Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic

> In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

> “We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”

> never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails

I get that it’s creepy that this is being done, but I highly doubt that nobody at Blind has “never seen” this. Blind sends spam using multiple different domain names trying to get people to sign up. The domains are rotated so they can get around blocking on the email server, and the fact they do it means they already know that companies try to block them.

Blocking, sure. But literally sending the emails to the CEO might very well be a new one.

There are loads of terrible companies around, so I'd be surprised if none of them had ever tried to intercept Blind sign-up messages before now, and if you're a tyrant CEO at one of said terrible companies, getting the emails forwarded to you is merely the next logical step.

The next paragraph in the text is a lot more interesting:

Some of the most commonly discussed topics on Blind are protected speech in the U.S.—pay, job terminations, critiques of workplace conditions—which we believe workers should be free to access and discuss.

What are the consequences (in the US) of a company blocking that?

Zero. Protected speech is protected from government intervention. You can run your own forum that bans people from discussing <thing you hate> without repercussions.

Eh, discussing salary is a right, guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act.

Discussing salary using company property (your provided email address and provided computer) on company time is not guaranteed nor protected.

You can discuss anything you want on your time using your own property.