ESPN employees appear to have taken the lessons of recently suspended host Jemele Hill’s Twitter activism and resistance to President Trump, to heart. However, instead of toning down the resistance, they appear to be ramping it up.
On Thursday afternoon, Twitter announced that President Trump’s Twitter account had been deactivated, “inadvertently,” due to “human error,” by a Twitter employee:
Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
Later on Thursday, Twitter announced that the action may not have been so inadvertent, considering the deactivation was done by an employee on their last day of work:
Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
ESPN personality Sarah Spain, captioned the announcement from Twitter with a single word, “Hero:”
https://twitter.com/SarahSpain/status/926271194134990848
Perhaps realizing that she was in flagrant violation of ESPN’s policy not to engage in politics on social media. Spain appeared to try and back-off of her tweet when challenged by another Twitter user, to explain why she called the rogue Twitter employee a “hero:”
'cause it was a joke. many worry about his tweets creating dangerous situations w/ n. korea & others, so joke is the hero made them go away.
— Sarah Spain (@SarahSpain) November 3, 2017
Wait a minute, if Sarah Spain truly believes, as she claims “many” do, that President Trump’s Twitter account may actually precipitate war with North Korea. Then why why is the “hero” comment funny? What makes it a joke? In her mind, wouldn’t that make the Twitter employee an actual hero?
I’ll say this for Jemele Hill, at least when she was challenged on calling President Trump a ‘white supremacist,’ she never backed down. Sarah Spain couldn’t survive one mild inquiry from a random Twitter user, before she caved and started coming up with absurd excuses.
Ironically, Spain’s wading into political waters comes on the same day when ESPN unveiled new guidelines in their social media policy, pertaining to political speech.
Some highlights from that policy, which Spain probably should have familiarized herself with prior to tweeting, are listed here:
- “Our engagement on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram should be civil, responsible, and without overt political or other biases that would threaten our or your credibility with the public. “ESPN is a journalistic organization (not a political or advocacy organization). We should do nothing to undermine that position.”
- “Related to political and social issues, our audiences should be confident our original reporting of news is not influenced by political pressures or personal agendas.”
- “…we should refrain from overt partisanship or endorsement of particular candidates, politicians or political parties.”
It would seem that Spain’s “hero” characterization crossed the line, in total or in part, of all these guidelines. Now we wait to see if someone at ESPN will actually discipline Spain for her overt flaunting of their new policy, on its very first day.
That would truly be heroic.
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