Nina Davuluri was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1989. When she was four, her family moved to Oklahoma, and when she was ten, to Michigan, where she went to college. Six years ago, they returned upstate, and in July, Davuluri became Miss New York 2013 . On Sunday night in Atlantic City, she was crowned Miss America 2014.
On Monday morning, girls at the Montessori school that Davuluri’s grandmother runs, in Andhra Pradesh, India, celebrated Davuluri’s victory with pride: a woman of Indian heritage had become Miss America for the first time. Yet if you Googled “Miss America” then, the top story was not about Davuluri’s glitzy crown but the racist tweets that followed her victory. The American public once sneered at television sets in private when they didn’t like what they saw. Today, they have the Internet.
On Sunday night, many disapproved of the new Miss America , and they took to Twitter. The flood of nasty discourse was hard to miss the following day. BuzzFeed classified the tweets by category: people calling Davuluri an Arab, as a slur; people shocked that an Indian-American could win because “this is America”; people offended that she was crowned so close to the anniversary of 9/11; people who joked about possible ties to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups; people who “were just outright racist.”
Twitter as a platform has unleashed an unimaginable volume of speech; Twitter as a company prizes the freedom of that speech above all else, and gives as little thought as it can to its decency. The people behind the appalling tweets were not, by and large, online trolls, if a troll is someone who sows intentional discord online . They were just being honest. Some Twitter users, acclimated to the original privacy of Facebook, which previously limited the reach of interactions to a circle of “friends,” seem not to realize how public its succinct cousin can be. Thus, during events like the Miss America competition, President Obama’s Inauguration, the George Zimmerman trial, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, tweeters with less than peaceable sentiments—incredulous that the Miss America title went to someone who may not have been descended from a Mayflower settler, for instance—very publicly share their feelings online, and then find themselves surprised to be quoted by a wide range of Web sites, from Jezebel to the Huffington Post to the New York Times . These sites not only berate them directly in articles about their tweets but loose upon them the wrath and condescension of society at large. Twitter, after all, is the most public of gallows; as a platform, it has no sense of whose head is in the noose, nor does it care.
Blogs like Public Shaming have sprouted up to constantly aggregate closed-minded tweets from smaller-fry civilians; its raison d’être is exposing Twitter’s bigoted populace to the rest of the site’s users. When an outpouring of offensive tweets results in a corresponding flood of publicity, many feel affronted by the rash of ugly thought and respond in kind. They use Twitter as a stage for intervention. The offended bombard the offensive, often with ugly tweets of their own. The result, typically, is that the original tweeters remove their tweets, or themselves, from Twitter entirely—or suffer real-life consequences. Recently, Pax Dickinson, the chief technology officer of Business Insider—whose founder, Henry Blodget , was recently profiled in the magazine—was forced out of his job after his tweets , which ranged from misogynist to homophobic in nature, caught the attention of tech journalists. (Twitter users bombarded him first, of course.)
Were Twitter to depart from its laissez-faire policy and intervene with respect to speech, on whose behalf should it do so? If the site tried to block harassment, it might wind up muting not the racists and the misogynists who express closed-minded thoughts but those so angered by the tweets that they respond with force. These responders, in effect, are attempting to police speech. Whether they fancy themselves enlightened or not, as they stoop to accusations of bigotry, stupidity, and ugliness—sometimes uttering their slurs in the deformed name of political correctness—they become the harassers.
In the uproar after our new Miss America was crowned, one of the tweets aggregated with disgust was by a user with the handle of @ChrisBlack57, who self-reported his location as Alabama and who tweeted that Davuluri was a “sand nigger.” Black, in the nominal sense, seems hardly savvy enough to be a Web troll. Most of his tweets are tributes to his girlfriend: #love her #loveyouguys, our puppy’s cute but #yourcuter. He has even tweeted , contrary to any sense of troll acumen, “Need new people to text textme,” with his phone number as the hashtag.
Black’s apparent girlfriend, @madisonmcmickin—bio: “Follow me, I love new followers!”—who had been more active on the site than he since the pageant, was called a heifer and a fool on Monday afternoon. Toward the end of the day, she tweeted, “Is anybody else having problems with weird terrorist people tweeting at you? Or is it just me?” One user, @meatbucketblues, tweeted at McMickin, “HAHAHA!!! You’re home schooled. No wonder you’re an idiot!!! @ChrisBlack57 probably is too! I’ll bet incest as well.” She replied, “Alright creeper. Glad you know all about our life. Have a great day :),” to which @meatbucketblues responded, “Be glad it’s Twitter. I’m sure other people will find you outside of the Internet. Good luck with that.”
These words, it would seem, had their intended impact: hours after the exchanges, McMickin and Black both shut down their Twitter accounts. It’s impossible to say whether they were reformed, or whether Davuluri’s elegantly dismissive demurral elucidated the error of their ways. (“I have to rise above that,” she said, at a press conference after the pagaent. “I always viewed myself as first and foremost American.”) They may have feared legal repercussions for hate speech, or how a racist online footprint might affect their job prospects as they grew older. Whatever the case, Black and McMickin had likely joined Twitter to speak freely. Perhaps they did not expect, and were not prepared for, the attention and threats that the open platform allowed. But the ecosystem for shame and degradation works both ways. Twitter exists to allow every kind of speech, and its users have developed vigilante tactics to expose expression they don’t like. Maybe this is a helpful way to educate. If only it could bring us beyond users removing themselves from the platform: a kind of end to speech.
During the time period that she still could be found on Twitter, McMickin received a viciously demeaning, sexist tweet by a user called @JimKidwell1. McMickin responded, “You look like a terrorist. Leave me alone, you’re scaring me.” She added, “You’re the one judging.”
Photograph by Lucas Jackson/Reuters/Corbis.
On Monday morning, girls at the Montessori school that Davuluri’s grandmother runs, in Andhra Pradesh, India, celebrated Davuluri’s victory with pride: a woman of Indian heritage had become Miss America for the first time. Yet if you Googled “Miss America” then, the top story was not about Davuluri’s glitzy crown but the racist tweets that followed her victory. The American public once sneered at television sets in private when they didn’t like what they saw. Today, they have the Internet.
On Sunday night, many disapproved of the new Miss America , and they took to Twitter. The flood of nasty discourse was hard to miss the following day. BuzzFeed classified the tweets by category: people calling Davuluri an Arab, as a slur; people shocked that an Indian-American could win because “this is America”; people offended that she was crowned so close to the anniversary of 9/11; people who joked about possible ties to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups; people who “were just outright racist.”
Twitter as a platform has unleashed an unimaginable volume of speech; Twitter as a company prizes the freedom of that speech above all else, and gives as little thought as it can to its decency. The people behind the appalling tweets were not, by and large, online trolls, if a troll is someone who sows intentional discord online . They were just being honest. Some Twitter users, acclimated to the original privacy of Facebook, which previously limited the reach of interactions to a circle of “friends,” seem not to realize how public its succinct cousin can be. Thus, during events like the Miss America competition, President Obama’s Inauguration, the George Zimmerman trial, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, tweeters with less than peaceable sentiments—incredulous that the Miss America title went to someone who may not have been descended from a Mayflower settler, for instance—very publicly share their feelings online, and then find themselves surprised to be quoted by a wide range of Web sites, from Jezebel to the Huffington Post to the New York Times . These sites not only berate them directly in articles about their tweets but loose upon them the wrath and condescension of society at large. Twitter, after all, is the most public of gallows; as a platform, it has no sense of whose head is in the noose, nor does it care.
Blogs like Public Shaming have sprouted up to constantly aggregate closed-minded tweets from smaller-fry civilians; its raison d’être is exposing Twitter’s bigoted populace to the rest of the site’s users. When an outpouring of offensive tweets results in a corresponding flood of publicity, many feel affronted by the rash of ugly thought and respond in kind. They use Twitter as a stage for intervention. The offended bombard the offensive, often with ugly tweets of their own. The result, typically, is that the original tweeters remove their tweets, or themselves, from Twitter entirely—or suffer real-life consequences. Recently, Pax Dickinson, the chief technology officer of Business Insider—whose founder, Henry Blodget , was recently profiled in the magazine—was forced out of his job after his tweets , which ranged from misogynist to homophobic in nature, caught the attention of tech journalists. (Twitter users bombarded him first, of course.)
Were Twitter to depart from its laissez-faire policy and intervene with respect to speech, on whose behalf should it do so? If the site tried to block harassment, it might wind up muting not the racists and the misogynists who express closed-minded thoughts but those so angered by the tweets that they respond with force. These responders, in effect, are attempting to police speech. Whether they fancy themselves enlightened or not, as they stoop to accusations of bigotry, stupidity, and ugliness—sometimes uttering their slurs in the deformed name of political correctness—they become the harassers.
In the uproar after our new Miss America was crowned, one of the tweets aggregated with disgust was by a user with the handle of @ChrisBlack57, who self-reported his location as Alabama and who tweeted that Davuluri was a “sand nigger.” Black, in the nominal sense, seems hardly savvy enough to be a Web troll. Most of his tweets are tributes to his girlfriend: #love her #loveyouguys, our puppy’s cute but #yourcuter. He has even tweeted , contrary to any sense of troll acumen, “Need new people to text textme,” with his phone number as the hashtag.
Black’s apparent girlfriend, @madisonmcmickin—bio: “Follow me, I love new followers!”—who had been more active on the site than he since the pageant, was called a heifer and a fool on Monday afternoon. Toward the end of the day, she tweeted, “Is anybody else having problems with weird terrorist people tweeting at you? Or is it just me?” One user, @meatbucketblues, tweeted at McMickin, “HAHAHA!!! You’re home schooled. No wonder you’re an idiot!!! @ChrisBlack57 probably is too! I’ll bet incest as well.” She replied, “Alright creeper. Glad you know all about our life. Have a great day :),” to which @meatbucketblues responded, “Be glad it’s Twitter. I’m sure other people will find you outside of the Internet. Good luck with that.”
These words, it would seem, had their intended impact: hours after the exchanges, McMickin and Black both shut down their Twitter accounts. It’s impossible to say whether they were reformed, or whether Davuluri’s elegantly dismissive demurral elucidated the error of their ways. (“I have to rise above that,” she said, at a press conference after the pagaent. “I always viewed myself as first and foremost American.”) They may have feared legal repercussions for hate speech, or how a racist online footprint might affect their job prospects as they grew older. Whatever the case, Black and McMickin had likely joined Twitter to speak freely. Perhaps they did not expect, and were not prepared for, the attention and threats that the open platform allowed. But the ecosystem for shame and degradation works both ways. Twitter exists to allow every kind of speech, and its users have developed vigilante tactics to expose expression they don’t like. Maybe this is a helpful way to educate. If only it could bring us beyond users removing themselves from the platform: a kind of end to speech.
During the time period that she still could be found on Twitter, McMickin received a viciously demeaning, sexist tweet by a user called @JimKidwell1. McMickin responded, “You look like a terrorist. Leave me alone, you’re scaring me.” She added, “You’re the one judging.”
Photograph by Lucas Jackson/Reuters/Corbis.
