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There were a series of accusations about our company last August from a former employee. Immediately following these accusations, LMG hired Roper Greyell - a large Vancouver-based law firm specializing in labor and employment law, to conduct a third-party investigation. Their website describes them as “one of the largest employment and labour law firms in Western Canada.” They work with both private and public sector employers.

To ensure a fair investigation, LMG did not comment or publicly release any data and asked our team members to do the same. Now that the investigation is complete, we’re able to provide a summary of the findings.

The investigation found that:

  • Claims of bullying and harassment were not substantiated.

  • Allegations that sexual harassment were ignored or not addressed were false.

  • Any concerns that were raised were investigated. Furthermore, from reviewing our history, the investigator is confident that if any other concerns had been raised, we would have investigated them.

  • There was no evidence of “abuse of power” or retaliation. The individual involved may not have agreed with our decisions or performance feedback, but our actions were for legitimate work-related purposes, and our business reasons were valid.

  • Allegations of process errors and miscommunication while onboarding this individual were partially substantiated, but the investigator found ample documentary evidence of LMG working to rectify the errors and the individual being treated generously and respectfully. When they had questions, they were responded to and addressed.

In summary, as confirmed by the investigation, the allegations made against the team were largely unfounded, misleading, and unfair.

With all of that said, in the spirit of ongoing improvement, the investigator shared their general recommendation that fast-growing workplaces should invest in continuing professional development. The investigator encouraged us to provide further training to our team about how to raise concerns to reinforce our existing workplace policies.

Prior to receiving this report, LMG solicited anonymous feedback from the team in an effort to ensure there was no unreported bullying and harassment and hosted a training session which reiterated our workplace policies and reinforced our reporting structure. LMG will continue to assess ongoing continuing education for our team.

At this time, we feel our case for a defamation suit would be very strong; however, our deepest wish is to simply put all of this behind us. We hope that will be the case, given the investigator’s clear findings that the allegations made online were misrepresentations of what actually occurred. We will continue to assess if there is persistent reputational damage or further defamation.

This doesn’t mean our company is perfect and our journey is over. We are continuously learning and trying to do better. Thank you all for being part of our community.

  • Rognaut@lemmy.worldEnglish
    241·
    6 months ago

    It’s unbelievable how much hate for LTT there is on this platform. I like them. No one is perfect. This investigation from a third party is a good thing and the findings are good as well. The statement about defamation, I feel, is warranted because the ex-employee made a ton of very damning claims and really hurt their image. The Fediverse is a great example of this damage.

    The hate from this community towards LTT is extreme and unfounded.

    • ShaunaTheDead@kbin.social
      60·
      6 months ago

      An investigation from a neutral third party is a good thing, but in this case LTT hired the third party investigator so the investigators obviously have an incentive to find LTT innocent of all charges since LTT is paying them through Linus Media Group (LMG). It’s better than nothing, but it’s like when there’s an internal affairs investigation into police misconduct… by the police… Nobody believes it and for good reason.

      • JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.caEnglish
        55·
        6 months ago

        The law firm would be putting themselves on the line for LTT if there was any further legal action, or if the subject of the investigation brought forth more evidence.

        I doubt LTT is big enough to give them the incentive to do that.

        Hiring a third party investigator is not the same as internal affairs. Internal affairs have only one client and little incentive to bite the hand that feeds them.

        If LTT goes down after this and it comes out that the law firm missed something major or outright lied, it would call into question every investigation they’ve done (at least recently) and destroy their reputation.

      • JRush@lemmy.caEnglish
        46·
        6 months ago

        If the law firm bungled the investigation, it would affect their reputation and future business. Wouldn’t that mean they have a monetary incentive not to favor LMG in their investigation?

        • Thann@lemmy.mlEnglish
          18·
          6 months ago

          Bro, CEOs pay them to not find things. Finding things would make CEOs not want to pay them

          • JRush@lemmy.caEnglish
            21·
            6 months ago

            Do you think a CEO would want to hire a firm that MISSES facts? Facts that would make said CEO vulnerable to a costly lawsuit?

          • Aphelion@lemm.eeEnglish
            13·
            6 months ago

            These firms build their business on a reputation for thorough, truthful investigation, and they put a contract in place that says that when they’re engaged by a company. It would destroy their own business if they took money to tilt their findings.

            • YeetPics@mander.xyzEnglish
              8·
              6 months ago

              Yea, and Monsanto needs to produce suicide seeds that can’t generate crops. It’s not that they’re greedy or brutalist in their control of the market at all.

      • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20·
        6 months ago

        Who would be paying for an investigation if not LMG? Firms don’t hire auditors/investigators to give them a rosy report. They want the truth so they can adjust their processes so they don’t spend more money on regulatory actions/fines.

        If the report is bad they just don’t release it to the public. But a third party audit lying to a firm to make them look good does not provide value. The company isn’t biased just because they are being paid by LMG, that’s just not how it works. LMG could just say they investigated themselves and found no wrong doing if that was their objective.

        Saying that you don’t believe the report because the company investigating it was paid for by PMG shows that you are biased more than they are.

          • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
            2·
            6 months ago

            Yeah, but there’s still the possibility of them releasing it. Anyway, my point is that there’s no monetary incentive for them to skew the results.

            • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              6 months ago

              Not within the span of one client, no, but businesses would have an incentive to hire firms that are more likely to find them innocent.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlEnglish
        14·
        6 months ago

        The law firm will gloss over as much as it can do safely, but if there was clear evidence of wrongdoing, they would have to report it or risk severe consequences. I am not familiar with Canadian regulations so I cannot comment on what those consequences would exactly be, but there would definitely be some.

      • 0xD@infosec.pubEnglish
        7·
        6 months ago

        That’s not how this works. Maybe if you get some business consultants, but this ain’t it. Just because you hire them yourself, doesn’t mean that they’ll fall in line with your wishes.

    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      58·
      6 months ago

      The defamation statement was maybe a bit much, but also warranted. People need to know that just throwing accusations out there that are just plainly not true is actually legally problematic.

      I also don’t get why people feel this is “threatening people who want to speak up in the future”.

      If your “speaking up” has merit, it’s not defarmation. Plain and simple.

      Companies make mistakes (and aparently some were made in this case, and dealt with).

      But I find it concerning that people also just blindly trust any and all claims that individuals make about these kind of situations. Believe that they are telling the truth, but also verify that this is actually true. The latter part is important. Blind trust is as damaging as not doing anything at all about a proble, There are people out there who get laid off for legitimate reasons, and try to retaliate for that. Even by claiming BS reasons.

      • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        I wish you never have to find yourself facing a corporation. The power imbalance is so massive that you feel like an ant, it’s the most disempowering experience anyone could face in legal terms. LTT could destroy people’s lives and it would be decades if ever, for them to ever have to face consequences.

        This is why I always default to believing the individual over the corporation. The corporation has no soul, no heart, no conscience and no remorse. Imagine being a person who wants to speak up about something else you know for certain happened, but a million dollar law firm just put in writing that such kind of thing didn’t happen. You have no recourse or power, it’s your word against a literal army of lawyers. Regardless of whether the investigation was good or not. The result still has a silencing effect.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      41·
      6 months ago

      I don’t have LTT, I just find it worthless. Their content is frequently shallow, I dislike the presentation (clickbait-y titles and thumbnails, annoying segways, etc), and I find Linus himself annoying. Then again, I do watch their content from time to time, if they have something worth watching. That’s not very often, but they do make some decent content occasionally. I rarely care about PC shenanigans, but sometimes I’ll watch Jays2Cents if I want some of that (he’s perhaps more annoying than Linus, but it is what it is, I guess).

      I mostly watch Gamers Nexus for reviews, news, and benchmarks. I find the delivery much more in-line with what I’d like, though I find Steve a bit long-winded so I tend to skip a bunch in the videos. But the content is high quality.

      To each their own though. My coworker really like LTT and went to LTX recently, so I’ll watch a video here and there for water-cooler discussions.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      41·
      6 months ago

      The hate from this community towards LTT is extreme and unfounded.

      Are you just going to ignore Linus and the companies abhorrent response to the situation? That alone should make anyone lose any respect they had for them.

      • Aphelion@lemm.eeEnglish
        31·
        6 months ago

        Yeah, same for me. Linus’ response was so stereotypicaly defensive, dismissive and shitty, I lost all trust. Couple that with GN’s fact checking of LMGs sloppyness, and I was done ever watching their channel.

      • fjordbasa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        6 months ago

        I agree, I don’t think it’s unfounded, their immediate response was really tone deaf and I’ve yet to see them own up to that.

        I’m a bit uncertain as to how I feel about the overall response. I don’t exactly fault people for getting publicly upset, and I don’t hate anyone for still watching. I personally don’t feel the need to broadcast my thoughts. I canceled my floatplane subscription and stopped watching LMG videos on YouTube, but I haven’t tried to get anyone else to stop- or really even talked about them much at all, save for this post

      • Rognaut@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        No, you’re right. That was shitty, but this report sorta puts a different light on it. I would hope that Linus was caught off guard by the allegations and responded poorly. I’m clearly giving him the benefit of the doubt though and I hope I’m not wrong.

        Time may tell. Idk.

    • erwan@lemmy.mlEnglish
      33·
      6 months ago

      I just don’t like Linus because he’s annoying and abuses clickbait thumbnails and titles.

      Some of their videos (from other people than himself) are good, but usually I’ll avoid LTT content all together.

      For that reason I’m not really sure what happened, and I don’t really care.

      • ericswpark@lemmy.mlEnglish
        20·
        6 months ago

        He said previously that he also dislikes the clickbait thumbnails, but they do it because it works. If they adhered to what the enthusiasts wanted their view counts would drop and they wouldn’t be able to have so many employees on payroll.

        • erwan@lemmy.mlEnglish
          8·
          6 months ago

          Maybe, whatever. It’s just too annoying for me to click on that shit.

          • just another dev@lemmy.my-box.devEnglish
            6·
            6 months ago

            Same. While Linus is part of the problem for using practices he claims to disagree with, I’d rather be part of the solution by not rewarding it with attention.

      • ericswpark@lemmy.mlEnglish
        9·
        6 months ago

        He said previously that he also dislikes the clickbait thumbnails, but they do it because it works. If they adhered to what the enthusiasts wanted their view counts would drop and they wouldn’t be able to have so many employees on payroll.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlEnglish
      29·
      6 months ago

      It’s unbelievable how much hate for LTT there is on this platform.

      They have a huge reach and tremendous influence, but are not always conscientious, careful, and thorough as they should be given their sway. Still, that doesn’t justify the vitriol.

    • TonyOstrich@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      6 months ago

      I watch almost all of the LTT videos as well as most of the videos across all the other LMG channels. While I think I’d probably get along really well with Linus as a friend or acquaintance, and I don’t necessarily have any issue with him as a person, he has had some pretty irritating takes and used his bully pit to essentially swat away or mock legitimate criticism on his takes. Usually about things that are outside of his core competencies. The ones that come to mind are some of the things he has said about unions (he’s not anti Union to be clear), the backpack, car dependency in North America, and worker cooperatives.

      I personally think it would be pretty interesting if he had experts in those areas come on the WAN show to talk about those things. Instead he does the super ADHD thing (something he has admitted he has, and something I have definitely recognized him doing having had a partner with severe ADHD exhibit similar behaviors) where he spends seconds finding an article, skims it not noting much nuance, and then somehow simultaneously says something confidently while also saying he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He often wants the best of both worlds. He wants to be taken seriously while also being given the latitude to joke around and just make hot takes.

      Even with all that said, as stated above, I will still watch most of his videos and wish him well. Recognizing the flaws in something I enjoy doesn’t mean I hate something, especially if I take the time to voice it. It usually means I care and I want to see something I like or that is good improve and get better.

    • Almrond@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      6 months ago

      I have no issue with LTT as a whole, I just really don’t like Linus. He portrays an almost weaponized incompetence in a lot of computing topics and doesn’t accurately represent his own lack of understanding to the audience that couldn’t tell on their own. By all accounts there is one hell of a team working there, they just chose a really bad face to represent the actual content.

      Just my personal take for what it’s worth.

    • priapus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      16·
      6 months ago

      there are a lot of reasons to dislike LTT outside of this incident. I don’t have anything against them, but I can understand why others would.

    • poke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      15·
      6 months ago

      It’s one of those things you just have to accept about this kind of social media and, in a sense, Lemmy users specifically. I’m not too surprised that parts of this community are in the camp of disliking things because they are popular and don’t fit their specific wants/needs. Many people are here because they dislike the more popular Reddit, after all.

      In a more general sense, most people when they don’t like something are neutral about it, and those people won’t show up in the comment section, so all we see are these more “extreme” opinions.

      I enjoy watching LTT videos, but you won’t find me jumping into comment sections saying I’m a huge fan and there’s no way they could have done something bad because I like their channel, for example. Getting the independent audit was a good idea, and I’m glad they went through it. I don’t think the defamation comment was necessary, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the message is worth ignoring.

    • Xanis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      It’s important to remember that the people who are okay with this report probably won’t speak up. Those who find reasons to not be okay will speak loudly. Personally, I take reports like this with a grain of salt and an assumption we are told only the good or neutral bits. I then decide if those bits are enough to constitute good will. In this I feel they are.

      So good job: LTT.