How tweets can lead to disastrous results

The moral of the story? Be careful what you say online, it can come back to byte you sometime in the future, especially when reddit and rouge hacking groups get involved.

One tweet can lead to a disastrous onslaught of consequences, as Adria Richards has recently found out. While attending the PyCon Technology Conference last week, she overheard two male developers behind her talking about “big dongles” and “forking someone’s repo”. She was offended by the jokes and she stated, “I was telling myself if they made one more sexual joke, I’d say something.”

The problem is, she didn't say anything and instead took a photo of the developers, posted it to twitter and outed them for saying "sexual" jokes.  After the tweet went viral one of the developers lost his job and it took an act of Anonymous to eventually get Richards fired from her job.

I can't say what the developers did is right and maybe their discussion should have been in a different setting but I'm pretty sure Richards didn't handle herself very well.  But, as they say sexual harassment can happen to anyone, in any setting and as we have seen, outside work and with complete strangers who have never worked together.

My, what the world has come to.

Related Web URL: http://www.slashgear.com/one-persons-tweets-leads-...