An Excellent New Chrome Extension Could Stop You From Getting Fired
Where was this when Justine Sacco needed it?
In 2013, the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, Justine Sacco, was headed to South Africa to visit her family. On the final leg of her trip to Cape Town, she sent out what she thought was a fairly amusing tweet to her 170 followers.
Sacco was parodying a type of person in order to satirise them — a common humour trope on Twitter, albeit poorly executed in this case — but that didn’t matter to the internet: a privileged white person was joking about something too far from her own experience, and it wasn’t on.
The tweet was sent to journalist Sam Biddle, who posted it on Gawker: ‘And Now, A Funny Holiday Joke From IAC’s PR Boss‘. #HasJustineSaccoLandedYet began trending a few hours into her flight, and she was clearing out her desk three weeks later.
The incident, which is back again in the public arena thanks to a recently published excerpt from Jon Ronson’s new book, So You’ve Been Publically Shamed, wasn’t the first time someone has been fired for a poorly-thought-out tweet.
There was the Taco Bell employee, who tweeted out images of him pissing into a nacho bowl.
And this lady, who was fired from her job after dressing up as a victim of the Boston Marathon bombings.
Australia’s own Catherine Deveny was fired from The Age in 2010, after an especially controversial tweet on Logies night: “I do hope Bindi Irwin gets laid”.
The bad news? I've lost my job and had to cancel the family holiday. The good news is the holiday was to Australia Zoo.
— Catherine Deveny (@CatherineDeveny) May 5, 2010
The fate of these people could have been saved by a simple Chrome Extension that was uploaded overnight.
Called ‘Tweetfired: a reminder’, it replaces Twitter’s ‘What’s happening?’ form with another set of words: ‘Remember: you are always one tweet away from being fired”.
Perfect.
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Personally, I’d like it to come with a few options — like ‘You are always one tweet away from sounding desperate for RTs’, or ‘You are always one tweet away from stealing someone else’s joke.’ But that’s just me.
Download it here.