[Qwertious]

>It's no longer safe to have an opinion that's not mainstream.

If a company is trawling your private opinions on social media, then they're not just opinions, they're public statements. Maybe they ought not to be, but they are.

Of course, your main point stands that companies generally shouldn't hire based on an employee's political opinions (unless it's a PR/representative position or such), outspoken or not, but let's use the correct terminology here:

publicly stating political stuff under your real name is more than just "having an opinion".

[edbob]

> publicly stating political stuff under your real name is more than just "having an opinion".

You're reasoning as if only "political" speech is relevant, but everything can be made "political stuff". Saying the words "master bedroom" is considered racist now. What will be racist tomorrow? No one knows. What is racist today that I don't yet know is racist? What is considered racist by one group if I say it but racist by others if I don't say it (Silence is violence and all that)?

[httpsterio]

Nobody gets fired for saying master bedroom though. Some things might be considered tactless, other just plain insulting or harmful. It's the latter that gets you in trouble, not of you forget to rename your branch to "main".

[edbob]

You're speaking as if the words are merely considered tactless, but they are being erased from the language for being considered racist, not for being tactless. I don't know if anyone's been fired yet for saying "master bedroom" specifically, but people have been fired for even more innocuous things than that. Like that professor in the UK who was fired for expressing his admiration of the competence of the Jewish people.

Of course anyone can get fired for saying "master bedroom" or absolutely anything else if it's said to be racist. I could agree with your take if the dialogue around those terms was that they were merely harmless. But that is not the dialogue. They are being labeled racist, and being racist naturally implies that they must be stamped out along with the people that say "racist" things. The entire point of labeling things "racist" rather than "tactless" is so that the dogma of the week can be enforced with actual consequences. You can't get a Twitter mob together for someone being tactless, but you can absolutely do it to someone that's "racist".