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"  Justine Sacco, a (now former) PR executive for IAC, a major media company that owns Match.com and Vimeo, sent out an awfully poorly thought-out tweet before boarding a flight from London to Cape Town. Here it is in all of its humiliating splendor (wrong word): While Justine flew through the air, she was oblivious to the mayhem her tweet caused back here on Earth. Thousands of people on Twitter were pissed, and took to the social media service to talk out their anger, frustration, and annoyance at such an incredibly ridiculous and ugly tweet. It was also brought to worldwide attention on websites \u2014 first by Gawker, and then Buzzfeed, CNN, and pretty much anywhere anyone writes about anything on the Internet.  While the VAST majority of people were simply publicly talking out their frustration at the ignorant tweet, a few folks took it upon themselves to figure out what flight Sacco was on and one dude even showed up at the Cape Town airport to take pictures of her. She&amp;#039;s issued an apology. Sacco&amp;#039;s tweet was a mistake \u2014 one that caused her to lose job. If the company had noticed the offensive nature of her feed before BuzzFeed, would she have been reprimanded and asked to tone it down? Or fired because the head of public relations for a major media company should have the foresight to think before sending out such missives on a public feed? But you have to wonder if her tweet deserved to be met with the death threats she claims to have received. In a more unusual take on the issue, Breitbart argues that Sacco didn&amp;#039;t deserve to be made an example of and treated so viciously by an Internet mob: How did this nobody living in a social media world buried in tens of thousands of truly racist and homophobic nobodies, find herself in the crosshairs? If BuzzFeed and Co. wanted to feel self-righteous about themselves, there are literally millions of tweets out there that are unquestionably indefensible and that are not written by some defenseless, unsuspecting woman about to step off a plane and into social media Hell. Maybe BuzzFeed... chose Sacco to send an intimidating message that says no one is safe from their speech rules, even nobodies with 213 Twitter followers. Randomly pulling people from their online homes as an example to the rest of us, is certainly going to have a chilling effect. Most people who aren&amp;#039;t public figures \u2014 like you and your friends \u2014 aren&amp;#039;t in any way used to living their lives under the public&amp;#039;s microscope, which always seems to be hunting for the latest knee-jerk outrage. But with social media, maybe that&amp;#039;s all changing. Follow Laura on Twitter. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/news/a17450/justine-sacco/>