If the business was uncomfortable with their treatment of their employees being public, maybe that activity wasn't ethical.
Businesses have every right to some level of obscurity on what happens internally. There is a very clear difference between using a tape recorder or your smartphone to record a conversation (after clearly stating that you will do so!) and having someone without any relation to the company present and blurbing everything into the ether.
And if hr disagreed, they could have asked the guest to leave.
Were they not livetweeting: fine, you can bring a family member or friend to these meetings.
But they were.
Also, what is tweeting if not "speaking publicly"?
And what are workplace conditions if not "how I am disciplined at work"?
For all I know she might insult people when she sees them say things she thinks are shitty, but I haven't personally experienced that and I think we've disagreed on things in the past.
Someone you brought in is doing something disrespectful and indicative of the central problem to the conversation.
If you come to my house and draw on my walls - I ask you to stop and let's have a conversation about it, so you bring a friend who starts drawing on my walls while we're talking about you drawing on my walls.
You've lost all goodwill that I was willing to extend to you.
While I have an internal meeting I would NOT assume someone is life tweeting this.
It sounds like some weird joke. What goes in those people's head?
I'd think a VP (many levels above) coming to DM someone for a private chat isn't likely coming in good faith to begin with so it goes both ways.
This, I think, is the point that caused the firing. It's pretty clear that if you choose a witness who then posts everything publicly that you are not discussing in good faith. Like, it's your right to speak your mind, and maybe you think you are in the moral right, but if you intentionally antagonize the people you work with you won't be working with them for much longer.