When free speech carries financial price

If a widely circulated screen shot is to be believed, a career can pretty much evaporate in three minutes.

That’s how much time apparently elapsed between when Christine McMullen Lindgren posted an ugly, racially driven tirade and when someone on Facebook posed this question: “You work at Bank of America huh?”

Lindgren hadn’t mentioned her employer in her post, but apparently she listed it elsewhere on her personal Facebook page. Within 24 hours she was dumped from her banking job in metro Atlanta.

Free speech is a nice idea. But, as we keep seeing, if you use it to show ugliness or share unpopular views, expect to pay a financial price.

Gerod Roth is happy he was able to find work again.

Last year he had posted a Facebook photo of himself along with the 3-year-old son of a co-worker. Friends posted dumb racist comments about the child. Roth, apparently in response to someone asking about why kids were running wild in his office wrote, “He was feral.”

Ten months later, he’s still getting ripped online, where he’s been labeled a racist. His employer wasn’t listed on his Facebook page, which also wasn’t under his real name. But it didn’t take long for people to figure out his real identity and where he had worked as an office manager.

They asked that he be fired. As it turns out, he already had been laid off for unrelated reasons before the firestorm even began.

But the blood-letting may not be over.

“What do you think internet sleuths?” someone re-posted recently about Roth and his Find Matt on Facebook (facebook.com/mattkempnercolumnist) and Twitter (@MattKempner) or email him at mkempner@ajc.com. Other Kempner’s Unofficial Business columns: http://www.myajc. com/flist/business/unofficial-business-column-matt-kempner/ f9y/