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Question about that trend of firing people for old tweets | Fired for a Tweet - Free To Speak

Question about that trend of firing people for old tweets

I saw that guy Mark from accounting got let go last month for a tweet he posted back in 2012. It was just him complaining about his landlord raising rent, nothing political or crazy. But someone dug it up and reported it to HR. The before and after is wild - he was a solid employee for 8 years, then one old tweet tanked everything in like 3 days. Do companies really not give people a chance to explain context anymore? Makes me wonder what skeletons are in my own timeline.

3 comments

3 Comments

ivan7744mo ago

Honestly, Mark's tweet about his landlord is barely a blip on the radar, not some huge scandal. Companies fire people for lots of reasons, and digging up a 12 year old complaint sounds like an excuse to get rid of a guy they already wanted to lose. Tbh, most old tweets are just boring everyday stuff that nobody cares about unless they have a reason to.

jamesf294mo ago

Ha yeah exactly. They probably had a spreadsheet of reasons ready to go. "Let's see here, page 4, paragraph 2... dust off that landlord tweet." Dude got nuked from orbit over a Yelp review from 2012. Meanwhile guys in the corner office are openly buying yachts with company money but that's fine. Corporate logic at its finest. Get the pitchforks ready for anything over a decade old. Guess nobody's safe from their own teenage tweets about their math teacher.

king.eric4mo ago

My buddy Dave got fired in 2017 for a Facebook comment from 2009 where he said pineapple on pizza was a crime against humanity. Some random person in the HR department had a pineapple pizza obsession and took it personally. @jamesf29 you hit the nail on the head about those corner office guys, they can do whatever they want while the rest of us get our lives ruined over lunch opinions from before smartphones were everywhere. The scary part is companies now have entire AI tools scanning for anything slightly negative going back to the MySpace era. I deleted like 40 old tweets last week just to be safe, and I still find myself sweating over stuff I said about video games in 2011.