
Mozilla CEO threatens to fire person responsible for anonymous hate speech - fabrice_d
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9202067/mozilla-ceo-chris-beard-reddit-hate-speech
======
deciplex
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.

~~~
spiffyman
I think you're using the wrong standard here.

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.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
It's vague, it's expansive, its informal usage is frequently conflated with
its legal usage. And all this is a feature of the term, not a bug.

~~~
deciplex
A feature for who? I prefer precise language and being understood.

~~~
13thLetter
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.

------
brianmurphy
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

~~~
13thLetter
> 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.

~~~
gcp
Well, feminists want equal rights for women. A misogynist hates women.

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.

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
gcp
He literally said: "taken their misogyny elsewhere"

~~~
hga
You said "feminist" and equated it with "misogynist", not "misogyny".

I say the relevant equivalents are:

Feminists and men's rights types.

Misandrists/misandry and misogynists/misogyny.

------
13thLetter
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
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.

~~~
michaelbuddy
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."

------
nsxwolf
Going on a witch hunt to identify an employee who went through the trouble of
speaking anonymously sounds like a bad idea.

~~~
asutherland
How would this be a witch hunt? The third definition from
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/witch-
hunt](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](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...](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/governance/policies/participation/), 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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/35u1yp/an_email_was_just_sent_out_at_work_with_2_free/cr7s34l?context=3)
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.

~~~
13thLetter
"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.

~~~
asutherland
The flies add up. There's not a harassment noise floor beneath which we should
ask the harassed to just shrug off harassment by their coworkers.

~~~
forgottenpass
_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.

~~~
joncampbelldev
Upvoting partly for partial agreement, but mostly for the taylor swift quoting

------
dragonwriter
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.

------
michaelbuddy
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.

------
orangebread
This seems like damage control more than an actual threat. CEO getting ahead
of the story before any bad press can make it something.

~~~
michaelbuddy
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.

------
rewqfdsa
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.

~~~
dudul
Same here.

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?

~~~
dragonwriter
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.

~~~
dudul
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

