By now you may have heard about the FHRITP incident at a Toronto FC game. The “trend” is this: find a (usually female) reporter in front of a camera. Grab her microphone, and yell “f*** her right in the p***y.” It’s vulgar and pretty degrading – not to mention disrespectful to someone trying to do their job. CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt was interviewing a soccer fan when someone yelled the phrase into her microphone. She confronted the group of men and one in particular, Shawn Simoes, defended using the phrase. Simoes was then fired from his $106,000-a-year job with Hydro One for violating the company’s code of conduct.
I’ve talked a lot about when public shaming gets extreme: the girl in the Boston bombing victim costume whose dad got death threats, the woman who flipped off the Arlington National Cemetery sign and got fired and death threats, etc. etc. But sometimes, public shaming and publicity actually turns out right – like when the person who has been shamed has actually done something he knows is wrong, rather than just being misguided.
Simoes didn’t just think something was funny and wasn’t aware how it affected the reporters at the other end of it. He didn’t show any remorse when Hunt talked about how it was degrading and insulting. He relished in it. He wasn’t misguided – he just didn’t care how his actions made Hunt feel. Does everyone who insults someone in public deserve to get fired? I don’t know; I feel like that’s a slippery slope. But Hydro One does have an employee code of conduct, which basically states employees have to act with respect, which Simoes clearly violated. I don’t feel sorry for him.
Several months ago, a Minnesota dad made a video showing lewd and racist snapchats received by his black adopted daughter. He also had a conversation with the father of the kids who sent the snapchat, who used racial slurs and dismissed his concerns. After the video also went viral, the racist father was also fired from his job.
There are examples upon examples of people who actually faced consequences for being idiots online or in private. In 2009, a woman tweeted about a new job but mentioned she would hate the work. An employee saw the tweet and passed it on to the hiring manager. She lost the job.
War correspondent and New York University fellow, Nir Rosen, tweeted flippant and insensitive remarks after CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan was attacked in Egypt. He was fired from NYU.
There’s even a website called Racists Getting Fired: people send in racist screenshots and readers try to find out who they are and get them fired.
I don’t agree with a lot of the extreme social media shaming that happens, and can’t fully endorse it precisely because there is never a middle ground there. And I don’t always believe people deserve to get fired based on what they do in their personal lives (For example, a teacher posted a photo of her holding a drink in each hand on a European vacation, and she got fired. Does drinking in her leisure time affect the way she does her job? No).
However, being racist or sexist DOES affect your work. Companies are allowed to hire people based on whether their personalities fit with the work culture. If Nir Rosen went into work and started laughing about Lara Logan’s attack, or if the racist dad used racial slurs around his boss, that would likely be grounds for firing. So why should the rules by different on social media? And for that matter, why do people think that what you say on social media doesn’t matter? They’re still words you say and feel, regardless of the medium the message is delivered.
This shouldn’t be difficult to understand, but what you say matters – and this includes when it’s just written down. You can’t somehow evade consequences just because you use the Internet. And I’m sorry, if you’re too dumb to get the difference, you deserve what you get.
