It used to be difficult to express your unvarnished opinions to the world. Now it’s easy. And because it’s so easy, Jamie Allman has lost his job.

Allman, a TV and radio commentator in St. Louis, fired up his Twitter account the other day and sent out a tweet about Parkland high school shooting survivor David Hogg. I won’t quote the tweet in this space. If you’d like to know what he said (it ain’t pretty), feel free to read about it here. 

Photo by studiostoks

Soon after the tweet became public, Allman locked down his Twitter account. But it was too late. Within days, KDNL-TV canceled his show and fired him. He’s not currently appearing on his own radio show; it’s not clear when, or if, he’ll be back.

[UPDATE 4/11/18:  Esther-Mireya Tejeda of Entercom Communications, Allman’s radio employer, told the Riverfront Times this on Tuesday:  “I can tell you on the record KFTK has parted ways with Mr. Allman and that his show is canceled effective immediately”].

It Used to Be Inconvenient…
That Was a Good Thing

There’s nothing new in the opinion Allman expressed — people have been saying dumb and destructive things in the privacy of their own homes for centuries. 

But it used to be much tougher to put those views into public circulation.

If a story in your local paper got you worked up, you had to get out your typewriter and write a letter to the editor. You had to look up the paper’s address and write it on an envelope.

You had to put a stamp on the envelope and schlep it to a mailbox.

It took a day or two for your opinion to arrive at the newspaper’s office. An editor would then read your missive and decide whether it merited inclusion in the “Letters” section.

And that’s where it stopped. Most letters were never printed in the paper.

In fact, a lot of them were never even sent. In the time it took to write a letter, print it, stuff it, and find a mailbox, many people cooled off.

Now It’s Easy and Fast

Thumb-type your 280 characters, press a button, and your unfiltered opinion is on the Internet for everyone to see.

No envelope. No stamp. No editor. 

No time to think about what you just wrote before the world sees it.

Here’s the Problem With That

Companies don’t like it when their employees make them look bad.

Everything you say online – your tweets, Facebook status updates, Instagram photos, blog comments – is a reflection on you, and a reflection on your employer.

In 2013, a woman named Justine Sacco sent out a tweet and then boarded a plane from London to Cape Town, South Africa. The tweet was a silly joke – her attempt to be ironic. Outside of her family, friends, and 170 Twitter followers, nobody knew who she was at the moment she tweeted.

By the time she landed in Cape Town eleven hours later, she had become an internationally known villain. She’d lost her job – her mortified employers decided to fire her while she was still in the air. 

The full story is in this New York Times article.

I’ve had my own issues with Facebook posts in the past. I’m now much more careful in discussing professional interactions, and I don’t post about Donald Trump anymore. It’s not worth the grief.

Baseball analyst Curt Schilling learned about the perils of social media the hard way when ESPN fired him for a Facebook post.

Jamie Allman’s learning the lesson now.

A while back one of my readers left a comment on this blog. The comment expressed a very negative opinion of the owner of his station. The reader’s identity and the name of his station were readily apparent.

Comments on my blog are held for moderation, and this one made me nervous. Rather than approving it, I took a screen shot and emailed it to the salesperson with a note: “Just wanted to make sure. Do you really want this comment on the Internet?”

The next day he wrote back and said, “Though it is true, he is quick to call his lawyer. Please don’t publish it.”

He is lucky that comments on my blog don’t post automatically, and even luckier that I gave him a chance to retract his screed before it went “live”. Because as Justine Sacco found out in a more extreme case, the Internet is forever, and it’s everywhere.

Three people can keep a secret, as long as two of them are dead.” – Benjamin Franklin.

Your emails aren’t private, either. They can be forwarded. You can Reply All by mistake. As senior executives at Sony Corporation and the Democratic National Committee have found out, private servers can be hacked.  

What does this mean for you? It means you should think before you tweet, post, update, submit, or send. It may be helpful to put a delay on your outgoing email.

Would you want what you wrote to appear on the front page of the New York Times?

If not, delete it. Your career will be glad you did.

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