Twitter fires VR manager after discovering 2013 anti-homeless Facebook rant

midian182

Posts: 9,632   +120
Staff member

Always be careful what you post online; it could come back to haunt you, no matter how much you try to distance yourself from it. Greg Gopman recently discovered this harsh truth. A few weeks after Twitter hired him to work on the company’s virtual reality endeavors, an unearthed Facebook rant he posted in 2013 about San Francisco’s homeless population resulted in his termination.

On October 18, TechCrunch reported that Twitter had hired the AngelHack co-founder to become its VR project manager. The article referred to his anti-homeless tirade, and questioned whether Twitter should be hiring someone who feels this way, especially as the company faces constant criticism for not clamping down on trolls.

Less than a day after the story appeared, Twitter fired Gopman. “anddd I’m fired. Thanks TechCrunch,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “They [TechCrunch] wrote a smash piece on me last night and comms didn’t want to deal with it,” he reportedly told friends.

After complaining that San Francisco’s streets were “overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash,” Gopman says his views changed as he began to understand the situation better. In a blog post last year, called “How I learned to care for the homeless,” he called his “arrogant post” the stupidest mistake of his life, and has since been involved with several initiatives to help those in need.

Possibly the strangest thing about the entire incident is how Twitter never knew about the controversial post. It’s hard to imagine a large company not looking into the background of an important hire, and a simple Google search on Gopman’s name reveals what he did in 2013. But then maybe the microblogging site did know and just hoped nobody would bring it up.

Twitter provided “no comment” when asked for a statement.

Permalink to story.

 
This is what it honestly means, when social media postings will forever haunt you. Be careful what you say because in the end, things in the past will be dug up and used against you. I really question the usefulness sometimes of social media, when it's often used as a reminder like this. You might have changed but the internet hasn't forgotten what you said.
 
You gotta love political correctness. It is freedom, until it clashes with the current trends. Speaking of, it reminds me of Brendan Eich, being fired some years ago for contributing a couple of bucks to an antigay organization. Felt sorry for the dude, he was supposed to be the Mozilla CEO if I remember correctly. Why fire a perfectly valid employee, just because he/she stated an opinion years ago? People just need labels and groups to attach to, they cannot think for themselves, always looking for the next "sounds good" trend to hang to, forever rebels without a cause (and without a brain).
 
You gotta love political correctness. It is freedom, until it clashes with the current trends. Speaking of, it reminds me of Brendan Eich, being fired some years ago for contributing a couple of bucks to an antigay organization. Felt sorry for the dude, he was supposed to be the Mozilla CEO if I remember correctly. Why fire a perfectly valid employee, just because he/she stated an opinion years ago? People just need labels and groups to attach to, they cannot think for themselves, always looking for the next "sounds good" trend to hang to, forever rebels without a cause (and without a brain).

He donated to a Prop8 supporting group, IIRC. Prop 8 subsequently passed a majority vote and democracy-loving, majority rule-practicing progressives promptly had the vote invalidated in court. Eich was eventually outted as a donor to the Prop 8 campaign by an SJW employee and he was forced out of Mozilla...only to subsequently launch Brave, a superior browser.

SJW-converged organizations always fail. Twitter is dying for this same reason. Like cancer, their compliance with ever-evolving social justice will spread until the host is killed.

It is an amusing disease.
 
It's the Left stopping Freedom is what this is. If you think anything else you are foolish and wrong
The left? first of all, there is no real "left" in American politics, and certainly not in the media, if you think otherwise, you have no idea what the ideologies of the real left are....and, if you survey the headlines from the last year, it's conservatives and religious zealots that are trying to stop people from getting married, trying to stop planned parenthood, trying to get laws passed that allow any business to deny service to anyone they suspect of being homosexual (which passed in north carolina), etc...in fact, on almost every social issue, conservatives are trying to take freedoms away. It's also the republicans who are firmly against net neutrality , and they also opposed all attempts to limit and reform the government spying on it's own people (I.e. the USA Freedom Act)...so while yhe American liberals (which you have incorrectly associated with the Left) may be trying to limit ceetain predjudicial language in the social sphere, conservative and republics are taking away our actually important freedoms, and are doing so with law, which is much more troubling.....P.S. I hate republicans and democrats because they're not too different parties, but simply two wings of the same corporate, fascist party. Also, in political science, on the entire spectrum of political ideologies, the republicans and democrats are considered centrist parties with only a very slight right or left leaning respectively. There is absolutely zero representation of "the left", either traditional or new, its various ideologies and voices in the American media or in the democratic process, and again, if you think otherwise, I suggest you do some research to find out what the "left" really is (in political science and academia) as opposed to what conservative talk radio claims it is, I.e. Hillary Clinton and the democrats are not leftist
 
Unfortunately, in the early twentieth century, the supreme court established the precedent of "Employment at Will" where an employer can fire an employee for absolutely no reason, so even though the reason in this is pretty thin, they never had to offer a reason in the first place. Gotta love America and it's complete lack of workers rights compared to every other industrialized, first world country.

For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
 
Well, we made it most of the day without a spergy troll showing up to eat stone.

Where da mods at?
 
The left? first of all, there is no real "left" in American politics, and certainly not in the media, if you think otherwise, you have no idea what the ideologies of the real left are....and, if you survey the headlines from the last year, it's conservatives and religious zealots that are trying to stop people from getting married, trying to stop planned parenthood, trying to get laws passed that allow any business to deny service to anyone they suspect of being homosexual (which passed in north carolina), etc...in fact, on almost every social issue, conservatives are trying to take freedoms away. It's also the republicans who are firmly against net neutrality , and they also opposed all attempts to limit and reform the government spying on it's own people (I.e. the USA Freedom Act)...so while yhe American liberals (which you have incorrectly associated with the Left) may be trying to limit ceetain predjudicial language in the social sphere, conservative and republics are taking away our actually important freedoms, and are doing so with law, which is much more troubling.....P.S. I hate republicans and democrats because they're not too different parties, but simply two wings of the same corporate, fascist party. Also, in political science, on the entire spectrum of political ideologies, the republicans and democrats are considered centrist parties with only a very slight right or left leaning respectively. There is absolutely zero representation of "the left", either traditional or new, its various ideologies and voices in the American media or in the democratic process, and again, if you think otherwise, I suggest you do some research to find out what the "left" really is (in political science and academia) as opposed to what conservative talk radio claims it is, I.e. Hillary Clinton and the democrats are not leftist


My sides hurt.
 
Unfortunately, in the early twentieth century, the supreme court established the precedent of "Employment at Will" where an employer can fire an employee for absolutely no reason, so even though the reason in this is pretty thin, they never had to offer a reason in the first place. Gotta love America and it's complete lack of workers rights compared to every other industrialized, first world country.

For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
I need side relief
 
He donated to a Prop8 supporting group, IIRC. Prop 8 subsequently passed a majority vote and democracy-loving, majority rule-practicing progressives promptly had the vote invalidated in court. Eich was eventually outted as a donor to the Prop 8 campaign by an SJW employee and he was forced out of Mozilla...only to subsequently launch Brave, a superior browser.

SJW-converged organizations always fail. Twitter is dying for this same reason. Like cancer, their compliance with ever-evolving social justice will spread until the host is killed.

It is an amusing disease.
Reminds me of the French Revolution
 
It would seem that Twitter has a corporate policy against free speech. I may not agree with what Gopman said, but I do feel he should be able to FREELY express his thoughts (as they were then, as they may have changed since) without sanction as long as they do not violate specific law which protects the rights of others (like libel, incitement, etc).

"Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction." (Wikipedia)
 
The left? first of all, there is no real "left" in American politics, and certainly not in the media, if you think otherwise, you have no idea what the ideologies of the real left are....and, if you survey the headlines from the last year, it's conservatives and religious zealots that are trying to stop people from getting married, trying to stop planned parenthood, trying to get laws passed that allow any business to deny service to anyone they suspect of being homosexual (which passed in north carolina), etc...in fact, on almost every social issue, conservatives are trying to take freedoms away. It's also the republicans who are firmly against net neutrality , and they also opposed all attempts to limit and reform the government spying on it's own people (I.e. the USA Freedom Act)...so while yhe American liberals (which you have incorrectly associated with the Left) may be trying to limit ceetain predjudicial language in the social sphere, conservative and republics are taking away our actually important freedoms, and are doing so with law, which is much more troubling.....P.S. I hate republicans and democrats because they're not too different parties, but simply two wings of the same corporate, fascist party. Also, in political science, on the entire spectrum of political ideologies, the republicans and democrats are considered centrist parties with only a very slight right or left leaning respectively. There is absolutely zero representation of "the left", either traditional or new, its various ideologies and voices in the American media or in the democratic process, and again, if you think otherwise, I suggest you do some research to find out what the "left" really is (in political science and academia) as opposed to what conservative talk radio claims it is, I.e. Hillary Clinton and the democrats are not leftist
I simply just believe you have no idea what the descriptors, "right" and "left" mean. Sort of like the Chinese, you've been reading the news from the lower right, to the upper left..

You have hit on a valid observation about "only one party". However, that's sort of vague. What we have are, "our crooks versus their crooks". Ugly perhaps, but apparently a sociological inevitability. Public office is the "prestige" component of the social, "trifecta". The first two are, "money, & power". So after you've screwed everybody you've come into contact with over the years, (smiling the whole time, of course) amassing you're personal wealth, it's time for those victims, "to afford you the honor of continuing to work on their behalf"..
 
Awww, someone got jarred from their alternate universe by someone telling it like it really is. This coming from the "lets get guberment out of our lives," but "lets let guberment into our bedrooms crowd." :'(
 
Should we do so, we would miss the diversity of opinion which helps to make a healthy society.
Social Media, as currently practiced, is anything but "healthy."
Perhaps @Cycloid Torus was being facetious. Oh well, at least I can hope he was... :D

I don't know how anyone could call Facebook, "healthy".

Take Kim Kardashian for example. If her backside gets any bigger, she'll need to reinforce her shape wear with carbon fiber. The fact notwithstanding, she has no perceptible talent other than breathing on her own. Over 48,000,000 people somehow believe that's relevant...:D
 
Last edited:
Back