Memo to all future Public Relations professionals (and this is coming from one): watch what you say on Twitter or any other social media site, because it WILL come back to haunt you. Just ask Justine Sacco, the former head of public relations at IAC (the parent company of such websites as The Daily Beast and OKCupid.com), who lost her job after a head-slappingly idiotic (and racist) tweet against Africans sparked a global outrage.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the offending Tweet was posted on Friday, and read, "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding -- I'm white!" The comment was widely circulated on Twitter and it wasn't deleted for several hours. Sacco's account gained several thousand followers throughout the day as the public relations executive was heavily criticized for the post. That same afternoon, IAC released a statement (while Justine was still in the air) that read as follows: "This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC. Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight, but this is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action."

On Saturday, according to CNN, Sacco deleted her Twitter account. Shortly thereafter, IAC announced that Sacco was no longer employed with the company. "The offensive comment does not reflect the views and values of IAC. We take this issue very seriously, and we have parted ways with the employee in question," the IAC statement read. "There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally. We hope, however, that time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core."

Following the announcement, Sacco issued a statement of her own to the South African newspaper The Star: "Words cannot express how sorry I am, and how necessary it is for me to apologize to the people of South Africa, who I have offended due to a needless and careless tweet. There is an AIDS crisis taking place in this country, that we read about in America, but do not live with or face on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, it is terribly easy to be cavalier about an epidemic that one has never witnessed firsthand. For being insensitive to this crisis -- which does not discriminate by race, gender or sexual orientation, but which terrifies us all uniformly -- and to the millions of people living with the virus, I am ashamed."