Twitter once again flexes its awesome career-destroying muscles, as reported by MSN:
During the Super Bowl, CBS aired a promo for its sitcom "2 Broke Girls" depicting stars Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs pole-dancing in skimpy outfits. Phil Hardy liked the raunchy ad so much he tweeted "Me likey Broke Girls." Except he accidentally tweeted it to his boss's account instead of his personal one. And his boss was Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador. Oops. Even though Hardy deleted the tweet in a mere 14 seconds, he was still fired from his job as Labrador's spokesman, which he's held since 2010. Labrador's office apologized for the really-not-that-bad-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things tweet, but declined to specify exactly why it cost Hardy his job.
Look what damage your weapons of mass distraction hath wrought, Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs!
This is what got Phil Hardy sacked. Be absolutely 100 percent certain you are logged into Twitter using your own account before venturing any opinion about it in public.
The Idaho Statesman notes that Hardy "worked in the music industry, including a stint in London, specializing in heavy metal bands, before coming to Idaho," a background that makes it unsurprising he would likey the "2 Broke Girls" promo. No one at Rep. Labrador's office could explain exactly why the boss thought this was a firing offense.
Maybe it wouldn't have been, if Hardy had not used Labrador's official account to express the sentiment. Besides the raunch factor expressed and parodied in the commercial, it's really not some staffer's business to use the boss' Twitter handle to venture opinions about pop-culture ephemera. This sort of thing has been happening with some frequency concerning the staff-curated accounts of political figures. Such officials are at pains to maintain the impression that they are personally engaging the social media universe, or at least that their accounts are putting forth the authentic, approved thoughts and positions of the boss.
A look at Rep. Labrador's Twitter feed shows him using it for serious statements, not goofing around; "Me likey Broke Girls" is very out-of-place with the rest of his messages. Perhaps he wanted to send a signal to staffers that they needed to take his social media presence seriously. I wonder if the Congressmen and his peers might begin having second thoughts about allowing anyone else to manage their online accounts.
