaborate on the harm caused by her tweet.

Edit: Maybe I'm not being clear. What I mean is can you point to any harm done by her tweet besides hurt feelings?

Being publicly racist harms people towards which said racism is directed at. I honestly thought that was an established truth.

Except she wasn't being racist, she was being sarcastic about racism.

And in any case, no crime deserves the horrific public shaming she got.

Isn't taking about them freely(Joking included) the first step to addressing the issue?

Don't say Jehovah.

Eighth Amendment - and secondly, I can't say the "social media lynching" is right either. This has gone far & above reprimanding someone for racial language to full on schadenfreude and mob punishment, and I can't agree thats an appropriate response to anything.

Exactly. You get to pay for your very stupid mistakes, especially those that affect other people (like this lady's tweet did).

She paid about a hundred thousand times over for that mistake. Is that fair? Is that justice? No, it's a mob lynching. This is indefensible.

How, exactly, did her tweet affect people?

...unless you standard for "affect" covers all communication. In which case, you're saying "People should pay for the sin of expressing an opinion or making a joke".

...and perhaps you are.

> How, exactly, did her tweet affect people?

Have you ever been the victim or racism? If not, let's say you're in an open group, you're of a certain nationality (let's call it X), and some other member of that group starts making racist or xenophobic jokes about your race/nationality.

By mistake my skin is white (so I've never been the victim of racist jokes/looks, even though my brother, whose skin is browner, has been a victim of said racist jokes), but being from a not-so-important-East-European country I've been the victim of xenophobic remarks/jokes coming from people "with the best intentions". They always, I mean always, hurt. It also hurts me why I have to explain on HN why racist jokes hurt people. I've been in this community for lots of years and never thought I'd see this day.

> By mistake my skin is white (so I've never been the victim of racist jokes/looks ...

Are you serious?

That white people couldn't be victims of racism? That only white people can be racist? You've never met even just funny looks? Then you haven't been out to the world too much.

I'm a big, white European, and when I was in China, I could hear myself being referred to as "laowai" "or dabizi". I could have gotten mad, because yes indeed by nose is big by Chinese standards and this is a reference to my racial features, but I chose to carry on. The people mostly meant nothing bad. Even the ones that actually maybe thought bad of me - possibly associating me with Western colonialism, of which I or my country were quite innocent - did nothing bad to me, so I let it be.

When our family went to the zoo, we were looking at the pandas, and a hundred people were looking at us (Look! Three white kids!). Very slow looks. It may be a bit awkward, but needs to be tolerated. I was just as much in awe when I saw the first black person in my life.

But perhaps I can do this because there was nothing I could gain by acquiring a victim identity. I'll leave getting mad to a time when someone actually tries to insult me.

Could you point the racism out in this tweet?

As a fellow Eastern European ... man up. Really. Taking offense is the stupidest thing to do.

Outside of offending people, how exactly did her tweet impact anyone else?

Offending people who might have lost a close family member to AIDS you mean?

There's no use in trying to explain. I'm being downvoted to hell for trying to explain why racist jokes are not ok, with replies like "this is just an off-color joke" or "do you know what racism means?" . I'm pretty dissapointed in this community, been here for lots of years and thought that generally speaking people in here would be more open-minded. But the minute you start to explain why making jokes about one's race or incurable disease is not ok you realize you're in the wrong group.

It's a weird, weird world when "open minded" means "likes to participate in mob justice".

And if you understand the tweet, you'd understand the she was making fun of ditzy white girls who naively assume that white people can't get AIDS. It's a caricature of racism, not racism itself.

In all honesty, you did a really poor job explaining why racist jokes are bad. You're being downvoted because (1) you assume that her joke was racist, and (2) you assume that racist jokes are bad (without showing understanding or "open-mindedness" about people who think otherwise).

Personally, I disagree on both counts. I like offensive jokes of all kinds (I mean, if they're actually funny). Coming from a very homogeneous Central European country, I have never been on either side of oppression (other than being bullied in school for being weak, small, smart geek), so I definitely don't have your experience of being "hurt" by jokes, but your experience doesn't translate into a universally-applicable moral/rational argument that racist jokes are bad. However, even if I agreed with you and would personally dislike racist jokes, I would still strongly oppose restrictions or censorship on racist/offensive jokes, to avoid situations like the recent Charlie Hebdo attack.

How, exactly, did it affect other people?

If everyone was treated equally, no matter the platform, I might agree with you.

But, don't you think it's interesting that out of all the countless racist and sexist comments on twitter, that those who are chosen for pillory fit an obvious demographic pattern.