Would it all have turned out differently had InterActiveCorp stared down the online mob? In December 2013, a public relations executive with the company, Justine Sacco, posted a joke on social media, satirising American insularity and racism. Sacco was about to board a flight to South Africa, from where her anti-apartheid family had emigrated, when she tweeted: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding, I’m white.’ While Sacco was in the air and offline, her tweet went viral. A social media mob condemned her as a racist, established that she worked at InterActiveCorp, and pressured the company to sack her. ‘We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time,’ posted one of her critics. The company duly sacked her.

Sacco’s experience featured in Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015), which drew attention to the brutality of the online world. Ronson had been an enthusiastic participant in social media shaming exercises, having relished the adrenaline rush and the righteous satisfaction of shaming an adversary. But having reflected on the devastating impacts of the vigilante justice that was meted out, Ronson repudiated it and devoted a book to the subject.

As is often the case with debates about cancel culture and free speech, Ronson did not interrogate the corporation that delivered the ultimate cancellation to Sacco. InterActiveCorp had a choice: it could have rejected the online mob’s demands to punish Sacco for her tweet by sacking her. It could have criticised her joke as clumsy, insensitive, and offensive. It could have explained that Sacco had intended to satirise racism and had effusively apologised once she realised how her post had been interpreted. It did none of that. Welcome to corporate cancel culture.