One Tweet Can Destroy Your Life

We've all been warned that these days our employers and schools look at our social media to consider our applications. I've always laughed it off. After all, what kind of incriminating evidence is a company going to find on a little blonde Mormon girl's Facebook? I mean, really.

This morning I read an article (link at  bottom) about a woman who posted a satirical (somewhat out of line, but not serious) tweet before getting on a plane to Africa, and by the time she arrived there 11 hours later, her entire life was ruined. Her tweet had been discovered, gone viral, and not only was she being slammed by hundreds of thousands of people, she had threats on her life and safety, lost her job, and almost permanently shamed her family's campaign for health in Africa. She even had to cut her trip short because people were protesting outside every hotel she had booked for her trip. She was unemployed for a year and her career was ruined.

The scariest part is, her story isn't a fluke. There was a 22 year old girl who wore a rather tasteless Halloween costume and was completely demonized online, eventually leading to her termination at her job as well. A lady posted a photo of her (disrespectfully) mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemetery...but it was an inside joke with a friend about disobeying signs. It was discovered, brought to the attention of thousands of strangers, and the woman ended up fired, spending her days inside, suffering from depression and PTSD.

It certainly makes a person wonder, doesn't it?

How easy is it to jump in on a crusade and ruin a person's life...and then completely forget about it the next day, moving on with our own? How easy is it to forget that there is an actual human being at the other end of every twitter account, every facebook picture? In high school (I'm almost afraid to admit to this on here now) my best friend and I dressed up as hobos for Halloween:

Notice the comments. Also that there are only two. We went to visit my sister at Duke that night and ran into groups of low SES kids trick-or-treating there and one little boy told us that his uncle was homeless. We were mortified and got home as fast as we could to change out of our ill conceived, yet innocently intentioned, costumes.

This is why these sorts of occurrences bother me so much. I was a goody-two-shoes. I was an LDS girl, volunteered at the soup kitchen sometimes, raised money for habitat for humanity--and in one small lapse of judgment we did something that may have offended some people. We're human and it happens. But social media takes these momentary, minor fails, and turn them into something unforgivable, and certainly something that can never be lived down.

It's a doubly tricky situation, because technically these people are operating under their freedom of speech. It would be difficult to make a case for libel when they are using a direct quote. But the punishment does NOT fit the crime. And how could we make a policy to protect those on social media? It's checks and balances! Without the ability to call someone out, people could do atrocious things and get away with intolerable offenses against people without consequence.

But could we all have a little more tolerance for others? Maybe a little forgiveness? In some ways I guess the message is to be careful what we post online, but it would be awfully nice if the bigger message was one where there was a little more compassion in the world. Reputations are hard to recover and we've all been there.

Social media is turning into russian routlette and we're all holding the gun.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=2