In December 2013, Justine Sacco was just another ordinary person—she had about 170 followers on Twitter (Ronson 2015). Yet, one tweet transformed Justine Sacco into a household name. The tweet read, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Many deemed it offensive and racist. It evoked public outrage on Twitter. It garnered so much attention that her tweet was picked up by major news outlets such as the New York Times. 

The following essay is divided into two sections. In the first section, I argue that Sacco’s case not only meets the sociological definitions of a scandal but also amends our understanding. In the second section, I apply sociological concepts to analyze the scandal. I show that the nature of Sacco’s tweet and scandal entrepreneurs were central in propelling the tweet to publicity. Then, I investigate the role of mainstream media in shaping our understanding of the scandal. I argue that the reason mainstream media reported on it was due to an organizational culture conducive to the reporting of “soft” news. From there, I examine Sacco’s response to the crisis and argue that Sacco offered a “successful” apology. I conclude by evaluating how the scandal affected Sacco’s reputation and by examining the scandal’s consequences. 

SACCO’S CASE AS A SCANDAL

Does Sacco’s story meet the sociological definitions of scandals? I argue the answer is affirmative. First, transgressions only transform into scandals if they threaten the core values of a society (Alexander 1988). Indeed, for many, Sacco's tweet threatened one of the core values of many Western societies—racial harmony (I elaborate more on this point later drawing from Durkheimian sociology). Second, a scandal contaminates high-status people and institutions who are associated with the transgressor (Adut 2005). This was made obvious in an article by the New York Times (Southall 2013), which immediately in the second paragraph discusses where Sacco was employed (i.e. IAC, a large media conglomerate based in the United States) and who owns IAC (i.e. Barry Diller). Hence, the Sacco scandal contaminated IAC and its chairman Barry Diller. Third, scandal requires “multisectoral mobilization” (Bayle and Rayner 2018), or the involvement of institutions from multiple sectors. The Sacco case involved the mobilization of several sectors—celebrities, AIDS organizations, the media, and IAC (Southall 2013; Vingiano 2013). These four types of actors all publicly condemned Sacco on Twitter and IAC fired Sacco. Fourth, Sacco’s tweet also received disruptive publicity (Adut 2005) and collective outburst (Jacobsson and Löfmarck 2008), as it had evoked public outcry on Twitter and was reported on by mainstream media outlets. In fulfilling this criterion, Sacco’s case also violates an assumption—as Fine (2019) asserts, “scandals typically focus on elites” (p.255). Sociologists have presumed that a transgressor’s high status was necessary in generating publicity to their transgressions. But Sacco was not well-known. Hence, Sacco’s case amends our understanding of scandals in the age of social media. As Chen (2019) points out, today, “even the average person can become public” (p.165). 

HOW SACCO’S CASE BECAME A SCANDAL

Cause, Scandal Entrepreneurs, and Purification Ritual

The Sacco scandal began with her infamous tweet quoted at the beginning of this essay. It was later revealed that her intention behind the tweet was to satirize white privilege. As Sacco explains, “[l]iving in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble” (Ronson 2015). However, the audience’s interpretation of the tweet derailed far from her intention. Therefore, the cause of the Sacco scandal could be categorized as an “accident” (Greve, Palmer, and Pozner 2010), as it produced unintended consequences. 

How did Sacco’s case receive enormous attention on Twitter? I argue that scandal entrepreneurs, or people who “believe that this is a story worth telling” (Fine 2019:256), played a central role. According to Vingiano (2013), the scandal entrepreneur in Sacco’s case is Sam Biddle, a former editor at “a Silicon Valley gossip and news site” (Cook 2015). Biddle retweeted and blogged Sacco’s tweet to his roughly 15,000 followers (Ronson 2015). As the title of Biddle’s blog reads, “And Now, a Funny Holiday Joke From IAC’s PR Boss” (Vingiano 2013), we see that contamination (Adut 2005) was a central force in propelling Sacco’s tweet into the spotlight. That is, since the beginning, the story was not about Justine Sacco but rather her then-employer IAC and the perceived incongruence between the content of Sacco’s tweet and her job as a PR professional. Furthermore, Biddle’s initial framing of the tweet—that it was offensive and outrageous—likely shaped how his followers interpreted Sacco’s tweet. 

Biddle’s retweet brought Sacco’s tweet to the attention of others—including celebrities, AIDS organizations, and Twitter’s general public (Vingiano 2013). Consequently, #JustineSacco and #HasJustineLandedYet (as Sacco was on a plane during the Twitter rage storm) began trending worldwide. Tens of thousands of twitterers came together to demand Sacco’s firing by IAC, demonstrating the common metric for measuring damage and compensation—money (Fourcade 2011).
 

From a Durkheimian perspective, these Twitter hashtags created a moment of collective effervescence and served as a purification ritual. Durkheim described society as the division between sacred and profane (Alexander 1988). The sacred and the profane are defined in relation to each other; while the sacred is values and symbols that organize our society, the profane refers to the every day and the mundane. Also, the profane could contaminate the sacred. Indeed, for those that came together on Twitter to condemn Sacco, Sacco’s tweet was the profane and it threatened the sacred; it threatened the sacred ideal that is “the image of America as an inclusive, tolerant community” (Alexander 1988: 208). Consequently, the collective conscience came together to label Sacco as ‘evil’ and deviant. The Sacco purification ritual reached its culmination when the collective’s demand (i.e. the firing of Sacco) was fulfilled, and the purification process restored the sacred and reminded everyone of what was acceptable.

Media and Publicity 

After Sacco’s tweet began trending on Twitter, it was picked up by the mainstream media (Vingiano 2013), who played an instrumental role in shaping how we perceived the Sacco scandal. For starters, mainstream media relies on “institutional morality tales” when reporting scandals (Gamson 2001). That is, the reporting focuses not on the scandalous acts nor the transgressors per se, but rather focus on the institutional environments that foster the scandalous acts. Indeed, in the Sacco scandal, mainstream media attempted to evoke an institutional morality tale. For instance, an article in the New York Times puts IAC at the front and center of its coverage right away in the second paragraph: 

IAC, headed by Barry Diller, is the corporate parent of more than three dozen companies, including […] BlackPeopleMeet.com (Southall 2013).

By doing this, the article implies that IAC’s organizational culture endorses Sacco’s presumed bigotry. Indeed, news media rarely outright condemns transgressors but offer hints through which the audience could use to build up an understanding of who should be denounced (Kepplinger, Geiss, and Siebert 2012). 

However, I argue that mainstream journalists ultimately failed to evoke an institutional morality tale in the Sacco scandal. This is due to a lack of sources attesting to the connection between IAC’s organizational culture and Sacco’s presumed bigotry and also due to IAC’s fast response to the crisis (i.e. firing Sacco almost immediately). Hence, these articles failed to explicitly state the connection. Inadvertently, Sacco’s case highlights the importance of whistleblowers—current or former employees who could expose unethical practices of their organizations (Miethe and Rothschild 1994). If a whistleblower were present, perhaps journalists would have succeeded in pivoting the focus of the story to IAC.

The framing of the Sacco scandal employed by mainstream media further lends support to my argument that mainstream media failed to evoke an institutional morality tale. When reporting scandals, different media outlets use different frames, placing certain aspects of a scandal at the forefront and not others and thereby shaping how we perceive the scandal (Clemente and Gabbioneta 2017). Multiple media articles employ a framing that places the locus of responsibility—“the identification of the principal culprit responsible for the wrongdoing” (Clemente and Gabbioneta 2017:293)—on Justine Sacco. Many articles discuss Sacco’s tweets before the scandal in-depth (e.g. Stelter 2013; Southall 2013), suggesting that her tweet regarding AIDS is a result of her bigotry attitudes. One article in CNN reads, “It seems she has left a trail of casual racism across social media on her various travels” (Stelter 2013). Bouvier (2020) argues that ‘racist call-outs’ on Twitter individualize racism. Indeed, by placing the locus of responsibility on Sacco, mainstream media demonizes one individual instead of focusing on the broader structural forces and institutions that have created discriminatory attitudes. 

An institutional morality tale allows journalists to transform a “soft” news story (e.g. a celebrity’s deviant sexual behaviours) into a “hard” one (e.g. deviant organizational culture of prominent institutions) and to differentiate themselves from tabloids (Gamson 2001). Then, if journalists failed to transform Sacco’s story from “soft news” to “hard news”, why did they publish the story anyways? I argue that the reason was due to market forces that have led to an increased tolerance for soft news. Scandal reporting does not occur in a vacuum. For example, Waisbord (1994) argues that the increase in political scandals reported by the Argentinian news media during the 1990s was not due to an increase in the number of transgressions but rather due to market forces that have led to increased competition amongst media outlets. Facing increased competition, media outlets turned to sensational political scandals to attract readership. Indeed, the production of news is to a great extent shaped by market forces (Hamilton 2004). Particularly during the early 2010s—when Sacco’s case took place—scholars have observed a significant increase in the reporting of soft news compared to prior years, due to increased competition brought about by technological changes (Jóhannsdóttir 2020). 

Further substantiating my argument, scholars have argued that due to the increased competition, “[r]eporters have fewer resources and less time to write more stories’’ (Broersma and Graham 2013:447). Consequently, since the 2010s, journalists increasingly relied on Twitter, which offers ready-made stories that require little investigation, as a source of stories (Broersma and Graham 2012). With its origin as a tweet, Sacco’s case offered a cheap-to-produce story with readily available information. In short, it was an organizational culture that provided “normative support” (Greve, Palmer, and Pozner 2010:66) for reporting soft news that led mainstream journalists to publish Sacco’s story.

The coverage by mainstream media brought more attention to Sacco’s tweet, thereby creating a feedback loop (Bayle and Rayner 2016) where media attention reinforced #JustineSacco’s trending status on Twitter, which in turn brought more media attention. With regards to the size of the Sacco scandal, Sacco’s name “was tweeted more than 30,000 times, and [#HasJustineLandedYet] almost 100,000” (Vingiano 2013). Her name was trending worldwide on Twitter for two days. 

Before the age of social media, traditional media outlets reported on scandals and the public consumed their reporting. But social media altered the processes of scandal reporting (Chen 2019). Nowadays, scandals could “[originate] with disclosures by the public through social media, and [the press cover] that exposure, widening the audience” (Chen 2019:168). Indeed, the Sacco scandal is an embodiment of this latter process. 

PR Crisis and Apology

The publicity Sacco’s tweet received constituted a PR crisis for both Sacco and her then-employer IAC. IAC quickly engaged in a response strategy outlined by Benoit (1997). That is, IAC evaded responsibility by distancing themselves from Sacco; their initial statement called Sacco’s tweet “an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC” and stated that it was “a very serious matter and [they were] taking appropriate action” (Southall 2013). IAC subsequently fired Sacco and publicly announced this decision. 

As for Sacco, her response demonstrates Sendroiu’s (2022) argument that individuals are capable of rational decision-making during a crisis. Sacco was in a perfect position to engage in two other Benoit’s strategies—denial and reduction of the offensiveness of the event, as it was later revealed that her tweet had been misinterpreted and that her intention was to criticize white privilege (Ronson 2015). Yet, Sacco did not engage in either of these strategies. Indeed, these strategies likely would not have worked in Sacco’s favour; they are typically ineffective (Koerber 2014)—something Sacco would know as a PR professional. Instead, Sacco deleted all of her social media presence and issued an apology that an NBC news article called “unsparing” (Silva 2013). Hence, Sacco employed the strategy of ‘mortification’ (Benoit 1997). 

I argue below that Sacco’s apology embodied all the characteristics of a successful apology (which elicits forgiveness from the public). For starters, Sacoc “unequivocally admit[s] shame and guilt and explicitly ask[s] the public for forgiveness” (Cerulo and Ruane 2014:131) and does not mention her original intention anywhere in her apology. The sequence of messages in an apology is also central to whether it succeeds. The beginning of an apology primes the audience to expect a certain type of ending. If the apology fails at delivering an ending expected by its audience, it will fail at eliciting forgiveness. Successful apologies demonstrate “victim-centered atonement”—that is, they begin by addressing the victims and end by either expressing remorse, promising future corrective actions, or addressing the victims again. Indeed, Sacco begins by directly addressing the victims of her tweet and expressing remorse: 

Words cannot express how sorry I am, and how necessary it is for me to apologize to the people of South Africa, who I have offended due to a needless and careless tweet… (Silva 2013)

It then ends by expressing remorse once more: “I am very sorry for the pain I caused” (Silva 2013). Therefore, Sacco’s apology should be recognized as “successful”. 

CONCLUSION AND IMPACT

Scandals tend to create consequences for the organizations involved (Piazza and Jordon 2018; Ruderman and Nevitte 2015). For instance, when a scandal does not discredit the entire industry, competitors of the denounced firm benefit (Piazza and Jordon 2018). Furthermore, as the public’s evaluative criteria shift, those competitors who enforce “tighter norms of conduct” (Piazza and Jordon 2018:166) benefit the most. However, as I have argued above, in Sacco’s case, mainstream media failed to evoke an institutional morality tale of IAC. Accordingly, I did not find evidence in the news media that IAC was punished and its competitors rewarded. But that is not to say the transgressor (i.e. Justine Sacco) was unpunished. 

Scandals tarnish the reputation of the transgressor (Azoulay, Bonatti, and Krieger 2017; Fine 2019). But existing evidence suggests that not all transgressors are affected equally. Azoulay, Bonatti, and Krieger (2017) find that only those that were considered high-status before the scandal suffered significant reputation loss. This finding would suggest that Sacco did not suffer a significant reputation loss as she did not possess high status. However, I argue that the authors did not take into account the issue of visibility—that is, it is possible that the finding is due to the fact that lower-status transgressors are less likely to be noticed. I have established above that Sacco received enormous publicity online for her tweet. Hence, I argue that, despite not possessing high status, Sacco suffered a significant reputation loss due to this publicity. Indeed, even six months after being fired from IAC, Sacco was still “ridiculed and demonized across the Internet” (Ronson 2015).

Marking the conclusion of the Sacco scandal, Jon Ronson published his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed two years after Sacco was publicly denounced, accompanied by an excerpt of the book in The New York Times1 and a Ted talk2. Justine Sacco became the central figure of Ronson’s narrative and was given an opportunity to elaborate on her original intentions behind the tweet (i.e. to criticize white privilege). Ronson’s book became a New York Times bestseller and the Ted talk now has over 2.9 million views, speaking to the reach of Ronson’s message. These cultural objects brought about two consequences. 

First, they (somewhat) amended Sacco’s reputation. Altering one’s reputation requires significant resources for the dissemination of information to the audience (Fine 2019). Ronson’s message provided these resources and disseminated Sacco’s explanation to a wide audience. However, as Fine notes, reputation rarely reaches consensus. Indeed, one search of the name Justine Sacco on Twitter still reveals many that view her as bigoted, even today. 

Second, Sacco’s story shifted the public’s evaluation of cyberbullying. Scandals could trigger the public to question their “taken-for-granted” (p.173) assumption that organizations are engaging in acceptable behaviors, thereby triggering a shift in the public’s evaluative standards (Piazza and Jordon 2018). In Ronson’s narrative, Sacco’s story became the embodiment of a senseless internet mob kicking off disproportionate and undeserved punishments. All because of a misinterpreted tweet, Sacco was fired from her job and, in Ronson’s (2015) words, was “deeply [...] traumatized”. As such, Sacco’s story evolved from one of racist call-outs to a warning of the dangers of Twitter’s mob mentality. Hence, Ronson’s portrayal of Sacco’s story likely shifted the public’s attitude towards Twitter shaming. 

SUMMARY

In summary, I have argued that Sacco’s case not only met our definitions of scandals but also amended them. I have shown several factors that could have contributed to the publicity Sacco received. First, Sacco’s tweet violated a fundamental societal value—or in other words, the sacred. As Jacobsson and Löfmarck (2008:205) point out, “[t]ransgressions against the sacred tend to lead to strong reactions”. Second, scandal entrepreneurs played a central role. Third, I have argued that mainstream media reported on the Sacco scandal due to market pressure. I have also argued that the scandal likely shifted the public’s opinion toward Twitter shaming. 

ENDNOTES

1: how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI

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