A tweet is, in essence, a mere comment of few words. But, potentially, it has the power to reach millions of people and cause reactions that we do not imagine, such as our own dismissal.
A new app called ‘Fire Me’ collects negative content tweets related to negative aspects. In this way, our superiors can easily see if we criticize any aspect related to our work on Twitter.
So if you don’t want to get in trouble, be careful what you tweet and even what you say because in the world we live in, we barely own our words, anyone with a mobile and the Internet in their hands seems to have the right to record us, photograph us and publish whatever you want about us. It is the danger of the digital age.
Fired for a tweet
This is what happened in California during the last PyCon developer conference, the most important concentration of the Python community. Sitting in the audience, a developer working for startup Playhaven made a sexual joke about the size of a dongle or hardware device and laughed along with the colleague next to him. So far everything normal.
The comment comes out of his private sphere disproportionately when the girl who was sitting right in front of him considers the joke to be sexist and offensive, so he decides to take a photograph of the men who have laughed and publish it along with a post on his personal blog, where she explains that she feels uncomfortable with the jokes that are made around her.
Adria Richards, who worked for the SendGrid Company, does not seem satisfied and while she continues at the conference she decides to send her discomfort in an email to PyCon and tweet it with the hastag #pycon. Immediately, all the attendees who were following the comments on Twitter about the conference, see Richards’ tweet. The organizers then decide to expel the two men in the photograph.
But the fallout from Richards’ comment has only just begun. The company where the guy making the joke worked immediately communicates that they do not tolerate questionable behavior and fires the worker, who decides to criticize Richards’ action on Hacker News. Finally, the woman is also fired.
Just ten years ago, the story of the unfortunate joke would not have made it beyond the scope of the conference. Today, anything is possible, even disproportionate reactions in a world too much? Interconnected.