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Legal Commentary

: Althouse

With sufficient followers on Twitter, you can cry out in the midst of an incident, get mass support...

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... and get the big corporation to tweet you an apology:

Director Kevin Smith was kicked off a flight leaving Oakland airport because they deemed him a safety risk and asked him to leave the flight....
"I broke no regulation, offered no 'safety risk,' (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?)," he Tweeted. "I'm way fat? But I'm not THERE just yet."

Later:

"Dear @SouthwestAir, I'm on another one of your planes, safely seated & buckled-in again, waiting to be dragged off in front of the normies," he continued to Tweet. "Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off!"
Southwest even sent him some apologetic Tweets after they saw all the support he received on Twitter for his embarrassing inconvenience.

Life is so vivid and in the moment these days, isn't it? But did the plane single out Smith because he was the heaviest person? Once one of my sons got kicked off a plane that was overloaded. He was pretty skinny, but he got picked because he had the last assigned seat and the airline didn't try hard enough to get a volunteer:

Two people did volunteer, but American only needed to kick off one person and so it would only offer one of these two the measly $200 travel certificate, and the two volunteers didn't want to split up. So one of my sons had to leave, to get the next bus to Madison, at 11 pm, and arrive at the Memorial Union at 2 am ? on a cold night, with no shelter open, and nothing warm to wear, because he hadn't worn a coat in Austin, and his luggage had traveled on the plane.
Many passengers on the plane witnessed how rudely my sons were treated and at least one came up afterwards to say how offended he was and how he was going to write a letter to the airline about it....

Today, there'd have been a lot of tweeting going on.

Full post as published by Althouse on February 14, 2010 (boomark / email).