It’s 2014, and social media has such a pervasive influence on modern life that the Modern Language Association created guidelines for citing tweets within academic papers. Home-improvement franchise Lowe’s uses Vine to produce six-second home-repair tutorials. And any individual — from unknown PR executives to UF football recruits — can be raked over the coals for posting offensive jokes online.
In a New Yorker article, “First Thought, Worst Thought,” writer Mark O’Connell ruminates on social-media anxiety — ever posted what you thought was a funny Facebook status, received no likes and swiftly deleted the post? — and how a few keystrokes can smear a person’s name for good if that person isn’t smart enough to delete in time.
He pointed to the brief Internet infamy of Justine Sacco, an ex-PR executive who, in December, tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding! I’m white.”
Predictably, people went insane. Even The New York Times covered the story of the smear campaign that resulted from her ill-fated, dumb joke, and Sacco was eventually fired from her job.
Closer to home, controversy erupted this week when the Alligator reported that UF quarterback Will Grier had posted a Vine last April in which he used multiple gay slurs in a locker room.
People immediately jumped to Grier’s defense, saying that at the time of the Vine’s posting — it was deleted after alligatorSports published a column on Monday condemning Grier’s behavior — he was only in high school and that he shouldn’t be held accountable for something he said as a high school student.
However, it’s not so much the fact that he said something offensive — it’s the fact that he posted it online.
It’s impossible to give Grier the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn’t know that the word f** is rooted in a history of violence against gay people; he got into UF, after all.
One can only hope he knows a thing or two about what you should and shouldn’t say as a prominent public figure.
New cautionary tales arise daily about the dangers of posting offensive jokes, personal information and questionable photos on social media.
In this age of instant public shaming as a result of idiotic Internet posts, how are high school kids and grown women not aware that their online actions have consequences?
“This is a new form of violence,” O’Connell wrote, “a symbolic ritual of erasure where the condemned is made to stand for a whole class of person — to be cast, as an effigy of the world’s general awfulness, into a sudden abyss of fame.”
This is the world we live in, folks, and now more than ever, a good sense of tact is necessary for survival.
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 1/16/2014 under the headline "Post responsibly: Offensive social media use still rampant"
