Justine Sacco incident In December 2013, Justine Sacco, a woman with 170 Twitter followers, tweeted acerbic jokes during a plane trip from
New York to
Cape Town, such as "'Weird German Dude: You're in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.' — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals." Sacco slept during her 11-hour plane trip, and woke up to find out that she had lost her job and was the number-one Twitter topic worldwide, with celebrities and
new media bloggers all over the globe denouncing her and encouraging all their followers to do the same. Sacco's employer, New York internet firm
IAC, declared that she had lost her job as Director of Corporate Communications. According to journalist
Jon Ronson, the public does not understand that a vigilante campaign of public shaming, undertaken with the ostensible intention of defending the
underdog, may create a mob mentality capable of destroying the lives and careers of the public figures singled out for shaming. She writes: "Because of the mob mentality that accompanies public shaming events, often there is very little information about the target, sometimes only a single tweet. Yet there is a presumption of guilt and swift move toward justice, with no process for ascertaining facts." McBride further notes, "If newspapers ran front-page photos of adulterers in the Middle East being stripped naked and whipped in order to further their shame, we would criticize them as part of a backward system of justice." Ben Adler compared the Sacco incident to a number of Twitter hoaxes, and argued that the media needs to be more careful to fact-check articles and evaluate context.
Ashley Madison data breach In July 2015, a group hacked the user data of
Ashley Madison, a commercial dating website marketed as facilitating extramarital affairs. In August 2015, over 30 million user account details—including names and email addresses—were released publicly. A variety of security researchers and
Internet privacy activists debated the ethics of the release. Clinical psychologists argue that dealing with an affair in a particularly public way increases the pain for spouses and children. Carolyn Gregoire argued "[s]ocial media has created an aggressive culture of public shaming in which individuals take it upon themselves to inflict psychological damage" and more often than not, "the punishment goes beyond the scope of the crime." He wrote that it is alarming that "the
mob that is the Internet is more than willing to serve as judge, jury, and executioner" and members of the site "don't deserve a flogging in the virtual town square with millions of onlookers." In the audience were science journalists Connie St Louis,
Deborah Blum and
Ivan Oransky, who found Hunt's remarks highly inappropriate. They decided to publicize his remarks on Twitter, giving St Louis the task of writing a short text to be tweeted and corroborated by the other two. The tweet called Hunt
sexist and said he had "utterly ruined" the luncheon. St Louis's tweet went viral, setting off what
The Observer described as a "particularly vicious social media campaign." To ridicule the "sexist scientist", the online
feminist magazine
The Vagenda urged female scientists to post mundane pictures of themselves at work under the
hashtag "#distractinglysexy". Two days after the speech, Hunt gave a BBC radio interview saying "I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and that people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to science. It's terribly important that, in the lab, people are on a level playing field. And I found these emotional entanglements made life very difficult. I mean, I'm really, really sorry that I caused any offence – that's awful. I certainly didn't mean – I just meant to be honest, actually." Hunt went on to say "I'm very sorry if people took offense. I certainly did not mean to demean women, but rather be honest about my own shortcomings." Numerous media outlets reported on the incident and the interview, citing portions of Hunt's original remarks and criticizing them as sexist. The editors of
Nature called on "all involved in science [to] condemn the comments". Hunt felt he had made it clear he was joking because he had included the phrase "now seriously" in his statement. The reconstruction of his words by an unnamed EU official corroborated the inclusion of these words. On June 10 Hunt resigned from his position as an honorary professor with the
University College London's Faculty of Life Sciences and from the Royal Society's Biological Sciences Awards Committee. Hunt's wife, immunologist
Mary Collins, had been told by a senior [at UCL] that Hunt "had to resign immediately or be sacked". Author and journalist Jeremy Hornsby wrote University College London out of his will in protest, leaving it "about £100,000 worse off". Following Hunt's resignation, at least eight Nobel prizewinning scientists and 21 honorary fellows criticized his treatment.
Boris Johnson, the mayor of London at that time, and evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins, expressed similar indignation. A few scientists, such as Hunt's co-Nobelist,
Paul Nurse, were critical of Hunt's conduct and said that his resignation was warranted. In a letter to
The Times a group of 29 staff scientists, students and postdoctoral fellows, both male and female, who had worked with Hunt, wrote in support of his character. They described how his help had been "instrumental in the advancement of many other women and men in science beyond those in his own lab" and how he had "actively encouraged an interest in science in schoolchildren and young scientists, arranging for work experience and summer students of both genders to get their first taste of research in his lab". They urged the ERC and UCL to "reconsider their rush to judgment". Hunt has distanced himself from the controversy, commenting that he had been "turned into a straw man that one lot loves to love and the other lot loves to hate and then they just take up sides and hurled utterly vile abuse at everyone".
"Shirtstorm" controversy In November 2014, while giving a televised status update on the
Rosetta spacecraft,
Matt Taylor wore a shirt depicting scantily-clad cartoon women with firearms made by his friend, a female artist. Taylor's decision to wear the shirt to a press conference drew criticism from a number of commentators, who saw a reflection of a culture where women are unwelcome in scientific fields (see
gender inequality).
Julie Bindel and
Tim Stanley, argued against such criticism. The woman who made the shirt for Taylor as a birthday present stated that she "did not expect" the shirt to attract the level of attention that it did. Some writers expressed appreciation for Taylor's apology. A campaign was set up on the crowdfund website
Indiegogo, with the objective of raising $3,000 to buy Taylor a gift, as a token of the public's appreciation for the work that he and the team had done. The campaign raised a total of $24,003, of which $23,000 was donated to
UNAWE at Taylor's request, the remainder going towards a plaque commemorating the mission.
Hypatia transracialism controversy The feminist philosophy journal
Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors. The journal published an article about
transracialism by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy, comparing the situation of
Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of
Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. The article was criticized on Facebook and Twitter as a source of "epistemic violence", and the author became the subject of personal attacks. Academics associated with
Hypatia joined in the criticism. A member of the journal's editorial board became the point of contact for an open letter demanding that the article be retracted, and the journal's board of associate editors issued an unauthorized apology, saying the article should never have been published.
Rogers Brubaker described the episode in the
New York Times as an example of "internet shaming". David Benjamin Hall captured video and shouted encouragement while Glenn Tuck Taylor toppled the formation. They posted the video to Facebook, whereupon it was viewed by thousands and the two men began receiving death threats. Their claim that the hoodoo appeared unstable, and that they vandalized it out of concern for passersby, was rejected by Fred Hayes, director of the Utah Division of State Parks and Recreation. Hall and Taylor were expelled from Boy Scouts and charged with third-degree felonies, ultimately pleading guilty to lesser charges of
misdemeanor criminal mischief.
Dog Poop Girl In 2005 in South Korea, bloggers targeted a woman who refused to clean up when her dog
defecated on the floor of a
Seoul subway car, labeling her "Dog Poop Girl" (rough translation of into English). Another commuter had taken a photograph of the woman and her dog, and posted it on a popular South Korean website. Within days, she had been identified by Internet vigilantes, and much of her
personal information was leaked onto the Internet in an attempt to punish her for the offense. The story received mainstream attention when it was widely reported in South Korean media. The public humiliation led the woman to drop out of her university, according to reports. The reaction by the South Korean public to the incident prompted several newspapers in South Korea to run editorials voicing concern over Internet vigilantism. One paper quoted
Daniel Solove as saying that the woman was the victim of a "cyber-posse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital
Scarlet Letters." Another called it an "Internet witch-hunt," and went on to say that "the Internet is turning the whole society into a
kangaroo court."
Cooks Source incident The food magazine
Cooks Source printed an article by Monica Gaudio without her permission in their October 2010 issue. Learning of the copyright violation, Gaudio emailed Judith Griggs, managing editor of
Cooks Source Magazine, requesting that the magazine both apologize and also donate $130 to the Columbia School of Journalism as payment for using her work. Instead she received a very unapologetic letter stating that she (Griggs) herself should be thanked for making the piece better and that Gaudio should be glad that she didn't give someone else credit for writing the article. During the ensuing public outcry, online vigilantes took it upon themselves to avenge Gaudio. The
Cooks Source Facebook page was flooded with thousands of contemptuous comments, forcing the magazine's staff to create new pages in an attempt to escape the protest and accuse 'hackers' of taking control of the original page. The magazine's website was stripped of all content by the staff and shut down a week later.
Donglegate Donglegate was a 2014 incident in which a woman posted a photograph of two men who were sitting behind her at an almost-all-male conference making sexual double-entendres. == See also ==