American Airlines sacks blog commenter

The whole point of social media is authenticity, and companies encouraging employees to be open and honest out on the web builds up endless goodwill with the public.

That seems to be unless you are American Airlines, who have sacked an employee for responding to a blog post (via e-mail) criticising their website's usability.

The user interface developer explained the whole process of redeveloping their site and all the stakeholders they needed to keep happy, which seems to be the bit that attracted the ire of his employers who searched through their e-mail system to find the message in question and binned the poster.

The blogger says of the case:

"When I first learned about this, I was horrified. Mr. X is actually a good UX designer, and his email had me thinking there was hope for American Airlines. The guy clearly cared about his work and about the user experience at the company as a whole. But AA fired Mr. X because he cared. They fired him because he cared enough to reach out to a dissatisfied customer and help clear the company’s name in the best way he could."

Not only has he been sacked, American Airlines have threatened to sue him if he speaks to the blogger again. Thanks to word of mouth, the airline will have lost many customers accordingly.