[Bartweiss]

Not only is an easily discovered public event poor leverage, it becomes much worse leverage if it comes up in an interview.

When companies (or governments) try to manipulate employees, they frequently rely on some kind of willful ignorance. Wells Fargo is a great example: they set impossible performance targets and turned a blind eye to fraud, then fired and blacklisted whistleblowers - ostensibly for knowing about that same fraud!

If a shady employer wants leverage, even public events can suffice as long as they can claim ignorance. For example, most stock option grants are immediately lost if you're fired, but even at-will employment can't be terminated specifically to deprive someone of their options. So an employer might give a generous options package, then "discover" the IG video and use it for dismissal at just the right time to prevent a profitable exercise. But if that video comes up during hiring, it's no longer a plausible reason for later dismissal, at least without committing perjury regarding the interview.

I can't even work out a scenario where "lots of people know about this including us" is an effective way to manipulate someone.

[sfifs]

In any real going business, cost of hiring and training someone of a type who is eligible for compensation with stock options and the subsequent morale dip if discovered doing such manipulation would by far outweigh the benefits of doing this. So this is largely a tin foil hat scenario

[Bartweiss]

For any business with decent size, absolutely. There are a thousand ways to claw back options, and the reason they don't get used is that doing it even once would make hiring practically impossible.

For a small enough company? It falls in the same category as "diluting out of one guy's shares" - bad morals and bad business, but it still happens.