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It’s a weekend night and you’re out with your friends. A YouTuber stops you on the way to your destination. He wants to ask you a question. “No big deal,” you think. The interviewer asks his question and you give an amusing answer. So amusing, in fact, the next day you’re the internet’s main character.

That’s what happened to Hailey Welch last week when a , “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?”

She replied without hesitation, “You gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang, you get me?” mimicking hocking a loogie and making her friend laugh out loud. It didn’t take long before the video clip went viral. In a mere few days, it’s been memed into . 

 Joking around with strangers outside of work has no bearing on a person’s ability to do their job on another day, in another location, under different circumstances. 

Because overnight fame rarely comes without a side of manufactured drama, there was an uproar on Monday when  that “Hawk Tuah girl” had been fired from her job for her remarks in the video. The firing story was quickly debunked, but it’s not surprising that people believed it. Reportedly, a NASCAR employee  for tweeting a Hawk Tuah  from the JD Motorsports NASCAR team’s X account that he managed.

Of course, that firing occurred due to actions the man took on behalf of his employer, in his capacity as an employee. Absurd as it may be to those who understood the joke in context, that’s admittedly murky territory. 

Were Welch to be fired for comical statements made in her free time and unrelated to her job, it would be all the more ridiculous — and disturbing. Even if you don’t find her comment funny, we should be able to agree: Joking around with strangers outside of work has no bearing on a person’s ability to do their job on another day, in another location, under different circumstances. 

Thankfully, Welch wasn’t subject to professional consequences for her speech — but others in similar situations haven’t been so lucky.

Take reporter Jad Sleiman, for example, who was fired from his public radio job in 2023 based on the content of his stand-up comedy, an activity he participated in during his spare time. Management called his material “egregious” and objected to its “sexual connotations,” but Sleiman wasn’t deterred. He fought back in court and . 

Even celebrities aren’t spared, as we saw in 2022 when a Minneapolis comedy club famously  after backlash erupted over the comedian’s past jokes. More recently, the Dallas Comedy Club  Pro-Palestinian comedian Dauood Naimyar his show would not go on after he posted jokes critical of Israel on social media.

It’s easy to believe cancel culture is a nonissue when it’s a private entity doing the canceling, because those cases don’t represent an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. While it’s true that such decisions rarely violate the law, free speech principles dictate we should generally want organizations — public or private — to avoid punishing people professionally for their personal expression, especially when it occurs outside of work and is unrelated to an employee’s job duties. 

The alternative creates a chilling effect, making people wonder if there’s anywhere they can fully express themselves, tempting them to self-censor just to play it safe. And when self-censorship becomes pervasive, it can deprive us of honest opinions, outside-the-box ideas, and uncomfortable-but-important information.

What’s more, it can deprive us of a good laugh.

In this case, we were happy to learn the fabricated firing was simply a product of people . But we’ll be keeping an eye out for similar cases that implicate free expression — because cancel culture is no laughing matter.