> He was getting internal training for the role and claims to follow the policies he was taught.

His posts were being flagged by the PR team.

I suspect it's because he was discussing products without going through the PR team (because they would have told him to stop).

All my arguments are from the article itself.

> He was effectively self-grooming for the position, isn't that what you're supposed to do?

If someone from marketing came down and started force pushing code to production, would that be self-grooming? No, you'd expect a PR and some review process, which wasn't occurring here.

The PR team never flagged anything. The SVP backchanneled unfounded complaints to my director in order to get me in trouble. The PR team loved me.

> ... I showed Rick the platform's essential functions. Eventually, he created the company's Social Media Council, and I was appointed as one of the founding members.

It seems the SVP was in company representative in charge of PR / social media? If so, he was the party responsible for the team and thus "the team"?

> The SVP backchanneled unfounded complaints to my director in order to get me in trouble.

Seems like the SVP was going through the command chain to direct his complaints / concerns to you. That's the typical way corporate structures work.

What was flagged?

> Eventually, he acquired the tweets in question, and we were both stunned about why these benign tweets, which were clearly not about the company's financials, were being flagged. Then, he finally confided in me that the person who reported this to him was the SVP I had been working with previously, Rick.

If you are taking them at their word, this came directly from SVP and not some PR policy AND it was not related to financials. So are you calling OP a liar or not?

> What was flagged?

Your seemed to imply above that the SVP got involved because of already-flagged tweets, whereas the part of the story you've quoted happened after the SVP had not only met the author and appointed him to the company's social media council, but after the SVP started ghosting him.

The causality you're implying (if not explying) seems inverted.

> His posts were being flagged by the PR team.

The article specifically says that they were not.

If any of that had happened the order of events would have been different.

He would have received warnings that he was violating company policy. The SVP would have addressed him directly and asked him to stop tweeting about the company instead of asking him to be taught. His manager wouldn't have been confused about the complaint.

None of your arguments are from the article. You're going way out of your way to assume the engineer is in the wrong and omitting information in the article.