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Talking to my cousin about old tweets got weird real fast
My cousin Jenna and I were grabbing coffee last Saturday and she brought up how she got fired from her retail job over a joke tweet from 2018. She said 'it was just a dumb pun about our regional manager, but someone screen-shotted it and sent it to HR.' I always thought cancel culture was about famous people or racists getting called out, not someone losing $14 an hour over a pun. It hit different because she's not a bad person, just made a dumb joke. Made me wonder where the line actually is, you know? Has anyone else seen this happen to someone regular?
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carr.gavin27d ago
My buddy got roasted online for a typo once. Wild.
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nina_johnson8627d ago
Read a really good article about this in the Atlantic where they called it "digital pile-on for regular people." Said the internet now has this weird jury system where one screenshot can ruin someone's life over something that used to just be a lesson learned. Your cousin's situation is brutal because that 2018 pun probably got like 12 likes and zero hate until someone decided to weaponize it. Saw another story about a woman who got blacklisted from her whole industry for a dumb meme she retweeted about her boss. The line seems to be wherever someone with a grudge decides to draw it, not based on any real harm done. It's like we all forgot that average people say dumb stuff sometimes and that used to be okay.
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hayden_butler2726d ago
@nina_johnson86 nailed it, the line is wherever someone with a grudge plants it.
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