From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

On this week's show, we test a radical approach to detoxing online life.

I'll get memes, direct message to me, of, like, my face photoshopped into Holocaust gas chambers.

Hey, this is your daily reminder that user L leads people to suicide.

The core drivers of violence are shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and an inability to meet one's economic needs.

Speaking face-to-face with the person who hurt you or who you hurt is difficult, but it can lead to meaningful resolution in a way that punishment alone

cannot. I think I've been going through some re-evaluation about the way that I communicate.

Violence begets violence. If you can just sever that chain, you save, in theory, infinite harm

down the line. Can mediation save the internet from our cruelest tendencies?

It's all coming up. After this, from WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And this is the third and final part in our series Repairing Justice.

We begin this hour with a nightmarish parable.

It happened back in 2015, and it started when a PR woman tweeted a joke.

Justine Sacco is a public relations executive, or she was at the time.

And in 2013, she tweeted

to her very small number of followers, going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white.

Lindsay Blackwell is a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information

studying online harassment. In my subjective experience, that is super racist. And I think

a lot of people on the internet also interpreted that as super racist. Another interpretation is

that it was a sympathetic, self-deprecating comment about white privilege. But either way,

tweet begins to spread. One of Justine's followers, screenshot of either way, tweet begins to spread.

One of Justine's followers, screenshot of that tweet, sent it to Sam Biddle, who at the time was a reporter at Gawker.

...