Blake Marsh spent four years working for Eidos Montreal, the team behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution. He was fired this week. Not for anything he did while on the job, but for stuff he said on Facebook.
As the latest reminder that anyone with a full-time job had best watch what they say on a social network, Marsh awoke on Wednesday morning to find that he’d been terminated for comments he’d made regarding a murder that took place over Quebec’s recent election results.
On Tuesday night, only minutes after two people were shot – one fatally – at a political rally, Marsh took to Facebook and began a wall post by saying “You just can’t find good assassins these days.”
A little distasteful, perhaps, but it’s what he says next that got him into trouble.
Talking about the election’s winner, controversial left-wing politician Pauline Marois, he wrote “I give this b***h a month before someone with better aim comes forth and does what must be done.”
That got the police’s attention, and they paid a visit to Eidos Montreal’s studio on Wednesday morning. At the same time, Eidos general manager Stéphane D’Astous had arrived at the office to find numerous complaints about Marsh’s behaviour. Which he swiftly acted upon.
“Because of the nature of his posting . . . I decided to terminate his position at our company,” D’Astous told Global Edmonton. “He crossed the line very clearly.”
“We were indirectly linked to this which was totally unacceptable . . . we have an internal policy of zero tolerance of any type of intimidation or aggression in any shape or form.”
Lt. Guy Lapointe of the Sûreté du Québec (the cops) told the site that, because such threats were taken very seriously, an investigation into Marsh’s comments “is still ongoing”.
As harmless as the comments appear to be, and as “personal” as they may have been intended, like I said above, it’s something you’ve got to be very careful of in today’s world. Especially when it’s a publicly-accessible page that clearly states you work for a company with a public fanbase like Eidos.
Threats on social media get Quebec man fired [Global Edmonton, thanks Maxime!]
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