There’s a reason why YouTube’s “trending” icon is a flame. Influence on the $US100 ($138) billion video sharing site grows uncontested, spreads to whatever is closest to it and can destroy whatever it feeds on. 

On the weekend, Netflix's US communications chief Jonathan Friedland was fired from the company for "descriptive use of the N-word" in the workplace. In an internal memo to staff, CEO Reed Hastings explained that Friedland had been let go for exhibiting "unacceptably low racial awareness and sensitivity."

Meanwhile, here in Australia, much has been made of "the right to be a bigot". This got us wondering - is it legal to terminate an Australian employee for using a racial epithet? Or would they have a case for unfair dismissal? Let's find out.

People will say all kinds of offensive things if they think you share their views.

Events in Charlottesville broke on Friday night and Saturday in the US, and by late Saturday night a good number of America's priests and ministers were scrambling to re-write whatever homilies and sermons they'd prepped for the next morning.

Discussing LGBT rights in conservative religious communities can be particularly challenging, both for people who are newly out and for those of us who simply wish that everyone would just hurry up and get with the civil-rights program. One can feel that those who reject the rights of LGBT people on religious grounds are using dogma as a fig leaf to hide their bigotry, and in many cases that's probably true. But there remain a large number of people raised in religious traditions who nonetheless have changed their views on the place of LGBT people in the broader community -- and even in the narrower world of their church community.