Is Twitter Shifting the Balance of Power From Companies to Their Employees?

[Astrid]

Last week leaked audio surfaced of investors arguing that journalists have too much power.

But the Verge’s Silicon Valley editor asks, “What if you take the whole discussion of “tech versus journalism” and reframe it as ‘managers versus employees’? Then, I think, you get closer to the truth of what’s going on.”

After all, this conflict started with employees. They were the people who initially described their working conditions under Steph Korey at Away, leading her to step aside as CEO. (She later returned, only for the company to say she would step aside later this year after her comments about the media on Instagram.) The employees made their comments at a time of increasing activism inside workplaces. Since the Google walkout in 2018, employees of venture-backed startups and public companies have become increasingly comfortable in speaking out — often using social media platforms to call out their employers. This trend has only accelerated since the Black Lives Matters protests swept the nation last month — which, among other things, led to the first-ever virtual Facebook walkout a few weeks later.

Workers still face significant obstacles as they lobby to create more fair and equitable workplaces. But Twitter in particular has given them a place where not only can they be heard, but — crucially — employers can’t really fight back… [T]weets have given workers an asymmetric advantage in the unrest — a one-sided argument is easy to win — and we’re seeing it play out in new ways all the time. This dynamic, which is tilted heavily against bosses, goes a long way in explaining the disdain that the managerial class has for what they call “hit pieces.” A “hit piece,” in angry Twitter parlance, is typically a piece of journalism in which one or more employees are granted anonymity to talk about their working conditions. Journalists, myself included, would simply call that reporting. But it’s the kind of reporting that tilts the balance away from managers and toward their employees — and in ways that are difficult to fight back against…

And so it shouldn’t be surprising, when a prominent reporter like Taylor Lorenz calls attention to posts like Korey’s, the managerial class rises to Korey’s defense. When CEOs can be held accountable not just for their working conditions but for social media defenses of their work, that represents a threat to the entire managerial tribe. And that explains how venture capitalists, who have millions of dollars at their disposal and could comfortably retire without ever participating in a single Twitter fight, have nonetheless come to see themselves as the underdogs in this situation. They got where they are in part because they’ve been good at winning arguments, and now they find themselves living in a world where they get punished for arguing…

[T]he next time you see journalists and tech overlords going a few rounds online, ask yourself whether what you’re looking at isn’t, on some level, a labor issue…

Workers are justifiably outraged about the state of affairs in this country, and some of that outrage is being captured by journalists.
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and the founder of Basecamp, called the piece “a wonderful framing of the issue” in a series of tweets. "While I decry this website as the bane of modern living half the time, the other half it has probably done more to move my own position on many issues than anything else online.

“Which is why I’m not actually sure that VC Twitter should be so eager to cheer on ‘citizen journalism’. The number of citizens that count themselves in the worker class vs. manager class are far more plentiful. And their unfiltered stories really do add up to paint the picture.”