On Thursday morning, President Trump tweeted out some gross comments about MSNBC's Morning Joe cohost Mika Brzezinski, apparently because she made fun of his framed fake Time magazine covers (not that he watches Morning Joe anymore!), and the tweets were not well-received, generally. In case you were offline all Thursday, or it was "beneath your dignity" to engage with the president's mean tweets, CNN has a quick summary.
Trump faced sometimes scathing reprimands from Republican lawmakers, TV commentators, and blue-checkmark Twitter for his tweets, but if he were in any other job, he would likely be sacked, workforce and social media experts tell The Associated Press. "Mr. Trump would be fired for his tweets of today, and nearly every day," Mike Driehorst, a social media expert at the marketing firm Weaving Influence, tells AP. "Most companies have a thin skin when it comes to public criticism and media reports." You can complain about work on Twitter, legally speaking, adds employment lawyer Nannina Angioni, but if "you take to Twitter to call your boss a 'psycho' or say that your CEO has a 'low I.Q.' that could absolutely get you fired."
The fact that Trump is the boss wouldn't necessarily protect him, either. "Any good outside crisis adviser would tell the company's board that they have no choice but to terminate the CEO," said Hofstra University public relations expert Kara Alaimo. "Today, more than ever before, citizens expect companies to espouse and uphold values." Every company has different policies about social media, AP notes, some more lenient than others, but federal agencies like the General Services Administration prohibit "engaging in vulgar or abusive language, personal attacks of any kind, or offensive terms targeting individuals or groups." You can read some examples of people fired over their social media posts at AP.
People have also been kicked off Twitter for abusive tweets, but Twitter's harassment rules "leave plenty of grey area," CNN reports. "We don't comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons," a Twitter spokesperson told CNN when it asked how close Trump's tweets get him to violating the company's rules. "I'm sure the Twitter team loathes how the product is being used by Trump," a former Twitter executive tells CNN, adding, "If they suspend his account, they'll have to do this consistently with other harassment accounts, which is impossible."