Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life
I'd never heard of Adria Richards before, or I'd forgotten it as an absurd non-newsworthy event. On reading about the incident, I thought "What a humorless, vindictive [Beelzebub]" I was kinda glad that she got fired.<p>But then I read on, and I found myself having a lot of empathy for her, and for Hank (although what happened to him, as bad as it was was way less intense and scary than what happened to her). I thought they both made (forgivable) mistakes. Their respective employers meted out not very compassionate punishments, those companies come off badly in the article. The public statements by one of the CEO's sounds particularly lame and insincere. More human error. The cascade of errors continues into an avalanche. "The Mob"(i.e. the public) <i>really</i> comes off bad in this story.<p>I don't think human error leading to more human errors and bad outcomes itself is groundbreaking news. It's more the runaway (not so) positive feedback loop that amplifies errors of (bad) judgement and gut level emotions. We evolved in a context where we only had to contend with unintentionally pissing off maybe a few dozens or hundreds of people with our mistakes. Now millions of people can be infuriated/whipped up into a cyber lynch mob overnight, and even then it's still only a tiny fraction of humanity's collective attention.<p>Maybe sites like Twitter and Facebook should think about whether or not they have a responsibility to the victims of Mob crucifixion. Even (especially?) the unsympathetic ones, who arguably may have made their own bed and set fire to it. Some kind of circuit breaker when burning crosses start popping up. Cyber public defenders. "Chill out" buttons.<p>The story made me really feel for Adria. It didn't hide the fact that she saw things in a very harsh, b&w way. Her letter to her father may have been a blatant attempt to emotionally manipulate the writer and the audience. But it works, even if so. What kind of hurt would make it necessary to resort to that? I feel her humanity. She deserves a shot of redemption.<p>Great article. The other stories are terrific as well, but maybe this one is more of a Puzzlebox.