Public Shaming on Twitter a Nightmare for all Parties

This is really horrible. Two guys at a tech conference are overheard privately making jokes about "dongles" and "forking," which were interpreted as sexist by a woman sitting in front of them whom they did not know. The woman then tweeted a picture of them with comments in order to publicly shame them.

Cue the, at turns, hyper-PC, hyper-insensitive and often nasty Internet, which within hours turned the story into a career and public-relations nightmare for the parties involved, their companies and the tech conference they were attending. What in years past would have resulted in a nasty look or, at worst, a testy conversation between the jokers and the offended party—most likely ending in apologies, a better understanding of each other and perhaps even friendship—has now resulted in the firing of one of the jokers and the offended tweeter herself.

The biggest problem with these sort of viral situations is that things quickly spin beyond the initial issue at hand. Was the tweeter right to publicly shame the men, rather than privately rebuke them? Were the tech guys being offensive or just a bit childish in their banter? What's the proper reaction for conference organizers and others on Twitter to this incident? Instead, we have hateful people tweeting horrible things about the woman. Her employer's website was hacked and shut down. The employer, running scared, fired her, around the same time the employer of one of the men fired him.

It's hard to say what can be done about such things in the wide-open world of social media. Restraint from all parties involved is called for, of course, but perhaps the key missing element here is courage. The offended tweeter could have brought the issue up with the men. The men could have apologized to her directly, or on Twitter, once they knew someone had taken offense (the one who was fired did apologize in a blog comment). The companies involved could have stood by their employees until the furor died down. Most of all, the cowardly Internet trolls and haters could have put up or shut up—they are the ones most deserving of shame.