(CNN) — On Monday, Hayley Geftman-Gold, a top CBS executive, posted on Facebook that she didn’t have sympathy for the victims gunned down at the country music festival in Las Vegas because “country music fans are often Republican gun toters.”
She was immediately fired.
Geftman-Gold is one of a long line of individuals who have been axed for saying outrageous things on social media.
Remember the InterActiveCorp PR executive who tweeted that she wouldn’t get AIDS in Africa because she was white, or the Florida prosecutor who posted on Facebook after last year’s shooting at the Pulse nightclub that all of Orlando’s nightclubs should be shuttered because they’re “cesspools of debauchery?”
These cases are warnings for us all to think before we tweet. “Every day, the words and images we all choose to share can do more than simply embarrass us — they can affect our entire future,” Sue Scheff and Melissa Schorr caution in their new book, “Shame Nation: The Global Epidemic of Online Hate.”
These instances are also rare cases in which it’s acceptable for companies to fire staffers for their social media posts. When employees write posts as private citizens, which may be damaging to their employer’s reputation or which call into question the employees’ abilities to perform their jobs, they should be fired.
Though much of this may be intuitive, companies should spell out for staffers what sorts of posts — racist, sexist or otherwise — are unacceptable and subject to disciplinary action.
Nicholas Fortuna, founder and managing partner of the law firm Allyn & Fortuna LLP, says it is generally legal to fire staffers for such reasons. “Unless there is a written contract limiting the circumstances (in which) an employee can be fired, an employer may fire someone without cause, for any or no reason, as long as it’s not an impermissible reason, such as discussing terms and conditions of employment, discrimination based on race, sex, national origin, in some states sexual orientation, etc.,” he says.
So, Geftman-Gold’s posting offers lessons for us all: think carefully before you fire off a tweet — and also before you fire a staffer for doing so.
The-CNN-Wire
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