I'm going to have to check with our HR department and see if we have the latest fad worked into our employee contracts. The old retroactive "oops I didn't mean to hire that person due to old tweets and now the social media mob is dog piling us all into the dirt" clause.
It feels like this should be a thing now for everyone that could be considered a public figure at a well-known company. If the social media mob has a cause or torch to bear, well then just pick a person, scroll their Twitter feed back to 2013, and pray for a misstep. Expose it and watch 'em burn!
It happened to James Gunn. Should it have? Nope. Disney knew what they were getting when they hired him. But beyond that, we shouldn't be playing social media judge, jury and executioner when we know nothing about what he believes in today and the circumstances surrounding something as ridiculous as a social media post.
But the mob won this battle and Gunn was fired, and this era of social media lynchings is snowballing. Yesterday, the New York Times announced that they had hired Sarah Jeong to join their editorial board. The New York Times is obviously a very high profile company, and Sarah is a somewhat public figure.
So, of course, the social media hit squad went into action. Immediately after the announcement of her hiring, without missing a beat, some of Sarah's old tweets - three years ago where she tweeted some racist comments about white people - began to surface.
These social media lynchings have got to stop. It's tearing our country apart. Should she have been fired? Nope, and the New York Times was right when they issued a statement yesterday defending their hire. Firing her would only encourage this kind of behavior to continue to snowball. You should have seen what this little social media war was doing to us last night. There were actual journalists, some respected and some not so much, actually defending racism.
They were seriously trying to make the case that racism isn't racism as long as it's coming from a minority directed at the majority. That's got to be one of the most idiotic things I've ever heard. Hateful comments are hateful. Bigoted words are bigoted. It doesn't matter what race, religion or creed says them. Hate is hate. But this is the tribal nature we now live in.
These social media lynchings have got to stop. It's tearing our country apart.
Now I don't know Sarah Jeong. Were her comments racist back in 2014? Yes, they were. But I can't testify to who she is today. Maybe the New York Times can. Maybe they can't, and they're just hypocrites. After all, they did fire another journalist, Quinn Norton, earlier this year when old tweets surfaced of her saying slurs about African Americans and gays.
But I do know this, if we're ever going to get through all this, to reach some kind of common ground and actually have a conversation with one another, we have got to stop with the social media mob attacks. Rather than assassination tactics, we need to concentrate on conversations. It's the only way through all this.