Why Did BuzzFeed & Co. Target Justine Sacco for Online Assassination?
Friday night, a young New York-based communications director had her life destroyed on social media while she was out of touch with the world and could not defend herself. Justine Sacco was on a flight to Africa and had no Internet access when BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski apparently got the ball rolling by tweeting out to his 100k-plus followers that Sacco was responsible for what "may be the worst tweet of all time." By the time she stepped off her flight, Sacco found herself a national pariah and fired from her job. Here's the tweet that caused it all:
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At the time of that tweet, Sacco had fewer than 200 followers (she has since deleted her account). And while in an airplane blissfully unaware that Buzzfeed and Co. had dispatched its flying monkeys against her, hashtags devoted to Sacco's destruction climbed to the top spot on Twitter, her employer InterActiveCorp released a statement condemning her (and later fired her), and there were literally hundreds of articles and blog posts on the subject -- including The New York Times, the left-wing BuzzFeed (naturally), The New York Daily News, The Hollywood Reporter, and, well, you get the idea.
Other than the very sad fact that a lot of bitter people obviously had nothing they would rather do on the last Friday night before Christmas, why did this happen?