BuzzFeed Downplays Its Role in Justine Sacco Online Assassination

Here is my rundown on the Justine Sacco story, the woman plucked from obscurity Friday night to have her life assassinated by the elite media and its mob while she was on an 11-hour flight and could not defend or explain herself. By the time she stepped off the plane, she was a national pariah and unemployed.

Saturday, after the witch had been burned and the mob was hung over on its own self-righteousness, it looks as though the left-wing BuzzFeed wanted to distance itself from its own role in the burning by publishing a misleading Internet autopsy that pieces together how the hunt started. Noticeably missing from the autopsy though, is a crucial Tweet sent by BuzzFeed’s own Andrew Kaczynski informing his 100k-plus followers that Sacco’s  tweet “may be the worst tweet of all time.”

BuzzFeed’s Sacco autopsy shows that the first media entity to pick up the tweet that destroyed Sacco’s life was some basement-level sub-Gawker site at 1:30pm ET Friday (about three hours after Sacco’s tweet). From there, within a few minutes, three obscure media types linked to the Gawker post.

Then, according to BuzzFeed,  BuzzFeed’s own David Cohn at 1:36pm and  Kaczynski at 1:51pm jumped in:

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Is that tweet real? You work in PR. You shld know better RT @JustineSacco “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

— David Cohn (@Digidave) December 20, 2013

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Shot: https://t.co/0rV5V8EyAR Chaser: https://t.co/x2tbQf5Kd7

— Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) December 20, 2013

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But…

Those tweets don’t credit Gawker.

Why not?

What BuzzFeed doesn’t include in its autopsy, though, is Kaczynski’s first tweet, that came ten minutes earlier. Notice again how Kaczynski doesn’t credit Gawker:

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This may be the worst tweet of all of time. actually the worst tweet. https://t.co/x2tbQf5Kd7

— Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) December 20, 2013

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For the next few hours, on a Friday night just five days before Christmas, and while the Manhattan-based PR executive was defenseless on a flight without Internet, the elite media and its mob gleefully tore the wings off of this young woman. Sacco would later step off an airplane and into infamy — without ever having been given a chance to explain herself, defend herself, or delete the offending tweet and apologize.

Sacco’s story is not a cautionary tale, it is a message of intimidation from our media overlords: No one is safe. Not even defenseless nobodies with 200 Twitter followers.

Now that we know no one is safe, who is next?

Watch yourself.

Be perfect.

 

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC