The answer, unfortunately, is yes.
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.
Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.
The woman and two others interviewed by The Washington Post learned from friends that they were the subject of derogatory chats on a widely read message board on AutoAdmit, run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent. The women spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution online.
People have known for a while that companies use credit checks when they are considering employment, regardless of whether one's credit has any relevance to the job. Such checks, in my opinion, cross the line from honest and important information into an invasion of one's privacy (I hold the same opinion about job drug tests, btw. If the testing has no relevance to the job, don't do it).
Now, apparently, that overheated argument you had with that stranger in Saskatoon can disqualify you from a job. Worse, site administrators are loathe to delete offensive posts or threads, wrapping themselves in the freedom of speech argument.
This seems to me to be a bogus claim. Even the courts recognize limitations of free speech, primarily those forms that harm people. The people in the article weren't even participants in debate; they were simply the subjects of others' discussions. To have those actions held against a person seems to me to be the definition of unfair. It makes me wonder if we do need to put some pressure on web administrators to do some better policing of their sites.
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