I’m very much against people being fired for their social media posts (unless we’re crossing way over a line that delves into calls for violence or is doing something illegal), but that situation was a bit more complicated. That author, who was PR professional and verified on Twitter, was using her account and her blue-checkmark to shame a worker on a train for eating on her break. She literally tried to get that employee fired and put their face all over the internet. So forgive me if I don’t weep for someone being snitched on on social media when they were snitching themselves and using their position (brands and places like the transit authority take complaints from people with blue checks much more seriously and blue checks absolutely know this) to try to get someone fired for daring to break a rule of eating on a train. Come on now. Her losing her book contract with a publisher no one has ever heard of seems almost fitting.

ETA: Since then, she’s also been able to leverage that experience into redemption/victimhood profiles on Good Morning America and an article in Elle UK. Both opportunities I guarantee she never would have had with her debut novel, so she’s fine.

You’ve gone and assumed the worst. “Trying to get that employee fired?” I just don’t see it. Anyway, the Metro employees union would never go for it.

The no-eating rule is a fairly big deal on Metro. A twelve-year-old girl was famously arrested for eating a single French fry [0], in a case (Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) that went all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where the arrest was upheld. A teenager was arrested in 2016 for carrying chips and snacks into a Metro station [1]. If I saw an employee flouting this rule, I’d be indignant too. I wouldn’t have posted a photo of the person, but the kind of vitriol, racism, and naked hate this novelist faced in response to her tweet was totally unwarranted. The potential for negative consequences on the part of the Metro employee was greatly exaggerated.

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=94999&page=1

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/met...

As someone who's never been on the DC metro, my first reaction to this story was that it's pretty unreasonable to post an employee's photo to Twitter just because they ate on the train. While we can't say for sure that they wanted to get the employee fired, their intent was clearly for them to be held accountable in some way by their employer for this infraction.

That said, if it's true that metro passengers have effectively been harassed and abused and arrested for years over this no-eating rule, then I can see how it would be more offensive to see an employee breaking it publicly, and this person's reaction makes more sense to me.

I've seen this interesting behavior in other contexts. There is a stupid rule that nobody likes. People make an effort to follow it despite hating it. When they see someone breaking the rule they feel that it's very unfair because of the effort they are making, so they report it to make it fairer. Either everyone should follow the rule or it shouldn't exist.

But in doing so they have become what they hated. They are now actively helping maintain and rooting for the stupid rule instead of fighting against it.

We all follow rules we don't agree with; that is part of the social contract. Selective enforcement of rules is one of the biggest threats to those who behave lawfully.

I see no compromise of principle in people who maintain and enforce stupid rules they disagree with. The most honest response is to argue for and support sensible rules, not to turn a blind eye.

I'm not saying that I think it is a good idea to follow bad rules - but people who disagree with rules and follow them anyway on solid moral footing and should reasonably expect others to do the same.

>We all follow rules we don't agree with; that is part of the social contract

it's been my experience that people generally don't follow rules they disagree with, unless they are afraid of the consequences. As such, seeing someone breaking the rule who is also someone in power over them with ability to enforce the rule can be especially galling.

Narcing on your neighbor for building an unpermitted shed because you feel like a chump for pulling permits when the reality is you both could have gotten away without permits is very different from narcing on somebody who is only getting away with it because they have some special status with the organization responsible for the rule.

I’m not defending the vitriol or racist and toxic remarks she received; I’m saying she was using her position as a blue checkmark to publicly shame someone and to try to get them fired. And as a self-described social media and communications expert, she should have known that using her position of power to shame/snitch on someone could carry consequences. She could have reported it privately, but she chose to use her platform that included her social status (most brands and orgs like the metro use CRMs to filter/prioritize responses from verified users, something someone who claims to be a social media strategist would know) to be a narc instead.

Moreover, the Metro had been ordered to cease citing people for jumping fares or eating on the train in 2019. I appreciate the author may not have known that. She still had no reason to use her clout to publish a photo of the employee and call her her to be punished. She was literally snitching someone and then cried tears of sorrow when she was snitched on back. I’m really struggling to garner sympathy in this particular case, although again, I don’t defend or condone the hate she received in return.

She also sued the publisher (an extremely small outfit with two employees) over canceling her book and they wound up publishing it anyway out of fear of litigation. She also tried to sue the distributor (Rare Bird, which is also small), who she didn’t have a contract with (these were the people that commented publicly they wouldn’t distribute it), but wound up dropping the case. I’m not trying to drag her for having a book deal with a boutique imprint, I just think it’s important to realize that this wasn’t Hachette or Simon & Schuster, this was an imprint with two employees.

And she then leveraged her experience to get positive international coverage/redemption arc. And you know what, if GMA and Elle UK want to buy into her narrative, kudos to her for selling it. But it really goes against the idea that her life was ruined, when again, she was able to place sympathetic stories about herself with Hearst (Elle UK) and ABC News (GMA).

> She could have reported it privately, but she chose to use her platform that included her social status ... to be a narc instead.

Reporting it privately is still "narcing", isn't it? You're saying she'd have been ok if she kept her anonymity while doing the snitching that the twitter mob seeks to "cancel" people for? Well sure.

There's a very substantial different between privately reporting someone, and publicly shaming someone for a behaviour, which has potentially far more extensive consequences, including putting additional pressure on the employer to act harshly.

It's perfectly reasonable to think one or both is wrong while still thinking one is far worse than the other.

Attempting to rile a Twitter mob is quite a bit different to reporting something to the authorities who should be the ones to act on something.

The adoption of “no snitching” culture well outside of its original contexts confuses me somewhat, but also in this case, how is this a situation someone should even concern themselves with? The entire thing is baffling to me: the original tweet, the Twitter mob against herself and firing afterward. Just seems out of this world.

> And as a self-described social media and communications expert, she should have known that using her position of power to shame/snitch on someone could carry consequences.

Exactly. She knew better and was sophisticated enough to discern what was proportionate to the situation.

To be fair, the DC metro is among the cleanest in the NE USA. It's not North Korea clean, but it's far better than NYC and Philly. The reason it's clean is because the system does a decent job of policing the trains and hires enough people to keep it clean.

I've seen people eat entire large pizzas on NY subways, I've seen people eat massive wet smelly hoagies in Philly and deliberately plop a handful of the onions on the floor of the train like it was nothing. I can at least understand her outrage, but she could have handled it differently.

Maybe she took the "if you see something, say something" directive a bit too seriously?

As a regular user of the DC metro for about five years, I can say that rule is often enough ignored. Overall the system is impressively clean and people generally do not eat or drink on the trains, but hop on after like 9pm and it’s a very different story.

As for “vitriol, racism, and naked hate”, is that not just standard stuff on social media? Any tweet that goes viral for better or worse will get it.

You reap what you sow. Her shitty behavior prompted a shitty response.

I couldn't care less about how strict the rule is, highlighting your disagreement with it by shitting on the little guy isn't a good look.

Thanks for this, it's this reason why I find it hard to believe people's summaries as they rarely tell the complete picture, and that itself is dangerous.

In this case, the original post didn't pass the sniff test to me. If I tweeted:

"Hey $operator, the person manning the gate at the station at James Street this morning was really rude, yelling at people and telling them to f-off"

I can't see any situation where the skin color of that person would come into it, so how would it be possible to get someone fired "because they're black" when that information isn't even made available.

While I agree with your logic, I am open to the point of view that some people would preferentially report someone’s behavior depending on the race of the person involved.

Perhaps a black employee is more likely to get a complaint about rudeness. If so, the race wasn’t made available but still changed the interaction.

I'm sure that's the case, and it will be up to the managers to be aware of unconcious bias on these types of reports and judge them respectively, but that's not going to raise a storm on twitter about a single person complaining about bad behaviour, or link that single complaint to an evidenced based dismissal later down the line.

It not okay to libelously lie about people like this. Please stop.

The author and her family received death threats over this. She briefly left the US for her own safety, and was harassed and bullied “to the brink of suicide.” Flippant dismissal of the Internet hate mob is all well and good until it comes for you.

The Metro employee faced no disciplinary action.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/dc-met...

I don't want to dismiss what she experienced and how upsetting it must have been, but "she received death threats" covers a lot of ground.

Apparently lots of people make internet death threats all the time. Every single case like this mentions death threats. I don't think these death threats are in general credible. Clearly at least some of them are made by people who just join in with and escalate online arguments for amusement. I assume at least some of them are made by people hoping to 'discredit the other side'.

I fail to see how the author's plight at the hands of the internet mob makes the situation less nuanced.

Flippant dismissal of facts isn't going to help things get better either.

This.

For the record, I’m not saying she should have been harassed. I’m not even arguing she should have lost work or had her book distributor who didn’t have a contract with her say they didn’t want to distribute her book. I find the outcome fitting given the circumstances, but I’m not rallying for that outcome. What I am arguing is that framing her as a victim of cancel ignores a much bigger part of the story and as dguaragalia says, dismissing the facts and eschewing the nuance for optimum outrage is extremely unhelpful.

Thanks for formulating this in much more understandable terms than my comment!

No, this is upside down.

The entire point of the situation is that the nuances are not hugely relevant in the big picture.

Moreover, the nuances are never catered to in cancel culture anyhow.

Nothing remotely significant happened in this situation that should have involved anything other than maybe some stern retorts on the medium she started on i.e. Twitter.

The commenter thinking that 'this was a good outcome' gives us a great example of the vindictive pettiness and overreaction of cancel culture.

You don't lose your job and livelihood for a possibly distasteful public remark, probably taken out of context.

It's actually a pretty great example of the stupidity of cancel culture.

> Nothing remotely significant happened in this situation that should have involved anything other than maybe some stern retorts on the medium she started on i.e. Twitter.

Somehow you miss the other side of this: her interaction on her train ride didn't deserve to be more significant than the average unpleasant experienced 10 times a week by anyone living in a city. She actively tried to make it bigger, then it got blown out of proportion by people like her, who blow shit out of proportion.

Maybe we should all start taking responsibility for our actions, instead of screaming 'cancel culture' whenever they catch up to us.

Yes, except that an apology was all that was necessary.

Claims of racism in the national press are ridiculous.