Though some younger conservatives may feel as though cancel culture has existed forever, it is a fairly recent development in American life. Before my own cancellation, internet comments unrelated to one’s job were not considered relevant to keeping a position. A person posting such things might be asked to delete them, and maybe apologize, but it had never been considered an immediate firing offense. A decade ago, that all changed.
In 2013, I served as the chief technical officer of Business Insider. I had been hired as chief engineer in 2010, when the business news startup was just a 20-person operation, and I managed a tech team of three people. By late 2013, Business Insider had grown into a 200-person company with 25 people working under me on the tech team. We were flying high, and I was working long hours; our company’s success was very satisfying. The entire company depended on me and my team, and we were delivering on all our responsibilities to grow and maintain the site. I took pride in the custom content management system we had developed, which allowed quick updates and rapid publishing that gave the company an edge against entrenched competitors in the business news sector, such as Forbes and Bloomberg.
I had a Twitter account, as many media and media adjacent folks did at the time. In those days, nobody felt like Twitter was part of the real world. Twitter users posted with irreverence and just tossed off tweets to amuse their friends. I posted a mix of business content related to my job and some vaguely libertarian observations and humor. Twitter was a much smaller place then and had a more light-hearted vibe to it in general.
Fired for a Tweet
However, in 2013 a shadow fell over Twitter and shrouded that sense of innocence in a climate of fear.
“Donglegate,” as it became known, was the incident that precipitated that shadow. A female tech evangelist for Sendgrid named Adria Richards was at a conference and overheard some male tech employees joking sexually about the term “dongle” and she took offense. She took their picture and posted it to Twitter and tried to have them shamed out of their jobs and the industry as a whole. Twitter allowed everyone under the sun to weigh in on this incident, and it only became significant due to that. One of the men lost his job, but a backlash against the eavesdropping and shaming resulted in Richards being fired as well. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
