It’s been more than a year, but people around the world still remember the firestorm that Justine Sacco sparked with a single tweet sent just before she embarked on an 11-hour flight.

Before taking off on a flight from New York to South Africa in December 2013, the former public relations director tweeted:  "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"

While she was in the air, and unplugged from the Internet and social media, the Twitterverse nearly exploded with derision, hate and outright abuse. By the time her plane landed, she had received countless hateful, misogynistic and threatening messages.

She also lost her job.

The well-known story of Sacco’s demise is told from a different perspective in Jon Ronson’s new book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.”

The Welsh author met with Sacco and other targets of intense social media outrage to find out what it was like to have one stupid tweet ruin your life. Her story is the backbone of Ronson’s book, which explores the evolution of public shaming in the Internet age.

Ronson drew on his own experiences too. In early 2012, he realized that someone had set up a Twitter account with his name and picture and was posting odd tweets, many of them about food.

The creator of the @jon_ronson Twitter account refused to take it down, but for some reason agreed to be interviewed by Ronson. The author filmed the encounter and posted it to YouTube.

You Tube commenters immediately supported Ronson, and slammed the academics behind the fake Twitter account. But the comments quickly went from benign criticism to death threats.

“We were like drone strike operators,” Ronson told CTV’s Canada AM of the online backlash against the creators of the account. “We destroyed a village and then went off and got coffee. 

“I thought, that’s not who we want to be as human beings.” 

Ronson said he was then inspired to seek out others who were shamed publicly, in order to show how “brutal and mental-health mangling it is.”

Ronson said Sacco’s tweet wasn’t meant to be racist, but he understands why it was interpreted as such. 

He said we’ve now reached a point where ordinary human mistakes and flaws are considered worthy of an onslaught on social media.

And while we’re trying to be empathetic and “fight the good fight” against racism, sexism and other injustices online, “we’re finding it impossible to differentiate between serious transgressions and unserious transgressions,” Ronson said.