My old tweet from 2012 got me fired last month

I posted a dumb joke about a movie when I was 19. A coworker found it, screenshot it, and sent it to HR. They called it a 'pattern' even though it was one post. The whole investigation took three weeks. Lost my job over a 12 year old thought. Where do we draw the line on digging up old posts?

3 comments

3 Comments

benc5312d ago

Honestly used to believe people were overreacting about old posts coming back. This kind of story totally changed my mind. If it was one dumb joke from over a decade ago, that's not a pattern, it's a gotcha. Tbh where does it end? Digging up every tweet from when we were dumb kids feels like a cheap way to get someone in trouble. We all said stupid stuff before we knew better.

felix82412d ago

But what if the old post shows who they really are? I mean, sometimes a "dumb joke" is actually a bad look into their real thoughts back then. People don't just say things totally out of character. Maybe it was a pattern that got cleaned up later. If someone never owned up to it, getting caught is the only way it comes out. Idk, feels like calling it a cheap gotcha lets people off the hook for stuff they hoped we'd all forget.

sean_johnson162d ago

Totally agree with you @felix824 about it showing a pattern. I had a friend who made a bunch of those "dumb jokes" years ago and it wasn't just one thing, it was all the time. When it all came out he had to admit he was just being mean and hiding behind jokes. If he had changed for real he would have said sorry way before anyone found the old posts. Calling it a cheap gotcha only helps people who never actually got better.