Washington was rocked this week when a White House foreign-policy staffer was fired for posting nasty comments about other Obama administration officials on Twitter. Jofi Joseph used the handle @natlsecwonk, and he’s ruined a career he spent a decade or more building.
He deserved his firing. Joseph’s conduct was not only uncivilized; he also committed slanders against his own colleagues and superiors. Future employers have to do little more than Google his name to discover his propensity for disloyal nastiness. His time in government is over; whether he can find anyone outside his family to hire him is another question.
Joseph is only the highest-profile denizen of the Web to commit workplace suicide on the Internet. As far back as 2002, the pioneering blogger Heather Armstrong lost her job when her employer realized she was writing satirical portraits of her office at dooce.com.
The critic Lee Siegel was kicked off his perch at The New Republic in 2008 when it turned out he was using a false identity to attack people who had the temerity to criticize his articles in the comments section. The same kind of “sock puppetry” became an irresistible and career-damaging temptation for the social scientist John Lott and Orthodox Rabbi Michael Broyde.
Those previous high-profile examples took place on Web sites and blogs. The advent of social media, in the form of Facebook and Twitter, has caused people to injure themselves professionally at a much faster clip.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of people have been fired or severely disciplined for breaches of etiquette, conduct or confidentiality on these sites. We can’t know just how many people have had job offers withdrawn, or have not been seriously considered for employment after applying for a job, due to the nature of their Facebook status updates or Tweets.
The Internet lends itself to compulsive oversharing, as we know. Bloggers will tell the most awful stories about themselves to get the attention they desperately need, even if that attention is negative.
But there’s something different about Twitter. Joseph tweeted anonymously for two years before he was uncovered, but his propensity for ugly-spirited jibes and digs is a characteristic of the medium.
Twitter is composed of a series of one-liners, which is all you can really get out of 140 characters maximum. And one-liners — think Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife. Please.” — work best when they sting.
In addition, with its tens of thousands of comments a minute, Twitter is like a river that moves with incredible speed — if you don’t do something remarkable or attention-worthy, your Tweet will simply be washed away as though it had never existed.
It is the world’s largest perpetual cocktail party, and the easiest way to get noticed is to put a lampshade over your head or to break something. Obnoxiousness has its uses in a situation like this.
Alas, I speak from experience.
I am reputed to be pretty good at Twitter. I have nearly 30,000 followers, many of whom seem amused by and taken with my Tweets. I’m very quick with a quip; for me, as for so many others, Twitter has proved to be a place where I can practice the craft of virtual stand-up. It’s an open-mic night that’s always open.
But if I’m in a bad mood, or a surly frame of mind, I find myself Tweeting not in the manner (if not with the wit) of Jerry Seinfeld making puckish observations, but more like Don Rickles going after his audience’s jugular.
The seductiveness of Twitter is its immediacy. And like all seductive things, it can blind you to the consequences of your conduct when you give into it. I don’t know a single Twitter devotee who hasn’t expressed shame or regret or embarrassment at one time or another.
Had I been 20 rather than 50 when I began Tweeting, when I was far more heedless and infinitely less prudent than I am now even at my lowest Twitter points, I can’t imagine what damage I might have done to my own reputation and my future prospects.
As it is, though, I am long since grown; it is time to put away childish things. Sadly, it was past time for Jofi Joseph.