What 15 Minutes of Internet Fame Taught Me About UberGate & Threats to Journalists
Sometimes, getting a small taste of someone else’s life is downright terrifying.
Last week I tweeted a few quotes from an obnoxious guy on a Tinder date who happened to be sitting next to me. Thanks to Marc Andreessen and Buzzfeed, I got a front row seat to a “how things go viral on the internet” show.
It was honestly great fun to watch unfold – having millions of people read your silly tweets and thousands of them follow you on Twitter is quite a blast. There is a flip side to that positive attention, though.
A small but extremely vocal minority of people didn’t appreciate me poking fun at the obnoxious Tinderer or “getting in the way of him crushing” what I assume was not actually a feline. They let me know in comments and tweets exactly how rude, dumb, bored, stuck-up, and jealous they thought I was.
Most of this was not all that bothersome (aside from imagining my mother fainting over the language). I grew up on a football field, worked with trauma patients, and butted heads with with best of them in my hedge fund days – my skin is so thick I’m basically a walking callous.
Some of the comments, though, actually made me queasy.
“Carrie Mantha should die in a fire,” read one.
“This dumb b*tch should meet the end of my fist, pronto,” read another.
I laughed them off until they started to get more explicit.
“I’d make her tweet every second that I f*cked her if I could find this girl,” was the first comment that actually turned my stomach.
And then: “Hey, you can pretty much tell where this dumb c**t is all the time is from her instagram and twitter accounts. Who lives near her?”
The fact that people like this are out there is absolutely frightening – he’s literally suggesting someone find me through my social media accounts (not that hard, it turns out) in order to harm me. All this because I poked a little fun at an anonymous guy he doesn’t know.
Can you imagine if I criticized someone he actually liked? Or a company he really liked?
For the sake of argument, let’s say that company was Uber. And let’s say I was not a random live-tweeter but a well-known journalist with a history of scrutinizing said company.
In that case, I’d be terrified right now. And if you told me the companies I critiqued would purposely leak information about my personal life to enable the most unstable of internet haters to actually harm me and my loved ones, I honestly don’t know what I’d do.
That is precisely why Uber executive Emir Michael’s comments about doxing Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy are so unconscionable.
Sarah is a hard-nosed journalist who pulls no punches when it comes to critiquing companies. You don’t have to agree with her all the time (and I don’t) to believe that she has a right to do her job without fearing for the safety of her children.
Quite simply, the press’ job is to critique people and companies. That job takes a lot of fortitude as it is, and the very notions of transparency and truth depend on it not being made impossible by any company’s unscrupulous actions.
As start-up founders we owe it to our colleagues in the press to demand that they be treated respectfully and not endangered over their work or their views.
Uber will not convince me that they are committed to that kind of respect, safety, and basic human dignity – nor will any of their investors – until they do something beyond offering a simple apology.
After all, if Emil didn’t mean what he said about doxing Sarah, why should we believe he meant his apology?
I only had to fear physical retaliation for my “15 minutes.” Sarah and her fellow journalists will have to put up with that for a lifetime. Making them more any more personally vulnerable is something none of us should tolerate.
