It is, however, standard practice for a company to evaluate an employee's list of duties to ensure that the tasks they were handling continue to be fulfilled.

Is it standard practice not to disclose to anyone that someone was fired at all? Is it standard to fire your main community manager and not replace her, to just stop replying to the community's emails? Is it standard to not cancel a terminated employees appointments? Is it standard to let your celebrity guests fly halfway across the country, wait an hour for their scheduled appointment, and only reveal what happened when their agent calls to complain?

Well, a Reddit CEO didn't hesitate to make public negative comments about a fired employee.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_...

Yes...but Reddit's CEO interpreted the employee's tell-all as justification to cross that privacy boundary in order to publicly counter the ex-employee's claims. Victoria, AFAIK, has made no such public attack against Reddit.

Also, Ellen Pao was not Reddit's CEO at that time and it seems unfair to hold her to the behavior of the CEO she replaced.

And there was a massive shitstorm after they did that.

It's a good thing that Reddit does not reveal details of why people were fired.

There are perfectly fine ways to discuss this situation.

The fact that Reddit refuses to take that path is a strong indication that the reasons would reflect badly on the company.

I'm on Reddit's side on this issue

"In return, the polite expectation is that the employee will not go shooting their mouth off about the company especially (as in your case) through irresponsibly unfounded speculation. (...) Unfortunately, you have just forfeited this arrangement."

As far as I know, "polite expectations" are not how businesses tend to operate.