Hard disagree- the appearance of wrongdoing can be nearly as harmful for the accused and cause as much trouble as actual wrongdoing. Both should be avoided.
Another Hard Disagree. I put everything thing in writing. If it’s not written down it didn’t happen.
Want access to prod? Sure give me a ticket. I don’t trust any place that doesn’t want things written down.
And the example of a drug trial comment being taken out of context? If it looks bad in a few years maybe it should also look bad now? And maybe steps should be taken to make it better now.
Writing things down, keeping copies of emails is the only way to hold management accountable.
In my country, there were some major anti-government protests a few years ago that pro-government media claimed were paid for by Sorosz and other such figures. My colleagues and I attended these protests and often talked about them. We also often joked about these claims by asking each other if the checks had arrived, how much they had made last night etc.
Of course, if our internal chats were subject to [the local equivalent of] FOIA requests, this would have been incredibly risky, since without the context of how much we laughed about them, the texts themselves would have looked like smoking guns. Government media would have had a field day.
This is the benign sort of thing you want to avoid putting in writing if your writing can be audited by motivated outside parties.
This is basically the “if you have nothing to hide, what’s the problem if the police can read all your correspondence?” argument applied to an organization.
Sure, if you view government agencies as equivalent to individual citizens and the public as equivalent to the police.
But some people view that the government is properly subordinate to the citizenry and not vice versa, such that inverting the government and public roles materially changes the scenario.
I think that no matter how scrupulous any government organization is, there are many motivated actors who would, given an unfiltered record of everyone single person's correspondence and conversations, be able to spin a misleading negative story out of it. This is essentially some people's full-time job and they're good at it.
