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" You are making some woman uncomfortable."

So what? nobody makes you feel uncomfortable at your job?

If nobody is accusing him of sexual harassment, what is he being accused exactly?

It seems like an important point that they forgot to tell him. The guy don't even know about what he is being accused.

When that started to be OK?

My perception is that the woman complained about him, he is not important in the company and HR don't want to deal with the mess, specially in the current climate of political correctness. So they inflicted an injustice on him.

How I know it was an injustice? because they punished him but they didn't tell him what he did wrong.

I'm not sure I would consider your advice on never initiating non-business related small talk to be so bullet proof, particularly when we get into issues of "creepiness", which is a term that isn't often well defined or viewed in the same light by differing people.

Now there are definitely behaviors that I think can easily be labeled as creepy(leering at people, making inappropriate physical contact, asking too many unwanted personal questions, etc) but there are other behaviors that are harder to automatically equate as such. As an example, I tend to be relatively introverted, and extremely private when it comes to discussing my personal life, this is especially true at work or with people I don't know well. As a result, I typically don't engage in small talk at work, and seeing as I rarely ever bring up my personal life, I very rarely ask about others. This isn't to say I'm not cordial, but when at work I prefer to simply focus on getting stuff done.

At one prior job, I worked with an extremely extroverted and talkative group, not gossipy or inappropriate, but simply gregarious. I would obviously join in when directly asked but I was always hesitant to initiate this kind of discussion. I did over a long period of time end up becoming close friends with one of my coworkers, at which point he let me know that when I first started some of my coworkers thought it was somewhat creepy that I never talked much about my private life.

I only relay this situation to point out how difficult it can be to navigate these kinds of interpersonal relationships, particularly in larger groups. One person's reluctance to discuss their weekend plans, which to me was completely benign, can be another person's creepiness. Just to be clear though, I absolutely think there are behaviors that are very unequivocally creepy or unwarranted, I'm not trying to argue that this is always, or even mostly, a matter of personal interpretation.

> Try to first believe what they said instead of getting paranoid.

If he wouldn't believe it then he wouldn't be paranoid, the whole paranoia angle only exists because of the complete vagueness of the accusation.

It's literally telling somebody "You did somebody wrong, we won't tell you what you did or to whom, but consider yourself on notice", how is anybody supposed to react to that except with complete paranoia?

> If the other people in the office start doing small talk to you, then you answer, don't engage the other way around.

Sorry for putting this frankly, but why? It's either the same rules for everybody or no rules at all. Why are other coworkers allowed to initiate private small talk while he is not?

What are you basing this difference of rulesets for different people on? On the mere existence of an anonymous accusation that doesn't even detail what exactly he did wrong? Or maybe even superficialities?

Don't you think that whole setup is quite one-sided and could just as well be considered as bullying?

> Just accept what they said and try to take this a learning a experience that your behavior does not come out as professional where you are working at the moment.

Again: How is he supposed to learn anything from this when he isn't even told what he did wrong or to whom? What part of his behavior? In what exact situations? As is, it's such a generalizing statement that it might as well just be a personal insult.

> Try to pay attention to that on your next job.

Remember that thing you did wrong and nobody ever told you about? Don't do that wrong the next time! Much has been learned, very educational.

> That sometimes you might think you are being friendly and people see you as creepy.

And what you might think is creepy I might consider funny in a friendly odd way. There are always two parts to communication of any kind: A sender and a receiver. Getting the right context across, and preventing misunderstandings, involves effort on both ends, not just the sender.

The only thing anybody learned here is that he's considered a horrible creepy person, with exactly zero context or reasons given as to why he's supposedly such a bad person.

Thanks for your comment: This is my outlook: I try to be the best person I can be and when I make mistakes, I try to know what I did so I can learn from them. I agree with you that in this case, I do not feel I have even a chance to really learn from it, other than to be very cautious. While I am trying to move forward, I don't want this to haunt me. I do not want to "creep out" people, or repulse them since people are how I will make my living, hopefully one day get married, etc. I guess its a fine line one must walk to be friendly to others while not offending/creeping out people and not talking to people.

Your very much welcome, as somebody on the spectrum I can relate quite a bit to your situation but can only imagine how frustrating this must be right now.

Don't let your head down too much and just keep in mind that we can't get along with everybody, it's not always all your own fault. Sometimes personalities just clash and it's best for everybody to just stay out of each other's way and do their own thing.

This does not mean that somebody is a "bad person" and the other a "good person", it simply means they just don't vibe with each other with no particular fault of anybody involved. So don't feel too guilty about this whole mess, at least as long they can't even be bothered to offer you any specifics about your supposed misbehavior.

What about the professional social skills of the person that made the complaint? Couldn't she have raised the matter personally instead of going straight to a manager? And how toxic is a workplace where you can be accused of unspecified behaviours by some unknown co-worker and be automatically on the wrong side, without any clue as to know who accused you and why?

I understand that somebody may not want to raise such a matter personally.

The real problem is that OP wasn't even given the details of the accusation. Because even assuming that the accusations are correct, there is likely no malice involved here (not by OP, taking his word on this, and probably also not by the other person, given that he's in an internship). Without the details, OP has no opportunity to correct his behavior and might make the same mistake in the future, whatever it was. That way, everybody loses.

After sleeping on it, this is sort of how I feel. I would have personally gone to see someone who is bothering me to let them know before going straight to management. And if I felt extremely uncomfortable, then perhaps I would ask if management could be present in a meeting between me and the person who I feel bothered by.

This is rich: "Believe that you're an awful person although we all know you aren't. Some delusional moron has decided they don't like you and wants to ruin your reputation. Just accept it, they are more important than you. And don't you even dare to get actual justice for you, we have this power over you now and resistance won't be tolerated."

I honestly didn't expect to see something like this in this thread. But, in hindsight, I'm not surprised, the narrative requires everything to be made about you (and with you I mean SJWs in general, not you in particular).