How a Dollar General Employee Went Viral on TikTok
When your employees are talking about you on TikTok, you can’t avoid them.
This week, the New York Times covered a story about how a Dollar General employee in Kentucky went viral when she shared some of her boss’s favorite TikTok clips.
The company said it did not allow conversations about its customers on the app. But one TikTok user responded to the boss in a way that she had never seen before, and it went viral.
“My boss is a total dork,” she wrote on Twitter. “I got into a fight with him and he said he would kick me out just to get a look at me. Then he got a look at me and called me an idiot.”
The boss, who had not seen the employee before, responded with a message he’d never seen in his TikTok history: “She’s a real person.”
While it’s the first time that a boss has openly responded to a TikTok user who is speaking about them, there has been a lot of backlash against the online harassment of people who have been fired or their personal information has been leaked.
A manager who was fired after she told her former co-workers at a Starbucks in Oregon that she was struggling as a woman, and was going to take a job as a server, was also a part of the criticism.
In December, a manager fired after a video he posted on his TikTok account showed him mocking a customer in West Virginia went viral when his video went viral.
The backlash of employee harassment and abuse on social media is not new, and TikTok seems to have responded by blocking some accounts and deleting others.
Many of you have asked how to protect yourself from harassment on TikTok, but it’s not easy. You can’t block your entire account because you have an account where people post inappropriate or offensive content, but you can mute your account.
TikTok is constantly updating its account policies to protect users from the type of abuse that they have come to expect with more than 80 million active users and more than 100 million active monthly users. But,