3 ms·

Hopefully every other part of your online life is under a difficult to guess pseudonym if you write anything even remotely controversial, because the social jus

Hopefully every other part of your online life is under a difficult to guess pseudonym if you write anything even remotely controversial, because the social justice mob is only looking for scalps, not justice.

CydeWeys 6y ago
Not sure how that's relevant here. He published under his real name, at work.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Maybe the lesson here, then, is "If a company really wants honest discussion of controversial ideas, they should provide a means for people to carry out those discussions with anonymity." A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting. Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address. A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company... Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed. From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    From your story it sounds like you already know this, but most companies really do not want broad discussions of controversial ideas, especially not ones entirely outside the remit of the employees participating in them.

CydeWeys 6y ago

Not sure how that's relevant here. He published under his real name, at work.

dane-pgp 6y ago
Maybe the lesson here, then, is "If a company really wants honest discussion of controversial ideas, they should provide a means for people to carry out those discussions with anonymity." A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting. Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address. A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company... Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed. From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  From your story it sounds like you already know this, but most companies really do not want broad discussions of controversial ideas, especially not ones entirely outside the remit of the employees participating in them.