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'If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it,' and other Twitter and Facebook posts that have got people sacked

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By Ishbel Macleod, PR and social media consultant

November 13, 2012 | 3 min read

In the aftermath of Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, leaving his job after his tweet saying that a Tory politician would be named on Newsnight as a paedophile, The Drum takes a look at other tweets and Facebook posts that have led to negative effects.

Napalm the High Road (and I’ll take the low road)

Lambeth Council press officer Sam Masters suggested in a tweet that the only way for the local High Road to be improved would be to blow it up.Masters deleted his account, and apologised to anyone he offended, before quitting his job.

A horse is a horse, of course…unless you’re slagging off a client of your agency

Hill & Knowlton trainee Mufadal Jiwaji blamed ‘employer twitter censorship’ after he lost his job.The PR agency denied that Jiwaji losing his job had anything to do with Twitter, although the employee posted two months before ‘@gracedent reminds me of a girlfriend I once had. By girlfriend I mean that time I accidentally made love to an ugly abhorrent horse.’ Grace Dent was a client of the agency…and had not been too pleased at the description of her at the time.

Confucius says…be careful what you post on Facebook

Canadian politician Alan Saldanha resigned last year after posting on Facebook that his favourite quote was “If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it!”Saldanha's defence was that someone had told him Confucius said it.Green leader Elizabeth May said “Had he not resigned, he would have been removed immediately.”

Detroit way to tweet…and the wrong way to tweet

Agency New Media Strategies lost a client when an employee accidentally tweeted swearing about Detroit from the Chrysler account instead of a personal account.The employee who posted the tweet was later told to hit the road as well.

You don’t need ESPN to know not to tweet death wishes

Scott Torgerson, sports talk host for ESPN radio affiliate 97.1 The Fan, lost his job two weeks after he tweeted his hopes that football analyst Desmond Howard would ‘get fired or die’.He was suspended indefinitely until the radio station tweeted 11 days later that he was ‘no longer employed’ by them. Have a look at some more uses of social media that led to job losses.

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