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Homophobic Tweet Lands Vodafone Rep on 'Indefinite' Suspension

by Amar Toor on February 8, 2010 at 12:45 PM

There's biting the hand that feeds you, and then there's severing the hand that feeds you. The line separating the two, as one Vodafone employee recently proved, is pretty clearly defined.

On Friday afternoon, Vodafone's nearly 9,000 Twitter followers were left scratching their heads after reading a tweet on the company's page that read: "VodafoneUK is fed up of dirty homo's and is going after beaver." The tweet, as The Guardian reports, was apparently the work of a bored (and bigoted) customer service rep based in Stoke, where the mobile company employs people to use Twitter and other social networking media to communicate with users. After receiving complaints within minutes, Vodafone deleted the Tweet and promptly set about doing damage control. Word, however, spread pretty fast, and the company has been forced to apologize and engage in a prolonged mea culpa. In a series of direct messages to its followers, Vodafone reassured its customers that they weren't hacked, as many had suspected, and said simply, "An inappropriate message. Severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. We're extremely sorry."

Vodafone later confirmed, in a press statement, that the culprit behind the fiasco "has been suspended pending further notice." As Chris Matyszczyk of CNET News points out, though, it's a bit strange that the company chose to simply suspend the employee, instead of firing him or her outright. It takes a lot for anyone to wear the black hat and play the role of head-hunter -- especially at a time when steady employment's desperately hard to come by. At the same time, though, we've gotta say that if there was ever a truly legitimate justification for firing anyone, this might be it. Not only did the tweet pop up on Vodafone's official page, it was written by someone whose sole responsibility is maintaining a healthy corporate image for the organization that puts bread on his table. [From: The Guardian; via: CNET News]

Tags: customerservice, homophobia, social networking, SocialNetworking, top, twitter, vodafone, web

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