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.
The causality you're implying (if not explying) seems inverted.
The article specifically says that they were not.
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.
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.