It’s the era of Internet drama as much as it’s the Information Age; that series of tubes presents a whole new way for rumors and recriminations to spread and it provides a platform for voices that otherwise wouldn’t know about any given event. By now, most people are aware of the fallout from a situation that arose at this years Pycon–a Python developers conference.

Developer evangelist Adria Richards was in attendance of a presentation when a pair of men behind her started telling jokes using technical jargon that have sexualized innuendo–such as references to “forking” and “big dongles,” giving rise to the now-common moniker for what happened next. As the presentation happened to be about making the conference community more welcoming to women and girls, Richards felt that the jokes being told led to exactly the opposite and that the men were in violation of the Pycon Code of Conduct. To deal with the bad behavior, Richards took a picture of the men telling the sexualized jokes, posted it to twitter and used a hashtag to make the conference staff aware.

The immediate reaction didn’t go so badly. Pycon staff arrived on the scene, pulled the men away to speak to them about the disruption, and the two offenders excused themselves from that day at the conference.

However, it didn’t stop there. One of the men got fired from his job–and due to the nature of how companies fire employees it’s impossible to say if it’s related to being “named and shamed” on Twitter. This triggered a tsunami of hate from the Internet (death threats, rape threats, we-know-where-you-live threats, you-should-kill-yourself threats) and even brought in the likes of 4chan and their signature malevolent river of sleaze; Adria Richards shortly also was fired from her job; and Pycon decided to update their Code of Conduct to forbid shaming participants on Twitter.

Women in technology face a disproportionate reaction in news media and social media

If the backlash against Adria Richards over her public shaming of the disruptive men at the conference had occurred at another time, we might be able to gawk at the explosive nature of that backlash. However, we’ve seen this sort of surprising vicious escalation of shaming occur in social media happen now once too many times.

The previous-best example of this is Anita Sarkeesian, who merely ran a Kickstarter campaign to examine and critique sexist tropes in video games. During the extent of her campaign she came under not just vicious criticism, but suffered under the yoke of numerous death threats, rape threats, had a Flash video game made where players could punch a photograph of her in the face and leave bruises.

In the wake of Richard’s using Twitter, not only did she suffer under a massive amount of persnickety rudeness and shaming for her actions; but her employer SendGrid was targeted by a massive DDoS attack that took their systems offline for a few hours; and one particular “critic” of her behavior circulated an image of a the decapitated corpse of a woman with the words “When I’m done.”

It wouldn’t be enough to say that Anita Sarkeesian and Adria Richard’s are not alone in this reaction. But we can look to Kathy Sierra and others to see how widespread this is.

Naming and shaming in the era of social media

In 2012, Twitter generated over 340 million tweets a day and the vast majority of these–even though controversial and those by celebrities went entirely ignored. It’s not hard to guess that some percentage of these tweets are used to publicly shame people for bad behavior; the number of those tweets we’re aware of is almost zero.

It still has a gigantic, worldwide audience, to whom anything posted there can be accessed publicly presumably forever. As a result, it makes a powerful resource for getting a message out (as much as those messages often go totally unnoticed.) How the Pycon staff reacted to Richards’s tweet speaks well to the power of the medium for catching their attention–they were actually watching–but it also adds an extra dimension that it made public that they needed to act.

Ethicist Janet D. Stemwedel spoke to the nature of “naming and shaming” as a strategy for getting a social problem dealt with and in particular that in relation to what happened to Adria Richards.

With her Tweet, Richards identified bad behavior, the participants, and put them in the public view. Much like all social media, this brings up questions about the intersection of external social spaces with smaller communities. A conference hall may exist on the more private end of the public cultural spectrum (after all, the men telling the jokes weren’t on the stage) but with the addition of people with smartphones with cameras, Twitter, and Facebook suddenly there’s a window from “outside” staring at everyone.

When a cultural problem is extremely pervasive, there’s few ways to address it that don’t generate fallout. If someone was fired for making sexualized jokes at a conference by their employer that seems like an extreme reaction. Adria Richards being fired from her job for what looks like the wake of fallout for pointing out bad behavior would also be bad. The fallout itself is perhaps the worst example of disproportionate shaming–those involved in sending death threats, rape threats, and attempting to shame Richards herself is part of what needs to change.

The coverage continues…

Aftershocks from Adria Richard’s now-infamous tweet will echo much like Anita Sarkeesian’s project.

Editorials have weighed in from Ars Technica, All Things D–on her firing–and even the Guardian UK; all this as well as critics such as Amanda Blum have also spoken out.

The technology industry’s dirty laundry is very public right now and it’s a good time to take a hard look at it to figure how to deal with it in the future.