I see this quite a bit on HN and I always thing it's silly, but this time it's particularly perplexing. Are you a lawyer for Mattel or something?
Perhaps there needs to be an account disclaimer checkbox as a standard feature: "I speak in no official capacity related to any employer or professional role"....
I've never identified myself as an employee of my company on this account and I'm certainly not identifying myself as an employee of my company in this post, so since I don't work for the NSA, I post whatever I want, no disclaimer necessary.
If for some reason I did want to identify my employer sometimes, it would make infinitely more sense to make a separate account for those times than to attach a meaningless boilerplate disclaimer to every single post I make on Hackernews.
I work at a company with a social media policy. My understanding of it (garnered by clicking through the slides as quickly as humanly possible once a year) is that they only want me to consider these sorts of disclosures if I'm speaking in a capacity where people MIGHT mistake what I say as coming from the company.
My employer is certainly discoverable from my HN account but there's no more value in me adding such boilerplate to my HN posts than there is me signing emails with my mom the same way.
My employer thinks I shouldn't comment on social media at all because people might think I'm commenting in an official capacity. Their line is "don't use social media", so if there's a comment where an argument could be leveled against me that "people think this is a part of your employment" I indemnify myself against that argument.
It's not unlike acknowledging the owner of a trademark, no-one can soundly claim people would think you own a mark if you point out you don't and name who does.
I don't work for Mattel, fwiw.
