Comment by stale2002
Harassment can be punished by the law. So that is the "now what".
No, freedom of speech doesn't mean that you can engage in serious harassment of people, their workplace, or their children or family.
Harassment can be punished by the law. So that is the "now what".
No, freedom of speech doesn't mean that you can engage in serious harassment of people, their workplace, or their children or family.
No actually. It is never just that.
The question was about "to get a social media frenzy going".
And this is never just an employer randomly looking at a tweet, for which they are almost never going to do anything about it. Most employers don't care.
Instead, the much more likely scenario is mass points of harassment, stalking, and death threats targeted at people's friends and family, when such a "social media frenzy" happens.
You cannot ignore the actual mostly likely result of your advocacy. And when you just say that this is all "free speech" you are doing disservice to the massive amount of illegal harassment that these internet mobs cause.
You do not control the mob, yet you are response for its harm anyway if you try to start one.
All of this stuff goes hand in hand. If you are getting a "social media frenzy going", to get someone fired, you are also response for when that social media targets someone's friends and family with stalking, harassment, and death threats.
You cannot pick and chose the consequences of your social media frenzy. It all happens at once, and you don't control the mob. And you are at fault for all of the consequences of that hate mob.
The scenario being discussed is employers looking at employees’ public statements, or third parties telling employers about those public statements. I don’t think that’s anything close to harassment.