I thought this was interesting:
OMG! @FCC Commissioner Baker voted 2 approve Comcast/NBC merger & now is lving FCC for A JOB AT COMCAST?!?
With this May 12 tweet on Comcast Corp.’s hiring of the Federal Communications Commission’s Meredith Attwell Baker, the Seattle nonprofit Reel Grrls lobbed a social-media grenade that has raised questions about how closely Comcast monitors the nonprofits it financially supports.
A peeved Comcast vice president in the Seattle area, after reading the tweet, dashed off an e-mail saying the Philadelphia company was eliminating Reel Grrls’ funding for a summer workshop for teenage girls – a none-too-subtle message that the nonprofit was paying the price for publicly criticizing the company.
After learning of the Seattle V.P.’s decision in news reports, Comcast executives apologized and offered to restore its $18,000. But the damage had been done.
The story was out of the bag, and Reel Grrls said it no longer wanted Comcast’s financial help because it apparently came with strings.
Then there was this issue for those at Reel Grrls: What was Comcast, a company with more than 100,000 employees and $50 billion in annual revenue, doing monitoring and then aggressively responding to a tweet by their six-employee nonprofit?
I folowed this story at another blog. What the Comcast VP did was stupid. Reel Grrls was also stupid by allowing that tweet to go out under their name. (It made me wonder who has the authority to use the organizational account and if there is any oversight.) Companies do watch what their grantees do. The use of grant funds have to be reported on, the donors like to know what a grant is used for. Grants are voluntary. If Reel Grrls didn’t know who was getting their tweets and following them, Reel Grrls was stupid. I’m not defending Comcast, mind, but these new communications media need to be watched at the organizational level as carefully as mailed notes were.
We are being ruled by gangsters. This is the way corporations have domesticated liberal organizations all the way up to the top of the Democrat Party: “Here’s some money for your work, but be careful or we will take it away if you do something we don’t like.”
Yeah, sure, Reel Girls, you better be more careful in the future.