Blizzard – Fran Townsend now blocks employees on Twitter

Blizzard’s infamous Executive Fran Townsend now blocks employees on Twitter. Fran Townsend is one of the most controversial and unpopular people at the very top of Activision Blizzard. The 59-year-old Republican and “woman’s advocate” has been mentioned by name several times in the abuse lawsuit filed by the state of California against Blizzard.

Over the weekend, amid all the uproar and bad publicity, Townsend thought it was the perfect time to tweet about “the problem with whistleblowing.” Fran Townsend, Blizzard’s Vice President of Corporate Affairs, Corporate Secretary and Chief Compliance Officer has become even more unpopular in recent weeks when she called the lawsuit against the company “undeserved” , “false” and “distorted”. She was one of the reasons Blizzard’s employees went on a work strike last week.

Townsend’s questionable past

Prior to her time at Blizzard, Fran Townsend held a much more public position – Townsend was the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism while Bush was in power. She was one of the big promoters of raising the national “terror threat level.” Among other things, Townsend championed the Bush administration’s use of torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity.

Waterboarding is a method of torture in which a cloth mask is placed on the victim or a cloth is placed in front of the mouth and nose, and then the mouth and nose area is doused with water for a period of time so that the victim cannot breathe, inhales water, and is thus brought close to drowning.

So when you think of Fran Townsend’s past, plus her reign of terror at Blizzard, and then the ill-timed “whistleblower” tweet, you can imagine how massive the shitstorm was. The tweet received a fair amount of anger and ridicule.

Instead of then simply admitting that she made a bad tweet as a senior executive in a leadership position and deleting the tweet or simply ignoring the critique, she began blocking anyone who even remotely criticized her. This includes several journalists and developers from outside companies, as well as many current and former Activision Blizzard employees.

Their own employees and colleagues. Considering that Blizzard’s corporate values say on their homepage that “Every Voice Counts,” this is quite ridiculous.