Denise Helms

Comment of the Day: “The Idiot, the Ex, and the Consequences”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I’ve been remiss in posting “comments of the day” of late; it is not a reflection on comment quality, which has been excellent, but rather on my own distractions. Here is a new one at last, from new commenter Kathryn. It appeals to me because it nails the subtext of the original post, and like most Comments of the Day, takes the original topic to the next stage of analysis. I hope we hear more from her. Here is Kathryn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Idiot, the Ex, and the Consequences.”

“I am waiting, perhaps overly optimistically, for culture to catch up with information availability and develop new ways of handling privacy outside of responding to information when it is made public, regardless of the source or context for that information. Everyone says/does something particularly unwise/unwell/without grace during their life. Technology is getting to the point that these moments, rather than being forgotten or a story told among friends, are fairly permanently in the public record. (The Internet is public, whatever Facebook settings attempt to convince you.) Continue reading →

The Idiot, the Ex, and the Consequences

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Denise Helms, who will probably not look like this the next time you see her if she knows what’s good for her.

My position would usually be this: for an employer to use a privacy setting Facebook post as justification for firing an employee is unfair. That applies to vacation photos of an elementary school teacher holding a beer and looking bleery-eyed at a pub, a Sunday school teacher doing a strip tease at a bachelor party, and political posts of a radical, vulgar or offensive nature. Two factors can change the equation, though. Action may be justified if the posting reasonably calls into question the trustworthiness of the employee in his or her job duties, or if the posting becomes public, subjecting the employer to embarrassment or undermining the employee’s ability to do her job, as in the naked teacher cases.

Denise Helms, the idiot referenced in the title above, posted this on her Facebook page, intended only for her closest, presumably most racist or most idiotic friends:

Continue reading →