Tesla Fires Employee For Posting Critical Footage To YouTube (original) (raw)

from the elon-meets-the-streisand-effect dept

It’s always difficult for me to land on an overall opinion of Elon Musk’s Tesla company. On the one hand, sure, the company has been instrumental in pushing the auto industry forward on electric vehicles. Whether Tesla will dominate that space in the future is an open question, but there can’t be too much doubt that more electric vehicles are being sold and used today simply because Tesla exists. On the other hand, both Musk and Tesla often times have taken actions that make them seem some combination of thin-skinned, willing to inflate the capabilities of their products, and even just overall being asshats.

There are the reports of Musk disregarding his own engineers’ concerns over public safety. There were attempts by the company to have Tesla owners sign NDAs so nobody finds out when shit goes sideways with a Tesla car, particularly in self-driving mode. And we must not forget Tesla petitioning the Chinese government to censor the company’s critics.

That last one is probably the most relevant, as Tesla has now reportedly fired one of its own staff members after he uploaded videos to YouTube showing incidents with Tesla’s self-driving mode from his own car.

Ex-Tesla employee John Bernal says he was fired for posting YouTube videos about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta. He had been creating the videos for about a year. Bernal says that Tesla also cut off his access to the FSD beta in the 2021 Tesla Model 3 that he owns.

The firing and beta cutoff occurred shortly after Bernal posted a video on February 4 of a minor accident in which his Tesla car hit a bollard that appears to separate a car lane from a bike lane in San Jose. In a subsequent video on February 7 providing frame-by-frame analysis of the collision, Bernal said that “no matter how minor this accident was, it’s the first FSD beta collision caught on camera that is irrefutable.”

Now, this is a terminated employee, so we should look at these claims with at least slightly narrowed eyes. That being said, Bernal is adamant that, while his YouTube videos were not cited in his termination notice, he had been told verbally by supervisors that his videos were the reason behind it. And it’s important to note that Bernal owns a Tesla as his personal vehicle and paid for the self-driving software. He claims he had no “improper use” strikes against him, leading to his conclusion that his access to the FSD software was also terminated due to those YouTube videos.

And so what is the result of Tesla showing its skin is thinner than what would be left on a pedestrian dragged across the asphalt by one of its cars in FSD Mode? Well, Bernal’s story is in the headlines, as are his videos, and his YouTube channel has several thousand new subscribers added in literally the past 24 hours as of the time of writing this post.

If Musk and Tesla imagined they were silencing a critic, they instead only invoked the Streisand Effect.

Filed Under: autonomous vehicles, criticism, elon musk, employment, fired, full self driving, john bernal, streisand effect, videos
Companies: tesla