How would this be a witch hunt? The third definition from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/witch-hunt is "A public smear-campaign against an individual" which seems to better describe the actions of https://www.reddit.com/user/aoiyama. One could try to be pedantic about the second definition, "An attempt to find and publicly punish a group of people perceived as a threat, usually on ideological or political grounds.", but if you read the posts at the reddit link and the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/part..., even if you don't agree with the Mozilla ideology, the aoiyama one is clearly incompatible with the Mozilla one.
If the only course of action is to say "Oh no! They used a throwaway account, so there's nothing we can do about the toxic environment posts like this create for members of our community!" that doesn't bode well for having a non-toxic environment. And since I do need to disclaim that I am a MoCo employee (but 100% speaking for myself alone), I should also mention that you will find in that list of posts a link to https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/35u1yp/an_email... where the contents of a Mozilla Corporation internal-mailing list post were reposted. So even if one wanted to write this off as just a random internet troll, the situation is that there is either a MoCo employee intentionally harassing another MoCo employee and Mozillian or a MoCo employee passing information to someone doing the same thing.
I do want to be clear that I am not attributing these hypotheticals to your one-sentence reply. But I also want to be clear that we can't write off this type of toxic behaviour as acceptable because of the risk of being perceived as engaging in witch hunts/star chambers/other hyperbolic misapplications of known-bad-terms.
"If the only course of action is to say "Oh no! They used a throwaway account, so there's nothing we can do about the toxic environment posts like this create for members of our community!" that doesn't bode well for having a non-toxic environment."
How on Earth was that comment "creating a toxic environment"? It was added a week and a half after the original post went up. By that time nobody but the most obsessive are still reading the same Reddit post.
Calling it "toxic" and having the CEO himself declaim from the pulpit about how this random throwaway account on Reddit with all of six posts to its name over the span of three months must be destroyed seems like using a nuclear weapon to kill a fly.
There's not a harassment noise floor beneath which we should ask the harassed to just shrug off harassment by their coworkers.
I'm not gonna argue what side this is on, just that there is there is a floor. They're called "haters." Conventional wisdom is to shake it off. (Just think about the time spent getting down and out. You could have been getting down to sick beats.)
Different people will have different opinions on if this is above the floor and actions should to be taken in response. People are going to to disagree about when actions cross boundaries, so simply labeling actions as harassment doesn't cut it to make everybody agree with your view that it has crossed boundaries.
Regardless of whether the person who wrote that should be fired, calling that post "hate speech" demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what hate speech is. It is not merely exclusionary speech, and it is not merely speech that singles out particular groups - only protected groups. Holding particular political views - no matter how popular or right they might be, and no matter how persecuted you may feel for holding them - does not qualify you as belonging to a protected group.
If you want to fire this person, fire them for misrepresenting the Mozilla organization in a public forum. Stating that the tech industry will be better off without feminists - while a pretty stupid opinion to have - is not even remotely "hate speech", and while it might make Chris Beard feel a little more righteous to call it that, it does not reflect well on his capacity for rational thought.
I was expecting some vitriol, but the comments left on that user now are pretty tame (perhaps there were bad ones that have been deleted). Rude, calling someone an asshole and mocking their fashion, but not even close to hate speech. Unless everyone that's made fun of Trump in the last month is also guilty of hate speech.
> Hate speech - outside the law, is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation.
"Marginalized political views" isn't in that list, but then again it doesn't purport to be a comprehensive list.
However, it seems like you're relying on a particularly legalistic view of what "hate speech" is. Is hateful speech toward a group truly not "hate speech" until a legislative act deems the group protected? On face, that doesn't seem right.
You're right about "hate speech" as a legal term, but I don't think the CEO of a non-profit speaking to his employees requires that level of scrutiny.
> You're right about "hate speech" as a legal term, but I don't think the CEO of a non-profit speaking to his employees requires that level of scrutiny.
When you're talking about firing someone over a thing, it's a good idea to be precise IMO. FWIW I'd be totally fine if he had said that he intends to fire that employee for claiming represent Mozilla the organization (or at least its employees) in a public forum. But calling it "hate speech" dilutes the term.
To my mind "Hate speech" != "hateful speech" - no?
It's not very good for being precise or understood, but it is quite good at being a weapon. The vaguer the definition of a crime, the easier it is to accuse your political opponents of it while minimizing equivalent or worse behavior by your allies.
I disagree. I don't think it is a stupid opinion to have. Feminists do not add anything of value to the tech industry, they never have, they never will.
This is awfully petty behavior on the part of a CEO, digging up a comment buried ten layers down on a two week old Reddit post and then promising to destroy its anonymous poster. At best, it makes out Beard to be some kind of paranoid control freak. At worst, it makes it seem like that Brendan Eich thing wasn't a one-off.
I doubt the CEO dug up the content; more likely the potentially libelous comment was brought to Mozilla management's attention by someone else, possibly the recently departed employee who was it's target.
Libelous? Ha! This is your ordinary hyperbolic run-of-the-mill free speech here. Sure it's insulting but it's not something that could be reasonably shown as libel or legally defamatory (as in false).
Here's what you call libelous written by Aoiyama:
"The rest of mozilla would disagree with you. Everyone hated her because she was an asshole Social Justice bully and frankly people are sick of her divisive stupidity."
"Frankly everyone was glad to see the back of Christie Koehler. She was batshit insane and permanently offended at everything. When she and the rest of her blue-haired nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief."
Mozilla CEO Chris Beard is saying that hyper-sensitive permanently offended types are welcome within Mozilla. This creates a terrible working environment for those who want to have a job without the politics. I can't see Mozilla as an organization continuing to exist for very long with this kind of leadership. If I were a current employee at Mozilla, it would be time to shop my resume around to saner workplaces.
> Mozilla CEO Chris Beard is saying that hyper-sensitive permanently offended types are welcome within Mozilla.
No, he's saying that employees using public forums to call other employees (including former employees) "batshit insane" are not welcome within Mozilla.
That's kind of distant from whether the target of that attack is welcome (whether or not they are actually "permanently offended"); its not inconsistent that Mozilla would both come down hard on this type of hateful speech (even where it might be accurate) and not be welcoming to the people for whom the description, or even just the "permanently offended" part, was accurate.
> If I were a current employee at Mozilla, it would be time to shop my resume around to saner workplaces.
Good luck finding a place that tolerates this kind of public attack by employees against other employees (even the kinds of places where the leadership might publicly make such attacks on a disliked outgoing employee are unlikely to tolerate underlings doing so independently -- the privilege of painting a giant PR and legal target on the company like that is generally reserved fairly narrowly, where its tolerated at all.)
If that's really something you need in a workplace, I'm not sure any place that would lose you for that reason would do anything but breathe a sigh of relief for the bullet they dodged down the line by your departure.
> No, he's saying that employees using public forums to call other employees (including former employees) "batshit insane" are not welcome within Mozilla.
Let's do a thought experiment. If the post had been, "[NAME] was one of those batshit insane men's rights types. I'll be glad when all of his kind have left Mozilla and taken their misogyny elsewhere," would the CEO be reacting in the same fashion? Would The Verge write approvingly about it?
If not, then we're really not talking about some studiously neutral principle, and we should stop pretending that we are.
But 13thLetter didn't say "misogynist", he said "men's rights types". Certainly many of them hate women, just as clearly as many feminists hate men, but that doesn't automatically make all of either type haters.
Ok then. So it sounds like we've established that this is not some purely neutral principle, despite such claims elsewhere in this comments section. Calling some employees "batshit insane" is perfectly fine.
Wouldn't say that it's perfectly fine but yes, it's probably more likely that the CEO won't care if something bad is being said about an employee that broke the organization's rules, than the reverse.
I would think is this common sense but HN never disappoints.
> If not, then we're really not talking about some studiously neutral principle,
No one has suggested that either the CEO or the Verge is acting out of studious neutrality.
Some people have suggested a neutral principal within which the CEO's action is within the range of acceptable actions given the event it responds to, but nothing in your hypothetical -- whether or not one assumes (its not really a thought experiment, its just a projection of one's biases) that the action would have been similar or different -- addresses that.
If, instead of asking if the individual actors behaviors would have been the same, one were to ask would the actions have been justified if they were the same, we would at least be discussing the only neutral principle that has been proposed -- but even then, there is room to debate whether or not there are meaningful differences.
But nice and elaborate strawman that you've set up there.
> No one has suggested that either the CEO or the Verge is acting out of studious neutrality.
If I may quote:
"No, he's saying that employees using public forums to call other employees (including former employees) "batshit insane" are not welcome within Mozilla."
> But nice and elaborate strawman that you've set up there.
No, a thought experiment. For those who figured they could come up with a neutral principle, I presented another situation to apply those principles to. The general reaction was "well, that's different because of the beliefs of the employee." Which is what I was getting at all along: if you work for Mozilla you either toe the line with Mozilla's ideology or at the very least better keep your opinions to yourself, even anonymously on a dusty corner of an Internet message board. If not, the CEO will denounce you in the media, attempt to find out your identity, and if he succeeds, fire you. Brendan Eich wasn't a one-off; he was a model for the future.
Now it seems a lot of people are fine with that. And that, in turn, is fine! I'm happy for you: you have a major browser which is only for people of your political persuasion, which is not something everyone gets to say. Those who don't care about the ideology of the engineers who write their applications may be less happy, but I suppose that's our problem.
And yet the CEO is using a public meeting to air the dirty laundry of internal matters, making the whole thing worse. Really bad decision. Very un-leader like.
Public attack? Yeah 6 anonymous comments on a website, what an all-out "attack." Oh no, her credibility was tarnished. Oh wait, she did that to herself already by leaving a twitter rant-stream mult-day bridge burning criticizing the company but providing no helpful facts, just rants and complaints. hence the good-riddance
Mozilla lost me today. It's no longer an organization I can support. Let this be a lesson to you. Don't indulge the perpetually offended. They will never be happy. Their presence is a cancer in your organization. Should they apply, reject their applications. Should they be hired, fire them. Should the cancer metastasize, leave.
Can we still not like people and say it? Is it still ok to say that we don't get along with someone, that we're happy to not work with them anymore without having it cataloged as "hate speech"? Just because I don't validate your beliefs, or your ankle tattoo or your pink hair cut or where you spend your vacation doesn't mean that I hate you! I just disagree with you, get the F over it.
And the whole "He commented as a Mozilla employee so that's not ok" is BS. Are they gonna start a witch hunt for all the commenters on HN and Glassdor who speak about what it really is to work there?
You can say you don't like working with someone, but if you publicly, forcefully, vitriolically express your hatred for working with not just one person, but a class of people in your workplace typified by one person, and your employer doesn't share your distaste for having those people in the workplace, you shouldn't be surprised if your employer resolves the incompatibility you've exposed to them by assuring you don't have to work with them any more.
I see, so if I understand your comment, employees should fully embrace their employer's values is what you are saying? Otherwise they should be terminated.
Wasn't there some outrage a while ago when an employer decided that they didn't want to financially help their employees use contraceptive or abortion? Based on what you are saying it was their right to push their beliefs down their employees' throat. Maybe they should have fired the employees who didn't fully embrace their values too.
Did this employee ever misbehave with the person who left? Did the fact that he/she didn't embrace her belief get in the way of his/her work? I doubt it, otherwise the comment wouldn't have triggered this whole thing.
Most people are grown ups, and can be around and collaborate with other people who don't necessarily fully agree with them.
> I see, so if I understand your comment, employees should fully embrace their employer's values is what you are saying?
You do not, then, even approximately understand the comment.
There's a pretty big excluded middle between, on the one hand, fully embracing one's employer's values, and, on the other, publicly, forcefully, and vitriolically propounding one's hatred for working with particular individuals and wide classes of people within one's industry.
Can we still not like people and say it? Is it still ok to say that we don't get along with someone, that we're happy to not work with them anymore without having it cataloged as "hate speech"?
Sure!
But calling them "batshit insane", "asshole" "the industry will be relieved with this class of people gone" in public goes a bit further than that, though.
Not really. That's actually pretty tame. It's not like a death threat or something like that.
The outrage at those comments is quite surreal. I can't fathom for the life of me, why would the CEO of a company (and the commenters on the thread) would spend so much energy at being outraged by a RANDOM INTERNET COMMENT.
That. shit. is. INSANE.
But of course to the perpetually offended, no problem is too small or trivial not to be blown out of proportion.
they can never be truly powerful because they eat each other after a short while. That's how toxic they are. I've seen it happen. These types are not survivors.
When the smoke clears, the rest of us shake our heads and move on to the real work because we don't let our knee jerk emotions rule over every aspect of our lives.
> Let this be a lesson to you. Don't indulge the perpetually offended. [...] Should they be hired, fire them.
How is that not what Mozilla is doing?
Or do you mean, only those people who are "perpetually offended" by things you agree with, rather those "perpetually offended" by the things that you too are "perpetually offended" by?
I don't understand what the perpetually offended anti-"social justice" types are complaining about here.
Anon poster publicly and forcefully says he hates working with, or even in the same industry as, a large class of people typified by a particular recently-departed Mozilla employee. Mozilla CEO proposes to directly resolve the problem if the person who raised it can be identified. Seems like a win-win for all involved.
There's no story here. The only story is how bad The Verge and Mozilla CEO are stooping to even try to perpetuate or drum up something. Employee gets fired, goes on twitter rant. Former coworker calls her a psycho, her twitter rant fits the diagnosis.
Any press picking this up aren't worth anyone's time, especially the CEO of an organization. sheesh.
Based on the tweet streams shared by the former employee she labeled her 'exit interview', I'm more going to side with the anonymous employee. The former employee basically went on a complete rant ripping across Mozilla on twitter, but when it came to specific details, we end up with "never got a firefox t-shirt that fit me" and "nobody listened to my ideas" Talk about embarrassing yourself while burning a bridge. That kind of bridge burning is indicative of the kind of coworker she would be to some people.
Where does this weakness come from? Is it mental illness or just a parenting thing? And she also seems to conflate the ideas of software accessibility with "safespaces." If that's the kind of ideas that she was peddling to her colleagues, I'm pretty sure they aren't going to buy into that.
I don't know if it's a feminism thing or a LGBT thing but suddenly there are these new words that were invented, showed up in sketchy sociology classes and these people reform their individual reality by them and expect the rest of the world to suddenly be part of it. But they never asked whether these things were actually truthful or useful. Suddenly people are supposed to refer to themselves as 'CIS-gendered' and worry about 'safe spaces' where you won't 'trigger' anyone from too loud of applause.
The CEO should never have brought up this issue in a public meeting. It's an internal matter. And his misunderstanding of hate speech is disappointing, I have no respect for Mozilla as a company at this point. CEO needs to be removed, not the person who spoke their mind anonymously on reddit.
48 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadIf the only course of action is to say "Oh no! They used a throwaway account, so there's nothing we can do about the toxic environment posts like this create for members of our community!" that doesn't bode well for having a non-toxic environment. And since I do need to disclaim that I am a MoCo employee (but 100% speaking for myself alone), I should also mention that you will find in that list of posts a link to https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/35u1yp/an_email... where the contents of a Mozilla Corporation internal-mailing list post were reposted. So even if one wanted to write this off as just a random internet troll, the situation is that there is either a MoCo employee intentionally harassing another MoCo employee and Mozillian or a MoCo employee passing information to someone doing the same thing.
I do want to be clear that I am not attributing these hypotheticals to your one-sentence reply. But I also want to be clear that we can't write off this type of toxic behaviour as acceptable because of the risk of being perceived as engaging in witch hunts/star chambers/other hyperbolic misapplications of known-bad-terms.
How on Earth was that comment "creating a toxic environment"? It was added a week and a half after the original post went up. By that time nobody but the most obsessive are still reading the same Reddit post.
Calling it "toxic" and having the CEO himself declaim from the pulpit about how this random throwaway account on Reddit with all of six posts to its name over the span of three months must be destroyed seems like using a nuclear weapon to kill a fly.
I'm not gonna argue what side this is on, just that there is there is a floor. They're called "haters." Conventional wisdom is to shake it off. (Just think about the time spent getting down and out. You could have been getting down to sick beats.)
Different people will have different opinions on if this is above the floor and actions should to be taken in response. People are going to to disagree about when actions cross boundaries, so simply labeling actions as harassment doesn't cut it to make everybody agree with your view that it has crossed boundaries.
If you want to fire this person, fire them for misrepresenting the Mozilla organization in a public forum. Stating that the tech industry will be better off without feminists - while a pretty stupid opinion to have - is not even remotely "hate speech", and while it might make Chris Beard feel a little more righteous to call it that, it does not reflect well on his capacity for rational thought.
From Wikipedia:
> Hate speech - outside the law, is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation.
"Marginalized political views" isn't in that list, but then again it doesn't purport to be a comprehensive list.
However, it seems like you're relying on a particularly legalistic view of what "hate speech" is. Is hateful speech toward a group truly not "hate speech" until a legislative act deems the group protected? On face, that doesn't seem right.
You're right about "hate speech" as a legal term, but I don't think the CEO of a non-profit speaking to his employees requires that level of scrutiny.
When you're talking about firing someone over a thing, it's a good idea to be precise IMO. FWIW I'd be totally fine if he had said that he intends to fire that employee for claiming represent Mozilla the organization (or at least its employees) in a public forum. But calling it "hate speech" dilutes the term.
To my mind "Hate speech" != "hateful speech" - no?
Here's what you call libelous written by Aoiyama:
"The rest of mozilla would disagree with you. Everyone hated her because she was an asshole Social Justice bully and frankly people are sick of her divisive stupidity."
"Frankly everyone was glad to see the back of Christie Koehler. She was batshit insane and permanently offended at everything. When she and the rest of her blue-haired nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief."
No, he's saying that employees using public forums to call other employees (including former employees) "batshit insane" are not welcome within Mozilla.
That's kind of distant from whether the target of that attack is welcome (whether or not they are actually "permanently offended"); its not inconsistent that Mozilla would both come down hard on this type of hateful speech (even where it might be accurate) and not be welcoming to the people for whom the description, or even just the "permanently offended" part, was accurate.
> If I were a current employee at Mozilla, it would be time to shop my resume around to saner workplaces.
Good luck finding a place that tolerates this kind of public attack by employees against other employees (even the kinds of places where the leadership might publicly make such attacks on a disliked outgoing employee are unlikely to tolerate underlings doing so independently -- the privilege of painting a giant PR and legal target on the company like that is generally reserved fairly narrowly, where its tolerated at all.)
If that's really something you need in a workplace, I'm not sure any place that would lose you for that reason would do anything but breathe a sigh of relief for the bullet they dodged down the line by your departure.
Let's do a thought experiment. If the post had been, "[NAME] was one of those batshit insane men's rights types. I'll be glad when all of his kind have left Mozilla and taken their misogyny elsewhere," would the CEO be reacting in the same fashion? Would The Verge write approvingly about it?
If not, then we're really not talking about some studiously neutral principle, and we should stop pretending that we are.
One of those is compatible with the companies code of conduct and the other isn't. So I think it's fair to treat them differently.
According to the article the former clearly is, but I don't imagine Mozilla's HR puts up with misogyny either.
I'm assuming expressing hate towards a group counts as an "exclusionary practice" whereas demanding equal rights isn't.
I say the relevant equivalents are:
Feminists and men's rights types.
Misandrists/misandry and misogynists/misogyny.
I would think is this common sense but HN never disappoints.
No one has suggested that either the CEO or the Verge is acting out of studious neutrality.
Some people have suggested a neutral principal within which the CEO's action is within the range of acceptable actions given the event it responds to, but nothing in your hypothetical -- whether or not one assumes (its not really a thought experiment, its just a projection of one's biases) that the action would have been similar or different -- addresses that.
If, instead of asking if the individual actors behaviors would have been the same, one were to ask would the actions have been justified if they were the same, we would at least be discussing the only neutral principle that has been proposed -- but even then, there is room to debate whether or not there are meaningful differences.
But nice and elaborate strawman that you've set up there.
If I may quote: "No, he's saying that employees using public forums to call other employees (including former employees) "batshit insane" are not welcome within Mozilla."
> But nice and elaborate strawman that you've set up there.
No, a thought experiment. For those who figured they could come up with a neutral principle, I presented another situation to apply those principles to. The general reaction was "well, that's different because of the beliefs of the employee." Which is what I was getting at all along: if you work for Mozilla you either toe the line with Mozilla's ideology or at the very least better keep your opinions to yourself, even anonymously on a dusty corner of an Internet message board. If not, the CEO will denounce you in the media, attempt to find out your identity, and if he succeeds, fire you. Brendan Eich wasn't a one-off; he was a model for the future.
Now it seems a lot of people are fine with that. And that, in turn, is fine! I'm happy for you: you have a major browser which is only for people of your political persuasion, which is not something everyone gets to say. Those who don't care about the ideology of the engineers who write their applications may be less happy, but I suppose that's our problem.
Public attack? Yeah 6 anonymous comments on a website, what an all-out "attack." Oh no, her credibility was tarnished. Oh wait, she did that to herself already by leaving a twitter rant-stream mult-day bridge burning criticizing the company but providing no helpful facts, just rants and complaints. hence the good-riddance
Can we still not like people and say it? Is it still ok to say that we don't get along with someone, that we're happy to not work with them anymore without having it cataloged as "hate speech"? Just because I don't validate your beliefs, or your ankle tattoo or your pink hair cut or where you spend your vacation doesn't mean that I hate you! I just disagree with you, get the F over it.
And the whole "He commented as a Mozilla employee so that's not ok" is BS. Are they gonna start a witch hunt for all the commenters on HN and Glassdor who speak about what it really is to work there?
Wasn't there some outrage a while ago when an employer decided that they didn't want to financially help their employees use contraceptive or abortion? Based on what you are saying it was their right to push their beliefs down their employees' throat. Maybe they should have fired the employees who didn't fully embrace their values too.
Did this employee ever misbehave with the person who left? Did the fact that he/she didn't embrace her belief get in the way of his/her work? I doubt it, otherwise the comment wouldn't have triggered this whole thing.
Most people are grown ups, and can be around and collaborate with other people who don't necessarily fully agree with them.
You do not, then, even approximately understand the comment.
There's a pretty big excluded middle between, on the one hand, fully embracing one's employer's values, and, on the other, publicly, forcefully, and vitriolically propounding one's hatred for working with particular individuals and wide classes of people within one's industry.
Sure!
But calling them "batshit insane", "asshole" "the industry will be relieved with this class of people gone" in public goes a bit further than that, though.
The outrage at those comments is quite surreal. I can't fathom for the life of me, why would the CEO of a company (and the commenters on the thread) would spend so much energy at being outraged by a RANDOM INTERNET COMMENT.
That. shit. is. INSANE.
But of course to the perpetually offended, no problem is too small or trivial not to be blown out of proportion.
When the smoke clears, the rest of us shake our heads and move on to the real work because we don't let our knee jerk emotions rule over every aspect of our lives.
How is that not what Mozilla is doing?
Or do you mean, only those people who are "perpetually offended" by things you agree with, rather those "perpetually offended" by the things that you too are "perpetually offended" by?
Anon poster publicly and forcefully says he hates working with, or even in the same industry as, a large class of people typified by a particular recently-departed Mozilla employee. Mozilla CEO proposes to directly resolve the problem if the person who raised it can be identified. Seems like a win-win for all involved.
Any press picking this up aren't worth anyone's time, especially the CEO of an organization. sheesh.
Where does this weakness come from? Is it mental illness or just a parenting thing? And she also seems to conflate the ideas of software accessibility with "safespaces." If that's the kind of ideas that she was peddling to her colleagues, I'm pretty sure they aren't going to buy into that.
I don't know if it's a feminism thing or a LGBT thing but suddenly there are these new words that were invented, showed up in sketchy sociology classes and these people reform their individual reality by them and expect the rest of the world to suddenly be part of it. But they never asked whether these things were actually truthful or useful. Suddenly people are supposed to refer to themselves as 'CIS-gendered' and worry about 'safe spaces' where you won't 'trigger' anyone from too loud of applause.
The CEO should never have brought up this issue in a public meeting. It's an internal matter. And his misunderstanding of hate speech is disappointing, I have no respect for Mozilla as a company at this point. CEO needs to be removed, not the person who spoke their mind anonymously on reddit.