The problem in my view is tech companies have squeezed their way in to our lives and managed to get the majority to post their private conversations publicly. So posting a mild complaint about your place of work on social media has become today's version of complaining to a friend in person or on the phone.

Yes I do think employers do have reason to want to protect their image online, but I also don't like the situation where people are always under public watch. So either you should be allowed to say these things on social media without losing your job, or social media companies should be cracked down on for what they have done.

>So posting a mild complaint about your place of work on social media has become today's version of complaining to a friend in person or on the phone.

Significant difference in audience size and staying power of the comment. Telling a person privately stays private and is likely gone forever. Even if they blab to someone it's just second hand at that point. Posting shit about your employer on social media is more akin to putting it on a billboard or writing an op-ed in the paper trashing them.

Yes, but newspapers didn’t socially engineer everyone in to writing these things and publishing them to the world. It was the norm for your comments to be private and forgotten. Now it’s the norm for the same style of comments to be public.

I’m saying the system is at fault here. Either what the tech companies have done or the fact that a normal action is now a firable offence which has become a new problem.

It's not normal though. Most people would never consider shit talking their employer on social media. People with poor decision making skills do.