Consider what's happened to the NFL with the anthem protests.

By not putting a strong policy in place (or rather, not consistently enforcing the policy they had) to avoid politics in the workplace, the brand has been damaged and the product they are selling has been hijacked.

Employers need to carefully weigh the pros/cons of letting employees participate in politics while they are representing the company. In the NFL that would include time on the field.

For the Times they judge that to include all social media use -- a clearly much higher bar brought on by journalistic responsibilities which hits at the core value of NYTs entire service.

Or you can view it as a high-profile step in an ongoing employer power creep.

When you work for a company, how much of your life does that company own? Do you have any rights as a private citizen at all if you have an employer? Can they tell you what to say in your off time? Can they tell you who to vote for? Whether or not to stand when a certain song is being played? Whether or not you can own a gun? Which political organizations to join? How about where to eat? Who to be friends with? What conferences and meetups to attend? Whether or not to smoke and drink alcohol? How much to exercise? When and where to pee and to surrender your bodily fluids (step over here for this mandatory drug test, please)? Can they own the ideas that you think of when you are not working, like they do in tech?

The most fascist governments in all of human history would salivate at the chance to exert this much control over their people. While here if you disobey, you are not sent to jail or killed, instead you lose your livelihood and health care, which for the poor approaches a similar end result.

As long as you are an employee at will, you can be fired for any reason that is not protected by law, or no reason at all. You choose where you want to work, and a rational part of that choice is how much you are comfortable with your employer looking over your shoulder, and how much they might try to dictate how you behave in and out of the office.

If a company can make a reasonable argument for why they have a certain policy as a condition of my employment, I am willing to consider it. If I find the policy anathema to my personal beliefs or lifestyle then I'm not a compatible employee for that company and I won't work there. Rational people might decide to avoid even companies like Google and Facebook for these reasons!

Can companies intrude too deeply in their employees personal lives? Certainly. But what we're talking about here is not personal life but public persona as a representative of the company, so I think you've gone a bit hyperbolic and it undermines your argument.

We see companies firing employees for bad behavior inside and outside the office all the time. Weinstein would be an obviously attrocious example / the PyCon developers or the Google engineer perhaps more borderline examples. Sometime we laud these public firings other times we question them deeply. Curt Shilling was fired for a Facebook share.

I can't judge if these are all right or wrong, but I do believe they are legal and should be legal for a company to choose its employees based, in part, on how they conduct themselves. And we are free to judge companies on how their employees conduct themselves, and how they react to their employees conduct. How meta!

This feedback cycle is an extremely powerful force now due to social media but I don't think we can or should put the genie back in the bottle. There are various forces pushing in different directions and there certainly can be negative feedback when people perceive a firing to be unjust.

One thing is for sure, a company's reputation and brand is a lot more complex to manage when every employee is an "ambassador" and everyone is watching what they are doing/saying, and it's all recorded in searchable archives.

Maybe it would be great if more often we could separate unsactioned employee actions from the employer themselves. But at the same time people use it as a lever to exact control over what they perceive as misbehavior. When rational people disagree over what constitutes offensive behavior, and both sides expect the company to do something about it then shit hits the fan!

Social media policies like this have been standard for a long time and even beyond existing employers, future employers will monitor and curate existing candidates in their social media usage.

Their brand has been long damaged before the NFL protests. Joining in the war in trying to out-Trump Trump has lost me as a reader-subscriber.

No, I think this is just them trying to cozy up to Trump supporters. Who never had an issue with the reporter's politics, but the fact that they were reporting much of that stuff in the first place.

Same with the NFL. They got bullied by Trump, no two ways about it.