So, this kid has become pretty famous on the internets as one of many idiots in the riot: Yes, that's him trying to shove a lighted shirt into the gas tank of a cop car to blow it up. IN A CROWD OF PEOPLE. Well, he's been identified: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Star+athlete+tagged+rioter/4967700/story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Star+ ... story.html</a> And his family are fucking pathetic. Read that story, and it pisses me off how they can say "well, he didn't REALLY set it on fire, he only tried to, but it didn't work, so he's innocent until proven guilty. He's a star water polo athlete with a scholarship. He's under a lot of pressure." Fuck. You. LOOK AT THE PICTURE. Tell me again how he's "innocent". I hope the fucker loses his scholarship and gets jail time. And I don't mean house arrest in his parent's million dollar home, either. Welcome to the school of life. Lesson number one, actions have repercussions. Which actually leads me into the direction of the focus. One of the most interesting things about the riot has been the use of social media, and people going out of their way to, for lack of a better term, "show off", with their "look at me" actions. There were live tweets and twitpics and Facebook updates from people at the riot, revelling in their participation. There were also a lot of people who recorded the fuck out of the riots, and the police are now collecting that media and using it to pursue charges against those involved. It boggles my mind how people could do this kind of thing, knowing, hell... SEEING everyone and their brother holding up their cameras recording shit. There were professionals as well as a million iPhone owners recording everything. It's like Mob Mentality just became a Rock Star, all thanks to Social Media. Mind you, that same social media has also empowered the entire city when it comes to identifying the riotards (see what I did there?) and bringing them to justice. In some way, the social media helped to fuel the riot, and in other ways, it's helping to recover from it. A Tale Of Two Riots - The Role Of Social Media FOCUS: Talk about the riot, and the use of the internet and social media in it. ALT-FOCUS: Have you or someone you've known ever shared too much on Facebook? Do tell. And let's not just cut/paste from the facebook-funny sites, keep it close to home.
I spoke to a couple of friends who live in Vancouver. I guess the general consensus among people they knew was that the riot was perpetuated by Americans from Seattle/Portland who came up to Vancouver expressly to start a riot, and that if Canadians had been left to their own devices, this never would have happened.
Oh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that... there are a few small groups of Canadians that travel around to various events like this with the intent to start shit. The most well known is a small group out of Quebec that caused problems at the G20, etc. They tried to do the same at the Olympics, but they threw them in jail as soon as they landed at the airport. Don't know if it was legal or not, but I'm glad they did. Fuck them. The cops knew that there were some shit-disturbers that came into town for Game 7, but didn't do anything about it. Probably because they had no reason to do so, as "we just know they're going to start shit" isn't a valid reason (except during the Olympics).
OK, I know that many Canadians enjoy feeling better than dumb Americans*....but hasn't this pretty much been the story of, well, every place that's ever had a riot? Same for the "anarchists" bit. It's been the same thing for hundreds (thousands?) of years. "Us? No, of course not! It was those damn hooligans from out of town! And the anarchists! Let us round up the sheriff and a posse, and chase them out to Dead Man's Gulch!" Every place has shitty people, and sometimes shitty people do shitty things. It's really not any more complicated than that. *Not directed at anyone here. Just...some Canadians have some ridiculous inferiority complex.
When it comes to riots, I think it comes down to certain people looking for an excuse, any excuse at all, to go absolutely fucking nuts. I guarantee there are people that think they had the time of their life at the riots, and it is something they've been wanting to do for years. Now, they're going to realize they're fucking idiots for participating when so many people had cameras and were taping it to throw up on youtube. I went to Purdue, a fairly conservative school, and I can think of a couple of occasions where they've rioted,* including the women's basketball team losing in the NCAA women's tournament. The women's team lost (not even the men's team), and some people started some shit. Now, none of it was on the same level as this riot, but there was still damage done to the campus. Alt-focus: As I've mentioned before, I used to be a social worker, and some of the kids I worked with were just intensely dumb about stuff. If we had a kid that was in the juvenile court system, the judge would mandate the kids had to listen to their probation officer, and the P.O. would mandate that if the kid wanted a facebook or myspace profile, the P.O. had to be a friend, so he could monitor their page. These same kids would then forget that their P.O. could look at their facebook or myspace any time they wanted, and post pictures of themselves drinking or, in the single dumbest case ever (and thank God it wasn't one of my clients), holding a giant bag of weed. Another case involved vandalism in a school bathroom, where they kicked the stall doors off the hinges and painted the walls. One kid took pictures of it all as they were doing it and posted it to FB. Of course, that kid was on probation, so all of them got in trouble, because the kid might as well have handed the photos to the police and school administrators. Essentially, people want to brag about doing stupid and illegal shit on FB, and they apparently STILL haven't figured out that if it goes up online, it is out there for the world to see.
I think that's one of the most interesting and hard to understand aspects of this whole thing; the apparent disconnect between online and the real world. It's like they feel that because it's online, it doesn't count or something. Or that their bit of space online is private, and nobody except who they want to will see it. It's almost like they feel offended if someone other than who they've "authorized" breaches that space, and yet those boundaries are all in their head. Sure, Facebook may appear to provide some "protection" with this information, but it's mostly a sham, forever changing, and usually opt-in privacy. It's online. It's out there. Forever.
Please. So you got second and third hand info that the riot *may* have been perpetrated by Americans? Cmon, I have a hard time believing that it was solely people from down here. But if that's true, it wouldnt surprise me if the idiot hipsters from the Amercan Northwest would come up and do that. Alt Focus: My younger cousin is the family black sheep. He's been arrested a bunch of times, mostly for petty shit but spent 6 months in jail for his latest offense, theft. Why? He posted on Facebook what a "dumb fuck" the judge was. Brilliant right? Aside from that, I'm currently working a corporate action plan attempting to address employees talking shit about the company. It's incredibly frustrating because the higher-ups don't want to hear that if a profile is blocked, there is nothing you can do to see what an employee says. My recommendation was to unblock all social media on the Corp. network and monitor it from the inside, but of course they wanted to hear none of that.
Personally, I feel that businesses have no business in their employees' social media. If the employees say shit privately, and have hidden profiles, and bitch about their job to their friends on there (as has been the right of every employee ever while having beers with friends on a Friday after work), go nuts. If the employee is stupid enough to say something on a public, non-blocked profile, then they can be held accountable for it. But companies demanding to be let into their employees profiles to snoop around is horseshit. Might as well come and ask to look in the shoe box I keep under the bed.
...Do you not find this creepy as hell? Not that they aren't within their rights to deal with public statements by employees. But the proactive way they're trying to seek it out seems very Big Brother. And that's not even touching on them being thin-skinned. Edit: What nett said.
Initially I did, but there isn't a corporate policy have to follow, it's up to me to develop one. Basically the perspective is the company has interests to protect. Employees talking shit or spreading false information can have a direct impact on reputation and potentially stock, as we all know how viral the web can be. And all it takes is one spiteful ex employee to divulge something crucial. Unfortunatey there's nothing that can really be done except: 1. Have clearly defined policies on social media 2. Make sure HR and PR have an action plan in case shit hits the fan My challenge is to convince the board that there's no way to track all social media posts of it's employees, but just to have outlined the "what ifs". Another challenge is, in the US, what actions companies can take varies state-to-state. My company spans across 5 states, and the laws are very different.
Like everyone most of my friends just post their week to week drunk pictures and haven't had anything big bite them in the ass. Only my ghetto friends have dumb ass pictures of them passing around blunts. Of course none of them work in the corporate world and never will. I think the worst thing some of my friends do is hold on to the trove of sexting pictures theyve gathered over the years while in high school. They aren't posting them to social sites but they have made the rounds between all the guys I know. Getting busted for that would be worse than anything I could imagine.
The absence of a corporate policy doesn't necessarily indicate the need for one. Sometimes there's no policy because it shouldn't be any of their fucking business. Why not serendipitously place tape recorders on them, because they might be saying mean things about the company that could be repeated? Or have people secretly tail them, just out of earshot? What's odd is that on this very site I've previously argued that employers were well within their rights to take into account any and all public postings. The difference is that there is a big difference between looking at what's publicly available, and snooping around in someone else's 'private' correspondences. It's the difference between reading a printed email sitting on the dining room table, and logging into your significant other's email.
There isn't any Fortune 500 company that doesnt have some sort of policy on it. Also, people can choose or not choose whether they want to work there. And when public and customer perspective are in context, it absolutely is the company's business. You don't see a problem when a company pays it's employees to have them turn around and trash it?
Before I graduated, I had to give a presentation at school to some administrators with another girl about the disconnect between the "Digital Natives" (20-somethings) and the "Digital Immigrants" (older faculty). Ignoring that whole discussion, I was most shocked by the difference in viewpoints that myself and this other student had. I was a senior at the time, and she was a sophomore - and she had exactly the point-of-view that you described. She considered it an egregious breach of trust and decorum that The Powers That Be could look at her Facebook profile without her specifically allowing it, and she refused to admit that it was her responsibility to monitor what she posted and accept the consequences that might arise. I took the (what I consider to be) more practical opinion: it is my job to assume that anything and everything that I put online could be viewed by anyone, irrelevant of any *supposed* limitations or restrictions or boundaries that the social network lets me put into place. When another one of my friends was doing the rounds for grad school, she was advised to clean up EVERYTHING on her Facebook account, even if it was locked down tight. Apparently some schools have put a laptop in front of the prospective masters/phd students, told them to log in, and then took the laptop back. Yeah, it's probably illegal and immoral - but in this job market, who do you know that is willing to give priority to the ability to post drunk pictures from the bar over the chance at an advanced degree?
Shit, caught me. I meant to use surreptitiously. And IWantJuice, it's not a matter of whether or not the company has an interest. Of course they do. It's a matter of them not respecting boundaries of appropriate behavior. Not everything that one CAN do is a thing that one SHOULD do. Would you have a problem with your company intentionally and knowingly sending people to listen in on your conversations at a bar, and then reporting back to them? Because that is what your company is asking you to do. This isn't them casually coming across it by accident, or viewing publicly available record. They're asking you to tell them how to actively spy on your coworkers.
The difference between those two scenarios is vast, and you know that. The same thing with them "listening in on you at a bar." That is just a completely silly comparison. If someone says something offhand to friends to vent, it is completely different than putting it in print and on the internet where, literally, ANYONE can get at it. The only people who can hear what you say in a bar are the ten people within ear shot. The only people who can see what you say on FB is ALMOST ANYONE. If someone overhears something in a bar, and then decides to report on it, it will at best be considered hearsay. If someone takes what someone said on FB and copies and pastes it (or takes a screen shot to prove it), they suddenly have evidence to back up their claims that (insert company here) is doing whatever they're accused of.
If you are intelligently using privacy settings, the pool of people who can see something posted there is potentially no larger than the occupants of a bar. Yes, it might be repeated elsewhere. Just like what you say out loud might be repeated elsewhere. Right, and then 'hearsay' might end up on the front page of the New York Times business section, and then, Oh shit! I shouldn't have said that in public! If someone who works for Apple says something that he shouldn't in a Silicon Valley bar, what do you think tomorrow's headline on TechCrunch will be? The major difference between social networks and previous social spheres is that misdeeds are easier to document today than they were before. The deeds themselves are not inherently different. This is true. I tried to make it clear that I think your employer is within their rights. They're just being creepy fuckers.
I understand your point and I agree with it on principle. And that's where the freedom of speech stuff comes into play. My perspective is, if you're choosing to work for a company, then you're tacitly agreeing to toe the company line, for the larger sake of profitability. And to that end, you're agreeing, publicly at least, to be a representative of that company. In a bar to a few trusted buddies is one thing, on Facebook or Twitter where more than likely 100+ people ( assuming a private profile) are seeing it, is another.