Liberal Twitter Mobs Need to Stop Attacking People and Start Dismantling Systems
It’s always going to be easier to take down a person than a company. That doesn’t mean it’s right.
Mercedes S. Johnson is a recruiter for a company called Honeywell. Honeywell had a budget for $130,000 — but Mercedes Johnson only offered her candidate $85,000, because that candidate didn’t know better.
Mercedes Johnson should not have posted about that on her Facebook page. But she didn’t deserve the absolute storm of fury that descended on her.
Mercedes only did what has been done by corporations as long as they’ve hired people.
When she then posted about it on social media, she did just as we’ve been coached to do by social media experts.
When she framed it in terms of a “win,” a controversial “lesson” or “hard truth” some people need to hear, she played into the bad-take dynamics that Twitter and Facebook encourage. She never expected it to go beyond her circle.
Is what she did kind of scummy? Yes. Do I wish she had taken a different track, like tech recruiter Briana Johnson? Absolutely. But she’s just one individual participating in a crappy system. She is not the system itself.
Mercedes S. Johnson lost her job because of the backlash online, despite the fact that what she did was company policy.
They didn’t fire her because she did it. They didn’t fire her because she posted about it. They fired her because the reception was negative. She was their scapegoat for the very practice she got hired to do. She got punished for saying the quiet part out loud.
As long as there is a human scapegoat, abusive systems will thrive.
Here’s what I think: I don’t think Mercedes Johnson is a dick. I think she’s doing her job to the best of her ability. I think she got caught in a viral moment unexpectedly.
Especially with an easy comparison right there, it was simple for people to say: “Don’t be a Mercedes. Be a Briana.”
But let me ask you this: if you were one of the zillions of shady companies who default to the standard hiring practice of trying to get as much work out of their employees for as little money as possible, who do you hire? A Mercedes or a Briana?
We all agree candidates should be paid their worth. That is not in dispute here. But I find it incredibly telling that when Twitter mobs found out about Johnson’s post, the first move was to get her fired from that company.
Cancel culture didn’t go after the company. They went after the individual.
The company, meanwhile, will continue doing exactly that same shady business practice. Why? Because they want to make as big a profit as possible, and they will happily pay candidates as little as they think they can get away with because people can be counted on to not know their own worth.
And the world will move on. Johnson will get another job, where she’ll probably continue doing the same thing because that’s what recruiters are motivated and incentivized to do (bar a few exceptions). Nothing will have changed except that Johnson will have undergone a lot of trauma and fear.
As long as there’s a human scapegoat to punish, abusive systems will thrive.
It’s harder to police systems, but that’s not an excuse.
Mercedes Johnson has a face and a name. She has a social media presence that could be vilified. She had a job that could be taken away from her. It was all too easy to pounce on her for her post. Then, she made the number one mistake of going bad viral and tried to clarify her intentions, giving angry users further ammo against her.
I get it. It feels good to take direct action against people we disagree with. I am sure many people felt powerful when they were able to punish Johnson by pressuring Honeywell into firing her.
Meanwhile, her employer Honeywell has been able to escape attention other than being tagged in multiple snitch posts demanding Johnson be fired. When I checked the news to see if Honeywell was being called to task for this practice, I couldn’t find any. The only mention of them is in the context of angry tweets about Johnson.
It has always been more appealing to attack individuals instead of the systems they represent. They present an easier target, with jobs that can be taken, morals that can be questioned, even family members that can be threatened in the cases of certain angry online mobs.
The systems in place will always value corporate profits over individuals. And until we start targeting them instead, we’ll go through the same rigamarole of yelling at people online, feeling good about our “activism,” and changing absolutely nothing.
