What the Whole Internet Did While She Was in the Air

The tweet took about five seconds to write. Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white! Justine Sacco—senior director of corporate communications at IAC, the company behind Vimeo, College Humor, and a handful of other internet properties you’ve visited without knowing who owned them—posted that, put her phone in airplane mode, and boarded a flight to South Africa. She had around 170 Twitter followers. By the time she landed, she had the full attention of the internet.

The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trended globally while she was somewhere over the Atlantic. Users tracked her flight in real time, counting down the hours. People made memes. People wrote death threats. Someone showed up at the Cape Town airport to photograph the moment she stepped off the plane. Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and Boing Boing had all run the story before she touched down. When she turned her phone back on, she had messages from IAC—she was no longer employed there—and from her family, who had decided they wanted nothing to do with her.

Let’s be clear about the tweet itself: it was racist in a specific, unambiguous way that her job title made worse. Not coded, not a misread attempt at irony—a direct statement equating whiteness with immunity from African disease, posted by the person professionally responsible for a media company’s public image. The stupidity compounds on itself the longer you look at it.

But watching the pile-on in real time was unsettling in a different direction. There’s an energy that takes over when the internet finds a target—the original offense becomes almost incidental within minutes, swallowed by competitive displays of fury. The death threats. People wishing her AIDS. Someone invoking Al-Qaeda as a punchline. The "welcome to South Africa" posts proud of their own cruelty. When she sent messages from her hotel room saying her family had disowned her, that she had nothing, asking people to stop, the crowd was not moved. The crowd was having fun.

What I keep returning to is the eleven hours she was offline, unknowing—maybe watching a film, maybe sleeping, somewhere over the ocean with no idea what was accumulating on the other end. The mob assembled in full before she had any chance to respond, delete, apologize, or even know the charges had been filed. The verdict was already in when she landed. There’s something sealed about that—a life changed irreparably by a thing you did that you don’t yet know you did.

The tweet deserved criticism. What came after was the internet entertaining itself with the destruction of a person. Both things can be true at once, and nothing about the first cancels the second.