The chief executive of a Michigan bank has lost her job after facing backlash for a social media photo of her family in sweatshirts that read “Lake America,” referencing Donald Trump’s relabeling of Lake Ontario.
Jane Smith from Family First Credit Union recently went viral after sharing the photo of her and three relatives wearing navy blue crewnecks with the words “Lake America” scrawled in white. The picture was snapped as her family left on September 11 for a 10-day trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but Smith says the sweatshirts were edited onto their bodies using AI.
“We weren’t trying to make a political statement,” Smith told Michigan outlet WJRT. “However, we were kind of poking fun at the fact that one of the Great Lakes’ names were getting changed.”
Family First Credit Union announced Wednesday that Smith was no longer with the company and that Jason Acosta, the chief operations officer, would serve as interim CEO.
It’s an interesting issue, since it isn’t really a freedom of speech issue since the government is not censoring this person.
Republicans cried foul in cases like these (which are not censorship) and then put in an administration that DOES do censorship.
Generally speaking, Republicans don’t agree with regulations that would prevent employers from hiring or firing however they want.
Then they started stripping funding from institutions that supposedly were “DEI hiring”.
So at this point they’re clear that “cancel culture is only bad when Trump supporters are fired”.
I have a more nuanced view, which is that if you accept a job where you are very publicly associated with the company, the employer should be able to have a clause where they specify you can be terminated for your public social media activity. Anything that isn’t fully public doesn’t count.
It would have to be clear that it is a condition of employment that you not get political on social media as you’re accepting a C level position, etc.
If you post anonymously somewhere and that account isn’t actually associated with you or your company, then that should be like a workaround for the above.
Otherwise, as long as you aren’t associating your public posts WITH your company, and aren’t harassing your coworkers, etc, they shouldn’t be able to fire you for them.
It very much is a freedom of speech issue, it’s just not a violation of US law.
Technically correct, I suppose.
If you mean lower case “freedom of speech”, sure the English definition of those words would agree with you. Colloquially when most folks in the USA say “Freedom of Speech” they’re not referring to the definition of English words in the phrase but rather the First Amendment to the Constitution.
So it might be a case of “freedom of speech” but its not a case of “Freedom of Speech”. In either situation, it isn’t a freedom from consequences of that speech.