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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

Imagine you start a company and one of your employees says or does something reprehensible. Investors fear a boycott and threaten to pull out of a fundraising round. You either fire that one person, or the whole company goes under and everyone that works for you could lose their job (including you).

If you make it illegal to fire that person, then any one employee could do considerable damage to dozens of other people and you'll have no recourse.

It seems like a better system would be one where everyone is responsible for their own behavior.

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But if it is illegal, then all the people working for cancelling the employee will know it is hopeless.

They won’t be able to get the person canceled, but they can still boycott the person’s employer. Said employer will be economically harmed, with no way to end the pain.

Companies don’t like being harmed in this way, so they will most likely respond by digging very deeply into every job candidate’s past to avoid hiring someone who may be “canceled” at a future date.

Here’s the thing: most people have done pretty shitty things in their past. However, most people don’t rise to a level of prominence that it ever matters. They are able to live normal, productive, happy lives.

Making “cancel mob” terminations illegal ends all that. Is this really the path we want to go down?

> Making “cancel mob” terminations illegal ends all that. Is this really the path we want to go down?

Yes? The problem with cancellation is that individuals are targeted which means that for most people it is not a problem and they have no incentive to stop it. The mob cannot go after everyone. Employers cannot filter out everyone - then they have no employees.

> If you make it illegal to fire that person, then any one employee could do considerable damage to dozens of other people and you'll have no recourse.

well then the investors can't ask for the firing, they have to demand something else.

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