The news agency Reuters on Monday reportedly fired its deputy social media editor after he was accused of conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to deface a website owned by his former employer, the Tribune Company.

“Just got off the phone. Reuters has fired me, effective today. Our union will be filing a grievance. More soon,” Matthew Keys tweeted on Monday.

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Keys also retweeted a message from Anthony Pompliano stating that the firing had not been related to the Anonymous case.

During the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects last week, Keys had been criticized for publishing unverified information from police scanners.

In a post to Facebook on Sunday night, he defended himself by saying that he had not seen calls by the Boston Police Department asking people to not to post details from police scanners.

“With a focus on four different video streams, several Twitter lists and, yes, dispatch audio, it slipped by me,” Keys wrote. “But once I became aware of it, I stopped. In fact — having been awake well over 24 hours, with 10 of them covering the overnight event — I closed the computer and went to bed.”

“We have a responsibility to tell a story from all sides. At the same time, we should be mindful of the health and safety of the subjects we cover. When someone makes a reasonable request for us to not do something, we should. Even if it was four hours later, when I learned of the request (by way of CBS), I did.”

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[Photo credit: Facebook/Matthew Keys]

(h/t: Shortformblog)