Not only agreed, but I feel like this is what's deliberately skipped over in such hand-wringing. People are distorting things to make it look like
1. it's just some nutcase in the Twitter crowd distorting things, while nobody else gives a flip, and
2. it's somehow a new "culture" to react to that.
The actual facts are:
1. Such attitudes also affect coworkers. Someone being a racist and/or homophobic and/or transphobic twit is also affecting the happiness of not only other cast members, but also the sound guy or makeup artist or writer who may well be a middle-eastern homosexual jew. Even if they somehow manage to not be a racist/homophobic/whatever twit in person at work -- which most such twits don't; they tend to think it's just being right and telling things as they are -- the very fact that they do make such statements over a public medium is affecting everyone who gets forwarded those posts.
And as a producer or director you DO have to manage that, just like in any other business. You can't just demand that everyone be happy and get over it, just so that an overt bigotted twit can happily continue to be so.
and
2. It's nothing new. People have been fired for not playing nice with coworkers for as long as we have a recorded history.
I mean, even as public statements outside work go, we had stuff like someone being fired from Cheers in 1989, long before most people even heard of the Internet, much less Twitter, for basically insulting a co-worker on radio.
But generally, getting booted because the others can't get along with you is AT LEAST as old as Solon's reforms in 594 BCE. That's right: over 2600 years ago. That was how Greek democracy -- which we all still claim to be the successors of -- worked: if the others can't get along with you, for no matter what reason, even literally being too gay for a gay city like Athens (no, really, we have the historical records for THAT silly trial,) you get the boot.
Hell, it arguably even goes all the way back to tribal stage. The bushmen culture (which is at least hypothesized to be as closed to the original pre-warfare human culture as it gets) even has built in mechanisms for going to a different tribe, if the current one doesn't get along with you. And other tribal cultures can go as far as murder you for it.
So basically all I'm seeing isn't some dangerous new "culture", but a subset of the intersection of "old" and "idiot" on a Venn diagram, going reactionary and afraid of whatever kids these days are doing on this newfangled Twitter thing. OMG, if anyone posts any distortion of what you said on this newfangled Twitter thing, it has some kind of mind control powers, and everyone including your employer absolutely has no alternative but obey.
Which, to be fair, is also not something new. It goes back at least all the way to Hesiod, who thought there's no future for Greece if it's in the hands of the young 'uns. That's right: long before the
golden age of Pericles, before even Greek democracy, an old idiot saw no future for Greece (much less a
golden age) because the young 'uns are doing things differently than in his time.
Though arguably it goes back even before that. The first known historical novel, the Story Of Wenamun, circa 1000 BC, already goes full tilt with how morals and everything have gone to hell in his time, compared to good old times. It's actually set in 1195 BCE (year 5 of Pharaoh Ramesses XI), so he's thinking that even 200 years before his times, things had already gone wrong, compared to the good old day.
NB: the rule of Pharaoh Ramesses XI is generally considered a
renaissance by historians. But nope, according to the dude who wrote that, things were already going to hell because young 'uns were doing things differently than back in the good ol' days
)
