Today, one of my friends, Darius Cheung, a successful serial entrepreneur, and currently founder of 99.co, Singapore’s #1 real estate portal, found himself in the center of an Internet Social Media catastrophe that led to him firing one of his staff, an SEO consultant, who was an Australian expatriate.

Now, I have known Darius for many years. I know him to be a thoughtful, compassionate, and highly ethical leader. But today, Singapore forced him to make a good call for 99.co, but a bad call for society.

You can read more about what happened at the mothership.sg blog post, but in short, Darius’ employee, in a personal capacity, wrote some really stupid stuff about Singapore in social media. Quickly, a virtual mob cornered him online, and rather than apologize, he defensively continued to spout stupid stuff. After the usual flame war, the mob then targeted 99.co, his employer. And…well…Darius did what any sensible CEO would have been forced to do in that situation.

And this is not a unique case in Singapore. In the recent past, I can think of two more instances of this. You can read about Edz Ello and the infamous Anton Casey. But, in short, both of these cases were similar. Somebody spouted truly heinous stuff online, and ended up losing their job.

Now, I forever remain a huge fan of Darius and 99.co, but I'm uncomfortable every time we allow free, albeit stupid, speech on social media to have such dire ramifications in real life, where people have real-world families, financial obligations, and lifelong careers.

All of us should have places where we can be idiots, say stupid stuff, and sometimes even do stupid things without dire real-world consequences.

I agree that this guy made everything difficult for himself (especially with his subsequent responses to flamers), but haven't you ever been wrong (perhaps because you were grouchy or venting), been caught out, and then defended yourself for all the wrong reasons only to make everything worse? This is such a common human phenomenon that in English, we even have a formal idiom for this - digging yourself deeper into a hole. I can't count how many times in my youth I was a moron, and then pulled out my shovel to keep digging - but I know it was many!

So, although I don’t sympathize with this guy, I do empathize with him. I absolutely do not condone what this guy, or Edz Ello, or Anton Casey, said. I think their stuff was stupid. But I also don’t condone a society where an Internet mob can escalate what someone says in Social Media into the loss of a job or residency, unless what they said was illegal - even when it is hate speech, which is some of the most foul, stupid stuff around. I just don’t think we want to go there.

At the end of the day, I prefer that we confront bad ideas, expressed childishly, with good ideas, expressed maturely and positively - with education, not punishment. (Check out this think-piece if you have time - http://www.slideshare.net/selenasol/on-scolding-managing-staff-children-partners-and-yourself)

My issue is with dire real-world consequences that, to me, are disproportionate to the crime. This is a young, junior, inexperienced guy, but even if it were someone senior, I think I'd still have the same reservations.

At the end of the day, I don't want an Internet where we have to censor everything we say for fear that we're going to be fired or kicked out of a country, or where what we say when we are in our 20s affects us for the rest of our lives, even as the morality of society changes. If that happens, we end up with a watered-down Internet, and we empower politically-correct "mobs" of (sometimes) unreasonable trolls who are mean-spirited and shallow in their own hearts and minds, to run the show.

Now, could Darius have done anything different? I doubt it. As an officer of the company, his hands were pretty much tied on this one. I’d say he did everything according to the Social Media Catastrophe playbook. He apologized with a sincere heart, and acted quickly. And, in his letter on 99.co by the way, his points about hate speech and the responsibility of Singaporeans to elevate the discussion were right on.

I would have hoped that he offered a good exit package that included counseling (the dude clearly has issues he needs to address), but I am not sure what else I would have recommended if I were on his board.

However, I can’t shake the feeling that this was a bad decision/precedent for Singapore, and the world, and that it moves us one step away from freedom and one step towards mob rules.

We live in a world where you can be executed for criticizing the Syrian government on your blog. Closer to home, you can go to jail for criticizing the Thai king on Facebook. We also live in a world where social mores can change from liberal to radical in less than a generation (i.e.: Islam in Saudi Arabia). In such a world, we need to be very careful with the precedents we setup in society.

At the end of the day, I do not trust the mob, or mob morality, to delvier justice.

Cover photo by Robert Couse-Baker under Creative Commons license: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29233640@N07/3645211083/