New York City-based NYU Langone Health suspended two physicians last year for social media comments about the Israel-Hamas war. Since then, their career paths have gone in two vastly different directions, The New York Times reported.
Zaki Masoud, MD, a resident at an NYU Langone hospital in Long Island, N.Y., and Benjamin Neel, MD, PhD, director of the Perlmutter Cancer Center, were removed from their posts after commenting about the Middle East conflict. Dr. Neel was later fired from his $1.04 million position and sued the health system for unlawful termination.
In a court filing, Dr. Neel claimed that Dr. Masoud was "reinstated surreptitiously" to his job because of an online petition that has gotten nearly 100,000 signatures, according to the Feb. 1 Times story. The newspaper could not confirm that Dr. Masoud had reclaimed his position. An NYU Langone Health spokesperson declined to comment to Becker's, citing the pending litigation.
Other health systems have reprimanded employees for social media posts on the conflict, with varying degrees of punishment, illustrating the complexities of policing employees' online behavior. In the lawsuit, Dr. Neel claimed his posts represented a legal "recreational activity," while the health system asserted that he wasn't fired "for the act of posting on social media, but rather, for the content of his posts," the Times reported.
Dr. Neel's reposted anti-Hamas cartoons that contained "offensive caricatures of Arab people," while Dr. Masoud was accused of defending the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of roughly 1,200 Israelis on Instagram as "liberation" and "decolonization," according to the story.