Tweets can bite back

Two weeks ago, Rakesh Agrawal, the director of strategy of the online payment company Pay Pal, tweeted a series of poorly spelled messages accusing co-workers of incompetence, and calling one a “useless piece of s***”. The next morning the tweets were deleted and Agrawal said these were intended as private messages and not public tweets. But by the end of the day Agrawal was no longer an employee of Pay Pal.

Last week, Sanjiv Kapoor the COO of Spice Jet created a storm of his own when he tweeted about abusive Indian passengers on board flights. His company did not elaborate on the matter. Kapoor responded to criticism on twitter and held his ground that supporting his crew was more important than ingratiating abusive passengers.

The question is whether social media is a personal tool or an organisational one. Many users specify that their tweets are personal and their retweets are not endorsements but merely a distribution of ideas. But these disclaimers don’t mean much. If you get caught up in a social media tornado, you are going down and you are pretty much on your own.

The dichotomy of social media is a real, career-threatening prospect. It is social, a term that implies the allowance of a certain laxity of rules and allows you to reach out to a living room as large as the world, but it isn’t social enough to protect you from criticism and backlash. While it might be acceptable to make sexist, racist or other kinds of disparaging remarks about someone when you are in a small group of like-minded friends, extrapolating this to the social media universe is problematic. Trouble is, with apps on the phone and the power to publish within seconds, there is a great temptation to act and react without pausing for thought. A spur of the moment tweet is all it takes to bring global infamy and professional disruption and disgrace, like Agrawal discovered.

Users must bear in mind that while the platform is social, it is more importantly, media. And therefore it is imperative to check whether a twitter message or a facebook status conforms to the rules of the medium. The right to freedom of speech can certainly be invoked to defend an opinion, but increasingly, in a politically correct world, it does not offer much of a defence.

Senior Assistant Editor

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