One person I met was Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who posed for a photograph while mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns˳ Stone had stood next to the sign, which asks for “Silence and Respect,” pretending to scream and flip the bird˳ She and her co-worker Jamie, who posted the picture on Facebook, had a running joke about disobeying signs — smoking in front of No Smoking signs, for example — and documenting it˳ But shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead˳ Worse, Jamie didn’t realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public˳
Four weeks later, Stone and Jamie were out celebrating Jamie’s birthday when their phones started vibrating repeatedly˳ Someone had found the photo and brought it to the attention of hordes of online strangers˳ Soon there was a wildly popular “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page˳ The next morning, there were news cameras outside her home; when she showed up to her job, at a program for developmentally disabled adults, she was told to hand over her keys˳ (“After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client,” read one of the thousands of Facebook messages denouncing her˳ “Woman needs help˳”) She barely left home for the year that followed, racked by PTSD, depression and insomnia˳ “I didn’t want to be seen by anyone,” she told me last March at her home in Plymouth, Mass˳ “I didn’t want people looking at me˳”
Instead, Stone spent her days online, watching others just like her get turned upon˳ In particular she felt for “that girl at Halloween who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim˳ I felt so terrible for her˳” She meant Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, who posted a photo of herself in her Halloween costume on Twitter˳ Lynch wore a running outfit and had smeared her face, arms and legs with fake blood˳ After an actual victim of the Boston Marathon bombing tweeted at her, “You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died,” people unearthed Lynch’s personal information and sent her and her friends threatening messages˳ Lynch was reportedly let go from her job as well˳
I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif˳, when a stupid joke popped into his head˳ It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles˳ He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me˳ “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said˳ “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle˳ ˳ ˳ ˳ It wasn’t even conversation-level volume˳”
Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph˳ He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture˳ It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming˳
