Sorry You Were Fired But Putting It on TikTok Won’t Change Anything
A Cloudflare salesperson’s viral social media post might feel satisfying, but it won’t level the playing field for workers.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince called a video of an employee’s firing “painful to watch.”
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Viral videos don’t usually last nearly 10 minutes. They don’t usually spawn a weeklong conversation. But a video an employee at Cloudflare recorded of being fired from her sales job clocks in at 9 minutes, 15 seconds. It has been viewed more than a million times on her TikTok account — and has been shared, remixed and endlessly analyzed since it was posted several days ago.
Its popularity is due not only to a prurient interest in watching someone suffer — there are countless videos of human suffering online. And it’s not just because of morbid curiosity about what it’s like to get fired. There are other videos of that, too.