Description
Boeing records around 75 billion dollars in sales each year, including a successful commercial airline strand and approximately 29 billion dollars in arms. This paper examines Boeing’s social media response to the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crash, in which 149 people died. Boeing tweeted consistently until the crash occurred, after which their tweets became infrequent and perform apology, grief, and “taking responsibility”. We contrast the inherent tension between profits Boeing makes from arms and their deadly effects – a “public secret” which is understood but often unarticulated – with public expressions of apology and sorrow following the crash. In doing so, we build upon two disparate bodies of literature: 1) public secrecy, which investigates how lack of public acknowledgement operates to obscure everyday security arrangements and 2) political apology, which pays significant attention to the (in)ability of institutions to feel and perform remorse, but mostly overlooks private actors. This paper is concerned with the political work of secrecy and public apology, arguing that Boeing’s social media apologies for this crash are not simply face-saving measures. Rather, they function as ambivalent ‘breaks’ in the frame of the public secret which acknowledge the loss of some lives, whilst obscuring the loss of others.
