Image via Complex Original
Intro
When you're employed by a company, you become a representative of that company. Whether you like it or not, when you leave your place of work you have to keep up appearances, make it look like the people giving you a paycheck are not completely out of their minds. Same goes for your online behavior. When you take to your social network of choice, it'd do you good to keep an eye on what you do and what you say, lest a higher up sees you Twitpic'ing images of you with two bottles of Grey Goose and your eyes rolled into the back of your head. It's not a good look. Take the following 10 examples of people getting fired because of social media as a warning: the Internet is watching.
walmart
Walmart Employee Fired After Bomb Joke Fizzled
Social Network: MySpace
Date: February 27, 2007
Back when MySpace was still poppin’, David Noordewier, at the time an employee at a Michigan Walmart, went on his page and said the average IQ would increase if bombs were dropped on all the company’s stories. Noordewier said it was a joke and that it wasn’t meant in a malicious way. All good, then, right? Nope. The next day David was asked to an acknowledgement that he was fired for gross misconduct, and he was then escored to the parking lot by Walmart security.
Texas
Texas Longhorn Linemen Gets Dropped After Racist Obama Post
Social Network: Facebook
Date: November 2008
After President Barack Obama’s historic campaign that made him the first black guy to occupy the Oval Office, a Texas Longhorn football player by the name of Buck Burnette went on Facebook to express his anger. “All the hunters gather up, we have a #$%&er in the whitehouse,” wrote Burnette on his Facebook page. Unsurprisingly, Buck got cut from the team.
cheerleader
New England Patriots Cheerleader Gets Cut From Team
Social Network: Facebook
Date: November 4, 2008
At 18 years old, Caitlin Davis was the youngest person to ever make a NFL cheerleading squad when she joined the New England Patriots. She showed her immaturity when she posted pictures of her with a dude who was tatted up with swastikas and other anti-Semitic slurs. The images somehow began to spread and wound up with the attention of the Patriots head office. She was immediately dropped from the squad.
eagles
Philadelphia Eagles Employee Fired For Calling Team “Retarded”
Social Network: Facebook
Date: March 2009
Here’s a word of wisdom: Don’t openly criticize the company you work for. Dan Leone, a former gate chief for the Eagles learned that lesson the hard way after he took to his Facebook page to lambast the team for not resigning safety Brian Dawkins. More specifically, he said “Dam Eagles R Retarded!!” Of course, that didn’t sit well with the higher ups who canned him shortly after.
Swiss Facebook
Swiss Women Calls Out Sick, Gets Caught on Facebook
Social Network: Facebook
Date: April 27, 2009
A Swiss insurance worker who didn’t want to go to work one day, called her job and told her boss that she had a really bad migraine and that the light from the computer screen would make it worse. Funny then, that when her boss logged onto Facebook, he caught her posting messages to friend’s pages. The company, Nationale Suisse, fired the unnamed women the next day and said it was “the abuse of trust, rather than the activity on Facebook that led to the ending of the work contract.” Smarten up.
MLB Pitcher
Former MLB Pitcher Lets His Racism Loose On Twitter
Social Network: Twitter
Date: April 25, 2010
Here’s a case of sports fandom gone horribly wrong. When Eduardo Najera of the Dallas Mavericks was ejected from a game for a flagrant foul against the San Antonio Spurs’ Manu Ginobili, Mike Bacsik, a former MLB pitcher and radio producer, went on a Twitter rant which included him saying, “Congrats to all the dirty Mexicans in San Antonio.” Classy. He was fired from his radio job shortly after he issued a public apology.
Pirates
Pittsburgh Pirates Mascot Gets Fired For Stating his Opinion
Social Network: Facebook
Date: June 21, 2010
When the Pittsburg Pirates choose to extend the contracts of two of its managers, the team’s mascot, played by Andrew Kutz, decided to express how he felt on Facebook. He wrote “[Frank] Coonelly extended the contracts of Russell and Huntington through 2011 season. That means a 19-straight losing streak. Way to go Pirates.” Kutz was fired soon after. We guess the Pirates don’t believe in free speech.
CNN
CNN Employee Gets Pink Slip For Controversial Tweet.
Social Network: Twitter
Date: July 4, 2010
Before his passing, Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was linked to a bombings that killed hundreds of Americans. Despiste that, when Fadlallah died, CNN’s Senior Middle East editor Octavia Nasr decided to take to Twitter to say how sad she was and how much she respected him. CNN didn’t take too kindly to her sentiments. Even though she apologized for her comments and clarified that she was speaking about his stance on human rights, the news company fired her.
Gilbert
Gilbert Gottfried Gets Canned by Aflac
Social Network: Twitter
Date: March 14, 2011
Some jokes are better left unsaid. Immediately after Japan suffered a tragic earthquake and tsunami, comedian Gilbert Gottfriend, who voiced the duck mascot in the Alfac commercials, riddled off a string of insensitive jokes about Japan like, “Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.” Though it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Aflac—this is the same guy who cracked jokes about 9/11 less than a week after it happened—the insurance fired him the next day.
Weiner
Anthony Weiner Resigns From Congress
Social Network: Twitter, Facebook
Date: May 27, 2011
This may be the most well known instance of a person catching a pink slip over their social media activity. You should know the story by now: former U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner sent dong pics to a 21-year-old college student who followed him on Twitter. Only instead of sending them in a direct message, he puts in his public feed. After quickly deleting the image, he claims in a press conference that his Twitter was hacked. However, after another woman came forward saying that Weiner has sent her pictures of his wiener, he came clean and later resigned from Congress.
