In John Ronson’s “God That Was Awesome”, we are given a story about Justine Sacco, in which she tweets an offensive joke referring to the AIDS epidemic in Africa right before she travels to Africa. The tweet blows up while she is on the plane and she receives an overwhelming amount of backlash that ultimately ruins her career and pairs her name with that racist tweet permanently. Ronson is intrigued by the humility she receives and wants to know more about humility being used as punishment, so he goes to an expert in this area, Ted Poe. Poe is a judge from the Houston area who is known for sentencing people to punishments that humiliate them rather than give them time in a correctional facility (Ronson, p.67-90).
The most interesting part of this work is the effects that one tweet had on Justine’s life. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue on her part, but it wasn’t intended in such a negative manner either. Justine fell victim to the powers of social media. The platform she used, Twitter, seemed to unanimously turn against her and punish her for her actions. Her actions were clearly wrong, but did her life deserve to be ruined for them? I’d like to focus on the idea of this humiliation paired with fairness. How fair is the punishment she received? To further that question, whatever you think is fair, should be applied to everyone who does something of similar nature. For every bad joke that has been told referring to a serious issue, that person should receive the same punishment as we find Justine deserving. This doesn’t just mean AIDS jokes, these go for any religious jokes, any jokes about a disease, and anything else that could have prejudice against a group of people. I’m by no way condoning these offensive remarks, but what I am trying to find out is what the punishment should be and how we should enforce this punishment. It seems very clear to me that people in a position of power can say things that are prejudiced on Twitter (perhaps a leader of a country or an athlete) and don’t suffer the same consequences that Justine did. I also don’t think this should apply to just social media, saying something like this out loud would likely be more degrading and prejudiced. At the same time, can we punish everyone for their bad jokes? I’m sure everyone has said something that they wish they could take back at one time or another, why don’t you deserve the punishment Justine received. Ultimately I would like to know what punishment Justine deserved and how we should go about universalizing such punishment.
Works Cited
Ronson, Jon. So you’ve been publicly shamed. Riverhead Books, 2016.