Reference no: EM133033464

The SEC mentioned that not a single KPMG employee reported the occurrence of cheating to the company's ethics hotline. Based on your knowledge of moral disengagement, identify, and explain four ways in which an employee could justify this practice. How might moral intensity have affected their decision to not report the cheating?

Twitter lets users air their views with the world in 280 characters or less. Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, wrote:

"Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential . . . Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don't always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content."

However, the company has come under increasing pressure regarding hate speech. Twitter, which views hate speech as violation of its terms of service, notes that is prohibits "the promotion of hate speech globally." But some argue that Twitter should do more.

Shahak Shapira, for example, a Twitter user based in Germany reported over 300 tweets to the company that he regarded as "absolutely serious threats of violence, homophobia, xenophobia, or Holocaust denial." Twitter responded to nine of the 300 complaints stating that the tweets would not be removed because they did not constitute a violation of the company's terms of service.

Amnesty International reported that 7.1% of 228,000 tweets sent to a total of 778 female politicians and journalists in the UK and the US in 2017 were either "abusive" or "problematic." Amnesty estimated that 1.1 million such tweets were sent to women in 2017, which equates to one every 30 seconds. Moreover, "black women were disproportionately targeted, being 84% more likely than white women to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets." The report concluded, "Online abuse targets women from across the political spectrum - politicians and journalists faced similar levels of online abuse and we observed both liberals and conservatives alike, as well as left and right leaning media organizations, were targeted."

For its part, Twitter says that, while it does not comment on individual accounts, it strictly enforces the rules where appropriate. To this end, the European Commission found that the company "sped up dealing with notifications, reviewing 39 percent of them in less than 24 hours."

Twitter's shares fell 12% after the influential Citron Research warned advertisers and investors the firm was now "toxic" and "un-investible." Citron further said, "The hate on Twitter is real and the company is not taking proper steps to curb the problem" and advertisers will soon be "forced to make more morality-based brand building decisions."