Another day, another innocent scalped by the mob. Today’s victim is a Chipotle manager fired and falsely smeared as a racist in a video seen by over 7 million people and retweeted by 31,000 morons.
Tomorrow it could be you.
Late last week, Masud Ali, who is black, posted the video depicting the Chipotle manager refusing to serve him until he paid, a rejection he blamed on racism. (The manager, named Dominique, could pass as white or Latina.) However, Ali evidently has a documented history of dining and dashing, a charge leveled by Dominique in the video and corroborated by years of Ali’s tweets. He once specifically wrote about “chipotle catchin up to us” in a tweet tagged in St. Paul, Minn., the same location as last week’s incident. If anything, it seems that Dominique was doing her due diligence to protect the company.
Chipotle repaid her by immediately firing her without waiting for any of the facts.
Even though social media sleuths and real reporters have unearthed the true injustice of the story, fake news has spread like wildfire, baselessly smearing Dominique as a racist rather than a conscientious employee who recognized known scammers. According to a since-deleted tweet from Dominique, Chipotle has offered her old job back.
She’d be wise not to take it. Instead, she should take them to court and take them for all she can.
Chipotle’s corporate Twitter account wrote yesterday, “Our actions were based on the facts known to us immediately after the incident. We now have additional information which needs to be investigated further. We want to do the right thing, so after further investigation, we’ll re-train and re-hire if the facts warrant it.”
According to writer Matt Palumbo, this is yet another falsehood from the company. In a screenshot of an email from Laurie Schalow, Chipotle’s chief communications officer, the company “did see these previous posts from Mausud Ali” before choosing to fire Dominique.
“The correct action to take would have been to make their food and not hand it over to them until they paid for it,” wrote Schalow. “It is not general practice to ask customers to pay in advance, and she shouldn’t have asked them to do so either.”
American idiots need to wise up and start engaging in the most cursory forethought before retweeting and reposting noncredible stories and videos with the potential to unfairly destroy private citizens’ reputations. How can we blame Russia and Facebook for the proliferation of fake news, given our own failures of personal responsibility and civic duty to use our freedom of speech wisely? Outrage clicks may feel good, but they’re reducing our national intelligence. If tens of thousands of people are this quick to engage in race grifting at the expense of an innocent woman, how fast will we succumb to lies against our actual adversaries?
Chipotle could be found liable for libel for publishing a notice that they knew to be false, that they fired an innocent woman for racism. But everyone who uncritically shared that video without a second thought of whether it told the whole truth or not is guilty of an ignorance almost as sinister.
