8B. Going viral

In December 2013, a PR executive called Justine Sacco boarded a plane in London on her way to South Africa. Just before take-off, she sent a short, tasteless joke on Twitter to her 170 followers. She then switched her phone to flight mode and slept for eleven hours. By the time she landed in Cape Town, she was, without knowing it, the number-one trending topic in the world.

During the flight, strangers had shared her tweet tens of thousands of times. Some accused her of racism. Others congratulated each other on 'finding her employer'. A journalist admitted publicly to having refreshed her flight-tracker every few minutes. When she stepped off the plane and turned her phone back on, a message from a friend she hadn't spoken to in years appeared first: 'You need to call me right now. Something has happened.'

By the following morning, Sacco had been fired. She said, in an interview years later, that she had suggested to her employer that she resign herself, but they had already made the decision. She insisted that the joke had been badly worded and misunderstood, and apologised repeatedly. Very few people were listening. The story is now taught in universities as a case study in what has been called 'internet-scale shaming' — a punishment that once required a whole town, and now requires only one screenshot and a shared laugh.

It is often argued that going viral is a lottery no one buys a ticket for. Sacco herself has since warned younger colleagues never to post anything, no matter how private the account, that they wouldn't be prepared to defend on the front page of a newspaper. Whether that is realistic advice in 2026 is another question — but her story is a reminder that on the internet, a small audience and no audience are not the same thing.