IT boss fired over kiss cam: is it fair?
At a Coldplay concert in Boston, a "kiss cam" was displaying couples when it panned to a man and woman who didn't want to be shown together on the big screen. Instead of kissing the two ducked away. The video quickly went viral and as a result the man in the video, who happened to be CEO of IT firm Astronomer and was at the concert with the company's HR chief, lost his job. Europe's press reflects.
Anyone could end up in the global pillory
Dagens Nyheter finds the case disturbing:
“No one is safe. Anyone caught in an embarrassing moment can become mere entertainment for the whole world. Is that what we want? Do we realise how, sitting staring at our phones, we are becoming part of a collective witch hunt? Anyone who shares the clip is helping to consolidate and perpetuate the surveillance society. Isn't it a disproportionately harsh punishment for the two people involved to be put in the global pillory for this? Doesn't the laughter stick in your throat a little?”
Revolting moralising
Writer and satirist Viktor Shenderovich complains on Facebook about prudish hypocrisy - now paired with digital surveillance:
“It's shameful (and idiotic) to fire a man, not because he wasn't able to do his job, but because he hugged the woman he wanted to hug - and not the one he should have been allowed to hug based on the 'standards of behaviour and responsibility' drawn up by his company union. I find this truly sickening. All this is of course trivial against the backdrop of the current global hypocrisy on far more serious matters, but it's nonetheless revolting. ... And also: comrades, get used to the digital re-education camp!”
What this is really about
The real problem isn't marital infidelity, writes Bálint Kovács, a book author specialising in the topic of sexual harassment, on Facebook:
“No, the only real problem here is that the boss is having an intimate relationship with his subordinate. In companies that take themselves halfway seriously this is prohibited. Not because it automatically involves a person higher up in the hierarchy taking advantage of someone lower down, but to avoid such suspicions arising in the first place. ... We shouldn't be talking about other people's private lives here, but about the problematic nature of boss-subordinate relationships. But it's harder to do this with just a few flippant, sarcastic remarks.”