Do you remember Justine Sacco? She became infamous in 2013 when she went to South Africa. With one single tweet from an airport, she literally ruined her own life. No hyperbole or anything; she screwed herself like a light bulb in a whirlpool, and even became the inspiration for the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed. What terrible thing did Sacco do? She made a joke. This joke:

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Let it soak in for a moment. Roll it on the tongue and get a good feel for it. What is it? A bad-taste joke? Sure. What did it mean? What would happen if you had said it? For Justine, it meant viral insanity. She tweeted right before getting on an airplane, and had no access to Twitter for the entire 11-hour flight. When she landed, she got a text from a friend saying that she was sorry. "Sorry for what?" Sacco wondered. Then the shit hit the fan.

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Sorry, I mean the #shit hit the #fan.

Sacco was the #1 trending topic on Twitter across the entire world. Hundreds of thousands of people had retweeted or responded with disgust. The company she worked for (as a PR person, no less) had announced that they found it outrageous and offensive, but that the employee in question was unreachable.

You could follow in real time the storm of madness, and the eventual realization everyone had that they were ahead of Sacco in this game. The anger was mixed with excitement, as people realized she didn't know any of this was going on. So they were now all in on the counter-joke, which was going to be her landing and discovering that her life was over, all in real time. In fact, someone went to the airport just to snap a pic of her when she got off the plane.