Why Is NBCUniversal Threatening To Report Commenters They Disagree With To Their Employers?

from the that's-bizarre dept

This one is a little bizarre. David Seaman, a contributor to Business Insider, claims that he lost his contributor status at the site following a dispute he had with an NBCUniversal employee, Anthony Quintano, concerning NBC's coverage of both SOPA/PIPA and NDAA. The details are a bit complex, but I've emailed with David a few times. It appears he posted some comments on NBC Universal's Google+ page, complaining about their lack of coverage on both issues: The comment seems perfectly reasonable, but NBCUniversal deleted it, and later claimed that it was spam: It's pretty difficult to see how that's spam, and David said so: Following this, Quintano told David that he had contacted Business Insider to complain about David's statements. This is the part that seems the most troubling. Why would NBCUniversal employees decide that contacting someone else's employer, because they don't like his comments, makes any sense at all. That's just outright bullying.

Either way, David then alerted his editor at Business Insider, who said:

I think it might be best if we revoked your account for now. We've drastically cut back on our contributors recently and while we really appreciate your posts there have been far too many of these types of contentious issues lately.

Now, there are all sorts of ways to look at this, and I'd almost be more inclined to question how Business Insider handled this, rather than NBCUniversal. The second one of your writers gets into a little bit of controversy, you cut them loose? Way to look out for your writers, BI.

So I'm not sure I buy the story that NBCUniversal is the reason Seaman is no longer a contributor to BI, but it is a fact that Quintano directly threatened to contact Business Insider to complain about David's statements. It's downright slimy for NBCUniversal employees to threaten people to contact their employers because NBCUniversal doesn't agree with their statements online. Disagree, fine. Hell, I don't even have a huge problem if NBCUniversal wants to be anti-internet and block comments it doesn't like (as it was doing here). But to then threaten to impact someone's livelihood because you don't like their comments? That's just bullying.

Filed Under: anthony quintano, bullying, david seaman, overreaction
Companies: business insider, nbc universal