Pearls from Freital

I came across Perlen aus Freital a while back—Christopher and Frederik’s website where they collect racist Facebook comments and send them to people’s employers. Guy gets fired.

The mechanism is obvious. Facebook won’t enforce its own rules. A woman posts a nipple, it’s deleted in minutes. Someone posts detailed fantasies about murdering asylum seekers, raping refugees, shooting boats full of families? That’s fine, that’s speech. So these two just did what Facebook wouldn’t: took the screenshots and mailed them to HR.

Part of me can’t decide if this is good or bad, but I think that’s the point. There’s this assumption that your online identity is separate, that you can post anything because it’s not real, it doesn’t count, it’s some other realm. Perlen aus Freital just proved that’s garbage. You’re the same person. Your words still have your name on them. If you’re posting about murdering people under your real face, your boss finding out isn’t exactly a surprise.

I don’t know what I feel about this as precedent. But as a specific situation, it’s hard to feel like they didn’t ask for this.