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Would it all have turned out differently had InterActiveCorp stared down the online mob?
In December 2013, a public relations executive with the company, Justine Sacco, posted a joke on social media, satirising American insularity and racism. Sacco was about to board a flight to South Africa, from where her anti-apartheid family had emigrated, when she tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding, I’m white.”
While Sacco was in the air and offline, her tweet went viral. A social media mob condemned her as a racist, established that she worked at InterActiveCorp, and pressured the company to sack her. “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time,” posted one of her critics. The company duly sacked her.
Sacco’s experience featured in Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015), which drew attention to the brutality of the online world. Ronson had been an enthusiastic participant in social media shaming exercises, having relished the adrenaline rush and the righteous satisfaction of shaming an adversary. But having reflected on the devastating impacts of the vigilante justice that was meted out, Ronson repudiated it and devoted a book to the subject.
As is often the case with debates about cancel culture and free speech, Ronson did not interrogate the corporation that delivered the ultimate cancellation to Sacco. InterActiveCorp had a choice: it could have rejected the online mob’s demands to punish Sacco for her tweet by sacking her. It could have criticised her joke as clumsy, insensitive and offensive. It could have explained that Sacco had intended to satirise racism and had effusively apologised once she realised how her post had been interpreted. It did none of that. Welcome to corporate cancel culture.
Since then, the spectre of an online shaming campaign followed by a corporate brand-managed sacking has become a grim ritual of the twenty-first century. After the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7 last year and Israel’s retaliatory massacre of Gazans that continues, the ritual has continued to play out, mainly cancelling the jobs and voices of pro-Palestine advocates, including my client Antoinette Lattouf, sacked by the ABC within hours of her posting a report from Human Rights Watch, which alleged that Israel was using starvation as a tool of war. Each time the ritual plays out, the corporation feeds the beast that is cancel culture.
Many distinguished, progressive commentators have argued that cancel culture is a myth, a moral panic, or an unfounded complaint about overdue accountability made by those who have enjoyed an excess of cultural capital. I beg to differ. Social media companies make a fortune from rage-inducing content, and their algorithms are geared to profiting from rage and revenge. As a result, vigilantism is rewarded with virality, and we all get to bear witness to the savage punishment of minor infractions. That brutality extends to sackings, blacklisting and shaming. The only beneficiaries of corporate cancel culture are those who treat the immense harm that follows: mental health professionals and pharmaceutical companies.
The rapid ascension of social media companies into dangerous monopolies is emblematic of the second Gilded Age. After more than 40 years of neoliberalism, corporations are now the most powerful entities in the world, none more so than Big Tech companies that enjoy wealth and power that dwarf those of many nation-states. The paradox of the social media age is that while we have never had such an abundance of speech, the harm it causes diminishes us all.
As corporations have de-unionised the labour market in recent decades, the abuses have multiplied. Think 80-hour weeks, zero-hours contracts, permanent casuals, fake internships and underpayment baked into business models. Then there is the profligate use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), non-compete clauses and intrusive workplace surveillance technologies.
In my new book, Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech, I examine the extraordinary power of the corporation through the prism of freedom of speech. Companies now routinely censor their employees far more repressively than any liberal democratic government does. The power to censor derives from the standard non-negotiable employment contract, which requires employees to comply with all relevant policies and a code of conduct. Buried in the fine print are obligations imposed on employees to honour a company’s professed values at all times — during and outside work hours. Those values routinely include respect, fairness, accountability, honesty and integrity. In addition, the social media policy is likely to require an employee not to do or say anything that might bring the company into disrepute. Employees are prohibited from saying or doing anything that is controversial, particularly when using social media.
There are many forms of harmful speech that are regulated by our laws, including those governing racial vilification, defamation, treason, and deceptive and misleading conduct. They are usually the product of careful deliberation, community consultation and review. Well-drafted laws delineate the line between acceptable and unacceptable speech so that citizens can understand the permissible boundaries and make informed choices. Not so with corporate cancel culture. Millions of employees in the labour market are forbidden from saying anything that might bring the company into disrepute. What does that mean? You won’t know until after the event.
On Anzac Day in 2015, when SBS sports journalist Scott McIntyre took to social media to condemn the manner in which war was glorified by Australians celebrating that public holiday, he could not have anticipated that his life would never be the same again. He had tweeted similar sentiments on previous Anzac Days. On this occasion, the zeitgeist was different.
News Corp journalists and Coalition politicians (including then federal minister Jamie Briggs) unleashed a vicious online campaign, evoking the spirit of Lord of the Flies. News Corp agitator Chris Kenny described McIntyre as a “scumbag [who] hates Australians but sucks a living from them” and urged then minister for communications Malcolm Turnbull to “get him off public payroll [sic]”. McIntyre was publicly vilified, abused and threatened. Then SBS sacked him. Like other victims of corporate cancel culture, including Yassmin Abdel-Magied, he left Australia to escape the vigilantes.
The net effect of the stipulations in a standard employment contract is akin to that of a morals clause. Morals clauses were first introduced into the employment contracts of Hollywood studio employees after a star actor during the silent film era, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, was charged with rape and murder in 1921. Arbuckle was ultimately acquitted, but his career never recovered. Morals clauses prohibited the employees from engaging in acts of “moral turpitude” or from doing anything that attracted public scorn or contempt. The morals clauses were used by the studios to sack and blacklist leftist political activists during the McCarthyist witchhunts of the 1950s. They were also used to police the sexuality of Hollywood actors, including Rock Hudson. Hudson was compelled to pretend that he was heterosexual; he married a woman in order to safeguard his career.
Morals clauses remain a feature of the highly lucrative contracts between prominent brands and their brand ambassadors. These include supermodels and film and sports stars like David Beckham and Beyoncé. After #MeToo, some publishers began to include them in contracts with prominent writers.
Morals clauses and the standard terms of employment contracts pose a moral quandary. Should there be a market in which workers can trade away their rights as citizens? If our rights to attend protest marches, crack bad jokes and publish our political views on social media are considered tradeable, what are they worth? For the millions of employees whose rights are being currently suppressed, there is no additional compensation beyond their remuneration. For the time being, we’re all brand ambassadors.
This piece was originally published in the November issue of the Australian Book Review.