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I agree, however, what is the statute of limitations for want of a better term for inappropriate behavior that "reflects on an employer"? I mean some people are twittering and facebooking from an early age.
1. Depends on what they were tweeting at that earlier age.
2. Are they mentioning their current employer in their tweets?
This woman was the Director of Corporate Communications in her company and still fed the need to comment publicly (and nastily) on everything she saw.
I am not sure why people think that their random thoughts are so important that you must broadcast them on social media. Being stupid on social media can result in a feeding frenzy. No one cares what happens to you.
I agree, however, what is the statute of limitations for want of a better term for inappropriate behavior that "reflects on an employer"? I mean some people are twittering and facebooking from an early age.
1. Depends on what they were tweeting at that earlier age.
2. Are they mentioning their current employer in their tweets?
In general, if you aren't linking yourself to work then you are in much much better shape of not getting in trouble.
3. Depends on the type of job or employment. Things with security clearances for example could be tough....things where you ask if they want to supersize not so much.
Define "punishment". If it was abject termination without severance, etc. then I'd say that's fair. Even it was allowable it's pretty draconian of the employer.
However, if someone was complaining about work conditions all the time on Facebook, do you think that person would EVER get a promotion or more opportunity? Extremely doubtful. That may not be "retaliation"; in my mind that is just common sense.
It is illegal retaliation though, and a pretty clear case of it, to not promote someone solely because they discuss work conditions. (But how is their performance otherwise? Not promoting your best trained top performing employee just because they complain about work conditions is obvious. But if eg are otherwise a poor performer without the training or experience to be promote anyway, you can choose not to promote them for those reasons.) The way to phrase the question to yourself as an employer is, "am I doing this to try to get my employees to stop discussing work conditions?"
If you are, then deal with your work conditions instead of punishing employees who complain.
This woman was the Director of Corporate Communications in her company and still fed the need to comment publicly (and nastily) on everything she saw.[b]
Interesting article. This in particular stuck out to me, though, as different and unfair:
"I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif., when a stupid joke popped into his head. It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles. He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me. “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle. . . . It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”
Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph. He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture. It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming.
The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it. She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. A day later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired.
“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” he told me. (Like Stone and Sacco, he had never before talked on the record about what happened to him. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further damaging his career.) “I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears, but” — he paused — “when I got in the car with my wife I just. . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”"
So this guy says something very quietly to a friend sitting next to him and because someone in front of him overheard it and got offended, and tweeted in attempting to shame him, he gets fired? What if the woman was lying? He didn't put anything in writing, he didn't put anything on social media, he just said something, and as he described, "it wasn't even conversation-level volume." For all her followers knew, she made it up. This is the other dangerous, if you will, side of social media. Anyone can take a picture of you, discreetly or not, and shame you for anything. Your clothes, your weight, a behavior quirk or weird action you may have been doing at a particular moment. Anyone with a cell phone and social media account can turn you into a laughing stock, whether it's for a small or large audience, viral scale or close-knit friends of the person who is trying to shame you. It sucks.
This happened to the woman who took the picture:
"The woman who took the photograph, Adria Richards, soon felt the wrath of the crowd herself. The man responsible for the dongle joke had posted about losing his job on Hacker News, an online forum popular with developers. This led to a backlash from the other end of the political spectrum. So-called men’s rights activists and anonymous trolls bombarded Richards with death threats on Twitter and Facebook. Someone tweeted Richards’s home address along with a photograph of a beheaded woman with duct tape over her mouth. Fearing for her life, she left her home, sleeping on friends’ couches for the remainder of the year.
Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone had launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if Richards was fired. That same day she was publicly let go.
“I cried a lot during this time, journaled and escaped by watching movies,” she later said to me in an email. “SendGrid threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”"
This isn't right, either, but IMO it's a lot more "deserved" than what she did to the anonymous guy. She put it on twitter, it went viral, she's the one who got someone fired over a stupid joke that wasn't even posted on social media. She seems like a sh*tty person who got her karma, though rather harshly, unnecessarily so.
But yes, I think this story and others show how dangerous social media can be. Apparently, people even have to be extra vigilant when whispering a joke to a friend.
I do think there is a difference between what Sacco did and what the anonymous guy said, though. Totally different scenarios.
This woman was the Director of Corporate Communications in her company and still fed the need to comment publicly (and nastily) on everything she saw.
I am not sure why people think that their random thoughts are so important that you must broadcast them on social media. Being stupid on social media can result in a feeding frenzy. No one cares what happens to you.
Keep a private diary!
Thanks for reminding me of that story.
A person in that position should indeed be fired. Because if she had such little awareness of the potential consequences of a stupid tweet, then she shouldn't be trusted with a box of kitchen matches, let alone a company's public image. Entirely an unsympathetic character. It's kind of like the entire sordid Monica Lewinsky saga. If you're going to canoodle with the most publicly-scrutinized man on the planet, you're going to get caught. Absolutely, Bill Clinton had the larger responsibility in that situation. But she was an intelligent adult who should have known what a dumb move it was, for a host of reason. If there's ever a good example of the difference between intelligence and wisdom, that was it. Her life was effectively over at the age of 23.
Here's the thing. With every benefit delivered up by technology, whether it's twitter, the Internet, the airplane, or whatever, there's always going to be a consequence as well. And how you use that new technological marvel has to be tempered with knowledge of the harm it could potentially create.
Had the hairdresser in question had just blown off steam verbally, that would have likely been it. But once it's typed and on the internet, it's out there forever. That's why there are companies out there now that cover up your past digital indiscretions.
And for all those people who opine things to the effect of, "Well, I should be able to say whatever I want," I have this to say: When has that ever been the case? If you say something incredibly hideous, mean, self-centered, and whatever else, there have always been consequences. In the past, it might have social opprobrium. Today, it's that same social opprobrium, only with millions of people having a chance to weigh in.
And what about information posted about them by others ?
We're not in control of what is posted on social media about us, like it or not, and it will only get worse. Google glass was just a first try.
There should be laws that allow one to control that information (takedown requests) as well as laws prohibiting companies from using this info against their employees, with certain well defined exceptions.
Most companies don't mind plastering untruths all over the media in advertising, but according to sspistol it's only the common man who needs to be controlled.
Interesting article. This in particular stuck out to me, though, as different and unfair:
"I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif., when a stupid joke popped into his head. It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles. He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me. “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle. . . . It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”
Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph. He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture. It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming.
The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it. She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. A day later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired.
“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” he told me. (Like Stone and Sacco, he had never before talked on the record about what happened to him. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further damaging his career.) “I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears, but” — he paused — “when I got in the car with my wife I just. . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”"
The bolded is what always bothered me the most about this particular incident. These social justice warriors(aka crybullies) don't seem to realize or care that they may be ruining the lives of more than just the person they were offended by. Having your father be fired from his job and essentially blacklisted from not only his chosen career field but pretty much any professional career field is a major game changer in your quality of life. People should put some thought in to that before going off willy nilly and trying to destroy people's lives because they said something insensitive.
I hope this guy was able to get his life back on track after this, for his family's sake if not his own.
It's beyond me too. I'm glad that heifer was fired. If I were the salon's owner, I wouldn't want that kind of personality around my customers.
I find it offensive to call a human a heifer. You should be fired.
See how that works?
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