Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

That night Hank made his only public statement. (Like Justine and Jonah, he had never spoken to a journalist about what had happened until he spoke to me.) He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News.

Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position… [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.

“The next day,” Hank said, “Adria Richards called my company asking them to ask me to remove the portion of my apology that stated I lost my job as a result of her tweet.”

• • •

I sent Adria an interview request. “All right, pitch me via e-mail and if relevant, I’ll respond,” she replied. So I pitched. Successfully. We agreed to meet two weeks later. “We will meet in a public place for safety reasons,” Adria wrote. “Make sure to bring along your ID for verification.”

—

We settled on the international check-in desks at San Francisco Airport. I was expecting someone fiercer. But when I saw her half wave at me from across the terminal, she didn’t seem fierce at all. She seemed introverted and delicate, just like how Hank had come across over Google Hangouts. We found a café and she told me about the moment it all began for her — the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle.

“Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.

“You felt fear?” I asked.

“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

Which was why, she said, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos.” She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”

“Danger?” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”

“Have you ever heard that thing, ‘Men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them’?” she said.

I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been in the middle of a tech conference with eight hundred bystanders.

“Sure,” Adria replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”

This seemed a weak gambit. Men can sometimes be correct. There is some Latin for this kind of logical fallacy. It’s called an ad hominem attack. When someone can’t defend a criticism against them, they change the subject by attacking the criticizer.

“Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired. But you must have felt pretty bad.”

“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him but it only goes so far. If he had Down syndrome and he accidentally pushed someone off a subway that would be different…. I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes I did.”

• • •

The evening Hank posted his statement on Hacker News, outsiders began to involve themselves in his and Adria’s story. Hank started receiving messages of support from men’s-rights bloggers. He didn’t respond to any of them. Later a Gucci Little Piggy blogger wrote that Hank’s Hacker News message had revealed him to be a man with

a complete lack of backbone… by apologizing you are just saying, “I am a weak enemy — do with me what you will.” [In publicly shaming Hank, Adria had] complete and utter power over his children. That doesn’t piss this guy off?

At the same time that Hank was being feted and then insulted by the men’s-rights bloggers, Adria discovered she was getting discussed on a famous meeting place for trolls: 4chan/b/.

A father of three is out of a job because a silly joke he was telling a friend was overheard by someone with more power than sense. Let’s crucify this cunt.

Kill her.

Cut out her uterus with an xacto knife.

Someone sent Adria a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth. Adria’s face was superimposed onto the bodies of porn actors. Websites were created to teach people how to make the superimposing look seamless, by matching skin tones. On Facebook someone wrote, “I hope I can find Adria, kidnap her, put a torture bag over her head, and shoot a.22 subsonic round right into her fucking skull. Fuck that bitch make her pay make her obey.” (That message, Adria told me, although I couldn’t confirm it, was from a student at the New York City College of Technology.)

“Death threats and rape threats only feed her cause,” someone eventually wrote on 4chan/b/. “I don’t mean stop doing things. Just think first. Do something productive.”

Then her employer’s website and servers came under a massive DDoS attack, which caused them to crash — the automated version of one person or even thousands sitting at a computer manually pressing refresh relentlessly until the targeted website becomes overpowered and collapses. A group of attackers said the attacks would stop if Adria was fired. Hours later she was fired — publicly and without warning, according to SendGrid’s CEO, for dividing the community she was supposed to unite.

“I slept on couches for most of 2013,” she later emailed me. “I cried a lot during this time, journaled, and escaped by watching Netflix. How do I feel about losing my job? I didn’t expect it. SendGrid [her employers] threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”

• • •

A few days before I flew to San Francisco to meet Adria, I posted a message on 4chan/b/ asking for anyone personally involved in her destruction to contact me. The message was deleted in less than a minute. I posted another request. That one vanished after a few seconds. Somebody inside 4chan was silently erasing me whenever I tried to make contact. But my messages happened to coincide with the arrests of some hard-core 4chan trolls and DDoSers and activists, so suddenly there were real names out there. Which was how I came to meet a twenty-one-year-old 4chan denizen, Mercedes Haefer.

—

In her Facebook photograph Mercedes wears a comedy mustache and bunny ears. Now we sat opposite each other in a vast, opulent loft apartment above an old grocery store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It belongs to her lawyer, Stanley Cohen. He’s spent his career representing anarchists and communists and squatter groups and Hamas, and now he was representing Mercedes.

The crime she was accused of (and would later plead guilty to; she is awaiting sentencing as I write this) is that in November 2010 she and thirteen other 4chan users DDoS’d PayPal as revenge for their refusing to accept donations to WikiLeaks. You could donate to the Ku Klux Klan via PayPal but not to WikiLeaks.

The FBI showed up at her Las Vegas apartment one day at six a.m. “I answered the door and they said, ‘Mercedes, do you mind putting your pants on?’ To be honest, being arrested is really fun. You get to troll the FBI, you get to wear fancy handcuffs, you get to pick the music in the car. But the indictment was boring. I napped through it.”

I spent a few hours with Mercedes. She was, on the surface, quite troll-like — a lover of jubilant online chaos. She told me about her favorite 4chan thread. It was started by “a guy who’s genuinely in love with his dog, and his dog went in heat, and so he went around collecting samples and injecting them into his penis and he fucked his dog and got her pregnant and they’re his puppies.” Mercedes laughed. “That’s the thread I told the FBI about when they asked me about 4chan, and some of the officers actually got up and left the room.”