Monday, March 25, 2013

Public Shaming Via Twitter


By:Kashmir Hill
Forbes
Over the weekend, a female “developer evangelist,” Adria Richards, overheard two male developers making what she thought were sexist jokes during a tech conference. Uncomfortable with confronting them in person, she instead tweeted a photo of the two to shame them publicly, writing that “jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and big ‘dongles’” are “not cool.” One of the dongle-joking dudes was wearing a visible nametag in the photo. Richards’s tweet was immediately spotted by an organizer for the tech conference who pulled the two men aside to confront them about the comments. According to a post on the conference’s website, the men agreed the comments were in poor taste and apologized.
Richards explained in a blog post why she needed to call out the behavior via twitter
That could have been the end of the story but instead, like a sexist snowball rolling down a hyper-sensitive mountain, the situation has escalated considerably. Richards wrote a blog post about the encounter, in which it’s not entirely clear that the comments were sexist (in my reading). 


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