140 Characters of Offensiveness

There is a fine line between funny and offensive, and Justine Sacco crossed it in an impressive 140 characters. The Ex-PR Executive tweeted the following just moments before taking off for her trip to South Africa: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Courtesy of: www.dailymail.co.uk

It didn’t take more than two minutes for her tweet to go viral, and before landing she was unemployed and attacked all over the Internet. Perhaps one of the hardest parts (and most ironic) to digest here is that Sacco was a PR expert, and her career revolved around making other people conscious of their actions in public. So how does someone who helps others for a living forget to censor themselves? I guess she could be called the modern day “shoemaker without shoes”.

I think the reason she thought this would be funny, and not offensive, is because she forgot that social media allows us to share and share and share; she forgot that the Internet is public. So even though she put it on her Twitter, one of her followers (I doubt she has more than Kim K), retweeted it, and then his followers saw it, and then another friend retweeted it, and pretty soon half of the world saw her offensive tweet and no one could believe that any being with a brain could write something like that; something that Sacco originally thought would be seen just by her friends, or in this case her followers.

When tweeting, there is no eraser, there is no delete button, and there aren’t any do-overs. 140 characters may not be many, but remember to #tweetwithcaution.