> private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark.
I think even more concerning for most people is a mob going after and firing people who didn't do these things. David Shor getting fired because he Tweeted that rioting was a bad political tactic, causing angry Twitter users to successfully press his employers to fire him. The case of the guy who got fired because someone thought he made an "OK" sign while driving and whipped up an angry Twitter mob (both cases are discussed here[1]).
Here's a random case I had stumbled upon a few years back that's now been forgotten[2] - man posts video of Chipotle telling him he has to pay for his burrito first because they say he's taken burritos without paying for them, accuses Chipotle workers of racism, and whips up a Twitter mob. Chipotle immediately apologizes and fires the manager. Then people notice old Tweets from the same guy bragging about stealing burritos from Chipotle. This leads Chipotle to rehire the person. If a random person decides to lie about you and whip of a Twitter mob, you have to hope that they've been so sloppy as to brag about their crimes on Twitter beforehand, because a simple unverified accusation from any random person is enough to get you fired.
And even after many cases like this, Twitter still let's people try to create Twitter mobs to get revenge on private citizens (particularly jarring when Yishan is arguing that the reason news articles are censored is to avoid angry mobs). However, they'll ban people who politely state heterodox opinions on controversial subjects (even if they are relatively common positions among the public). And since Yishan brings up Reddit, it's worth noting that they have a similar approach as well (whipping up angry mobs is fine, heterodox positions are not).
This culture on these sites is a result of the choices that social media companies have made (and not just the choices mentioned above, but others like the efforts made to push engagement). We see the results of that choice by the state of these sites. And the people involved, instead of taking responsibility for what they've created, decide to dump all the blame on the users.
>Why are people being fired because they made a tweet that wasn't supportive enough (or supportive in the right way) of the "correct" social causes?
I honestly rarely have seen this happen. There's almost always some other context to the story or the people who feel that they've been unjustly fired actually vastly underestimate what the impact of their statement was.
The reality is when you post on twitter with your name attached to it you are making a public statement that can reach thousands of people. Doesn't matter if you tweet from your toilet, you're reaching an audience that is larger than most people 20 years ago could ever dream of.
If that actually for some reason causes a PR shitstorm for your employer, you've damaged their business. This has always let to people being fired, this is not new.
Do you know how many local politicians or celebrities or public figures have lost their careers over a single sentence? A ton, there's nothing novel about it. Twitter gives you the opportunity as a complete nobody to reach hundreds of thousands within minutes. It's time people recognise they're not nobody's any more when that happens.
Indeed -- here is some additional context that the article doesn't provide:
The fired employee Tweeted today:
>In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee’s inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me the chance to quit [0]
He then specifically cited [1] the Tweet in question that was the cause:
>I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of support to Recoil's docs and he privately refused, claiming open source shouldn't be political.
>Intentionally not making a statement is already political. Consider that next time you think of Recoil. [2]
This is specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB, which in my own estimation crosses the line from criticism of executives or general policy, to specifically trying to instigate public outrage against a co-worker. If such actions were directed at me, I would definitely consider it as contributing to a hostile work environment. It all strikes me as a modern-day example of "Havel's greengrocer" [3].
She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired for saying something offensive on Twitter.
The thing with situations like this is that it's not that the crowd is reporting that a crime has been committed. It doesn't even matter what was said, it's just that thousands of people are threatening that they will boycott their product. Companies and organisations just need to realise that those people were never their customers anyway and will have forgotten about it tomorrow. A Twitter campaign to get an employee fired should be treated as no more than a DDoS attack and mitigated the same way.
For contrast, look how Pax Dickinson was fired from the CTO role at Business Insider for his joking tweets that were perceived as anti-black racist. Such tweets were on a personal account, unrelated to work matters, and obviously ironic jokes about news items. (The context was ignored in order to paint a picture of Dickinson as a bigot.)
Here, @_danilo is also on a personal account, and tweeting specifically about work matters. The difference? His tweets were anti-white rather than anti-black. Given the prevailing SJW agenda infesting Silicon Valley his job should be safe for now. But activists should keep our eyes on him.
> Some scumbag got a guy fired by publicly shaming him on twitter for making a joke to his friend in a private conversation. That is one of the most hostile, weird, and hateful ways I've ever seen someone behave.
A conference attendee overheard another conference attendee making dick jokes in a public space at a conference, violating the terms of the CoC that he'd agreed to before attending. She reported him and posted it on her Twitter feed, complaining about it. He was reprimanded by the conference organizers, and apologized
When he returned to his work, he was fired—and he immediately posted to HN that she'd gotten him fired. He found a new job, while she was subjected to two years of personal threats, identity theft, employer-targeted DDoS attacks, and chan grief. She still is to this day.
If you think that reporting someone for violating an conference code of conduct is the 'most hostile, weird, and hateful' way you've ever seen someone behave, you aren't watching very closely.
I don't know the individual story, but for me it sounds like a line was crossed.
> Yes her comment on twitter was distasteful and racist
Racism isn't acceptable in any form. If I make a racist comment, I wouldn't be surprised if my employer dismissed me.
I agree, trial by mob isn't acceptable, neither are death threats, and I agree that it's more common and that it shouldn't happen. (To avoid this personally, I don't use Facebook or Twitter) But if I make a racist statement, in public (because social media is public) then I won't be surprised if people start thinking of me differently and I won't be surprised if my employer decides to get rid of me.
You seem awfully against the anti-cancel culture crowd, but do you feel like there should be zero recourse for someone who's company fired them amid public baseless accusations? Say for example a bunch of people jump on a bandwagon to tarnish someone's reputation publicly after hearing from someone else that he (lets be real) did X. So the company fires them because twitter is spreading their name around and then it turns out the accusations were plainly false. Now his income is hamstrung and everything else is just out there.
An even more ridiculous example might be an annocuous disagreement with what a lot of people are saying. "I don't think the cops should be abolished, and anyone should be able to protest for their beliefs".
I don't think anyone disagrees with the other implied strawman of the guy who goes around constantly making rape jokes and is surprised when his friends don't like him anymore. It's more about how easy it is to just spread dirt, truthful or otherwise.
I really seems like this is about to become a pile-on against a company's actions based on a single tweet, showing one side of a story.
Even half-way through that one video he makes a comment/accent that (while I have really no context around) feels like a racial mockery, and some cursory reading shows that the same account had other posts (homophobic context, "buying NAACP shirt so these people [Black people] vibe with me more", etc).
Is firing someone too far? Perhaps. But this really doesn't seem like someone getting fired for a comment about bodegas.
> if she is fired, Benton should definitely also be fired for doxxing her
Isn't that anchoring bias? For starters, why equate firing with punishment? Firing an employee is a discretion of an employer meant to be used if they deem that the employee did not fulfill duties adequately, it's not really supposed to be a vehicle for mob appeasement.
More generally, I take issue with this idea that doing something bad ought to result in career ruin. Like, is the undertext that they ought to gtfo of their field of expertise and go flip burgers or something instead? I feel like there ought to be better ways to address conduct issues that doesn't involve messing w/ people's livelihoods (twitter lynching is not any better, to be clear)
IMHO, it'd be more conducive to a healthy society if we defaulted to talking about remediation strategies in the workplace, like three-strike systems, clearer public comm policies etc than defaulting to tearing people down.
Sure, I probably largely agree with that. But there's a difference between what you're describing and what often happens in the real world where a twitter mob calls for you to be fired and your company immediately shitcans you to placate the yobs.
I don’t know anything about the specific dynamics of the problem — so perhaps you’re right. But I have a general problem with the catalyst to being removed being a twitter mob. Whether it should have happened long ago, was deserved, or not.
If people should be fired or removed from a position that’s fine, I don’t know Hsu beyond his blog. But this is a method that is dangerous to societal function.
> Companies taking responsibility for the actions of their employees is far more grownup than whatever you're suggesting.
Agreed. But firing someone for expressing personal oppinions (if that is what happened, as the article sucgests) isn't "taking responsibility".
> "Twitter isn't even connected to MS. Seriously."
> What a meaningless statement.
You missed my point. The article suggests you can't tweet anything without your employee feeling you are representing them. That would be reasonable if you used the company website to communicate, but the person in the article had used twitter. There is absolutely no reason for a reader to believe he is representing anyone but himself.
The reason a disproportionate number of these articles are regarding public sector employees is because public institutions are publicly accountable, and therefore generally must respond to a controversy. A private sector firm is under no obligation to state how it is resolving a matter with an employee and may find it advantageous in terms of public image and legal liability to simply not comment if the employee has not been terminated. Having said that, here are a couple of private individuals.
Feel free to additionally move the goalposts as you wish, but the point remains that the insinuation that some HN'ers are making that the only possible reason he isn't facing forthwith termination is his race doesn't seem inarguably the case.
It's not just firing, however. The article discusses the case of the guy who owned the company, whose daughter (whom he employed) posted some bad stuff to Twitter years ago.
He fired his own daughter but this was insufficient: not only did virtually all his customers abandon him immediately but his landlord revoked his lease (how can a landlord do that? I have no idea).
So basically his entire business was destroyed overnight in response to something he didn't even do himself.
A lot of these firings are driven by fear of customer boycotts. And the customer boycotts are driven by fear of more boycotts/outrage/etc... it's a circle of destruction.
Twitter's actions seems like retaliation against the employee for enabling other employees to collect evidence of discrimination. Performance reviews often exist to reduce the companies liability when firing people off, but being fired with good performance reviews can work against them.
I think even more concerning for most people is a mob going after and firing people who didn't do these things. David Shor getting fired because he Tweeted that rioting was a bad political tactic, causing angry Twitter users to successfully press his employers to fire him. The case of the guy who got fired because someone thought he made an "OK" sign while driving and whipped up an angry Twitter mob (both cases are discussed here[1]).
Here's a random case I had stumbled upon a few years back that's now been forgotten[2] - man posts video of Chipotle telling him he has to pay for his burrito first because they say he's taken burritos without paying for them, accuses Chipotle workers of racism, and whips up a Twitter mob. Chipotle immediately apologizes and fires the manager. Then people notice old Tweets from the same guy bragging about stealing burritos from Chipotle. This leads Chipotle to rehire the person. If a random person decides to lie about you and whip of a Twitter mob, you have to hope that they've been so sloppy as to brag about their crimes on Twitter beforehand, because a simple unverified accusation from any random person is enough to get you fired.
And even after many cases like this, Twitter still let's people try to create Twitter mobs to get revenge on private citizens (particularly jarring when Yishan is arguing that the reason news articles are censored is to avoid angry mobs). However, they'll ban people who politely state heterodox opinions on controversial subjects (even if they are relatively common positions among the public). And since Yishan brings up Reddit, it's worth noting that they have a similar approach as well (whipping up angry mobs is fine, heterodox positions are not).
This culture on these sites is a result of the choices that social media companies have made (and not just the choices mentioned above, but others like the efforts made to push engagement). We see the results of that choice by the state of these sites. And the people involved, instead of taking responsibility for what they've created, decide to dump all the blame on the users.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...
reply