You said earlier Rob is not Epik but he makes no effort to dissociate the two on his profile.
Rob has been the owner and CEO of Epik for many years. Unlike other CEOs, Rob actively engages with individual customers, answering support tickets, bailing them out with domain-backed loans, even editing their DNS records over the phone. And he's a workaholic (I mean that in a good way) who is always "ON". Except when Rob's asleep, there is almost no moment when he might not respond to someone who has a question for Epik.
So, you're right: Rob hasn't been in the habit of distinguishing between Epik and himself as an individual 100% of the time. In public, he has just said what he thinks and sometimes mentioned his company and its services, which are often directed toward issues he cares about – like privacy or censorship.
For many years, this identification of Rob = Epik has helped the brand. Many customers at Epik choose the company primarily because of positive experiences they've had with Rob. Indeed, many in this thread have said so. Rob never built a wall between Epik and his individual identity.
Blurring the lines between Rob / Epik caused a problem finally. Please give Rob a chance to adjust policies and habits. It's only fair. Within the past week, Rob has made a number of changes:
- Rob closed his individual Twitter account. That's based on the risk of his individual opinions being mistaken for Epik positions (which caused the recent scandal).
- Epik social media accounts at Twitter and Facebook are now made via a designated Epik employee in all cases and not by Rob directly, as sometimes was the case. This provides a filter and allows for the post to reflect more team consensus – which is the real Epik. It also provides an opportunity for basic editing and fact-checking.
- Within this thread, I suggested that Rob should change the Gab username from "Epik" to something reflecting him as an individual. And his comment today suggests that will happen.
- Here at NamePros, Rob changed his avatar / image so that it no longer reflects the Epik logo. People still recognize Rob as Epik's CEO. But this emphasizes that posts by Rob about religion or politics are not Epik positions as such.
Some CEOs delegate public comments to underlings as much as possible. But Rob has been in the habit of speaking directly to people in forums, emails, and social media. That can backfire. In some cases, it helps to have an extra layer of teamwork in a company's public statements on blogs, in Twitter or Facebook, or forums. If there is no such layering, then there may not be any consensus within the organization. And then arguably it makes sense to emphasize that each person is speaking as an individual, except when emphasizing that they are speaking about official policy. That's the case here in NamePros with Rob's posts.
Rob may be the CEO of a company, but he deserves some right to have his own opinions and express them as an individual. Nobody needs to agree with his opinions. But we should acknowledge that Rob says things as Rob. He isn't always a mouthpiece of Epik's official positions 24/7. If Rob says he enjoyed the last movie he saw, nobody will interpret that film review as a statement by Epik. By the same token, if Rob expresses a political view using the "Epik" username, it doesn't necessarily reflect Epik's position.
Rob began engaging with people at Gab.com in connection with the domain being transferred to Epik from GoDaddy, which refused to service it any longer in response to public pressure after a crime was committed by 1 of Gab’s members. So when Rob began commenting on Gab, he would have been representing Epik. To the extent that Rob began engaging with Gab members about politics, that was Rob acting as a private citizen, expressing his personal opinions. It’s easy to understand why, under the circumstances, the username began as “Epik” and how Rob might have continued using it in a personal capacity without realizing that it would be helpful to create a separate personal account.
In the post above, Rob outlined a number of proposed changes in Epik’s practices. I think he deserves some credit for that. Among other things:
The online personas called
#Epik,
#Anonymize and
#BitMitigate will restrict their engagement to technical matters and not engage in commentary that could be construed as being inflammatory.
So Epik usernames will be limited to official Epik business. That's progress. If I understand that correctly, then Rob’s personal posts on Gab would henceforward be made under a username not bearing the Epik brand.
This won’t address all issues. But it cannot be said that Rob “makes no effort to dissociate” between Epik and Rob Monster. He is making that effort.
For years, Rob relied on people to understand that his comments reflect individual opinions (like christianity) and to judge Epik as Epik, based on the quality of its services. Evidently, the general public gets Rob and Epik mixed up sometimes. To some extent, I get it. But when this scandal arose, some people were calling for a boycott of Epik based on a political opinion Rob expressed in his own personal Twitter account. And I know the general public is smart enough to realize there is a distinction between Rob and Epik in such a situation. I agree that more differentiation was needed. Rob and Epik are working on that.