Someone Made an Anonymous Post Criticizing Our Workplace. We Tracked Them Down and Learned More Than We Bargained For.

Good Job is Slate’s advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? Send it to Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir here . (It’s anonymous!)

My co-workers and I recently became aware of an “anonymous” social media post against the large company we work for. This was posted by an individual who is disgruntled for being passed over for a promotion, and their rant mentioned that they were located at our worksite specifically. So naturally, our interest was piqued. We all embarked on side quests to sleuth out their identity. I really wish we hadn’t.

There are internet sites that collate all posts and comments ever made under a profile name (and it even saves the deleted stuff!), and so we were able to find everything this person did under that profile for the last five years. In various work forums, they had mentioned their other workplaces and roles, so we figured out their identity pretty fast with a high degree of certainty. There were some unkind comments about some of our current co-workers, and some misogynistic and racist comments sprinkled throughout. We could also see that they had been active in certain hobby forums and dating forums. Unfortunately, this person also posted very intimate photos of their aroused, um, parts, and described a lot of details and kinks that you’d never want to know about a co-worker. Now we all know, and we’ve all seen the pictures.

Some people began clapping back at his posts, and the he deleted the original rant about our workplace, which indicated to us that perhaps he knew he’d been discovered. To make matters worse, a few co-workers were concerned that if he figured out that we’d seen literally everything he had ever posted, this could be a trigger for workplace violence. It ended up getting reported to HR in a panic. In all honesty, we never thought it would go this route. We thought we’d find out their identity and be done with it, but we got more than an eyeful with this one. Lesson learned for next time. So far it’s too early to know what the repercussions will be, but it would be awful if he gets fired or goes haywire and harms himself or others. It will also be very awkward to continue working with him. Are we terrible people? Did we overreact? Any advice for moving forward? By the way, we are all grown adults, even though we probably didn’t act like it as this all evolved.

I completely get the impulse to want to figure out who wrote the original post about your workplace, because there are few things more satisfying than figuring out an anonymous poster’s identity. So I don’t really fault you for doing that—your co-worker put themselves in a compromising position by posting in the first place, and they should have realized that nothing on the internet is truly anonymous (or private).

But where I think you and your colleagues started going astray was when you decided to do a full FBI-level forensic investigation of everything this person had ever posted on the internet.