According to recent press reports, in an expensive lesson in
self-censorship, Courtney Love has paid out more than $430,000 to
settle the world's first Twitter libel lawsuit rather than risk
facing a jury over tweets in which she allegedly accused the
claimant of theft and being a criminal.
Employees (and contractors) should be warned not to publish
anything publicly on a social networking site that they would not
be happy to have printed in a national newspaper. In particular,
when the user identifies their employer, discusses the nature of
their work or updates their social networking site during the
course of the working day, they must behave in accordance with the
terms and conditions of their employment.
To minimise the serious risks of reputational and other damage
which can be caused by your employees' non-work-related
internet use, you should ensure that your social networking policy
is up to date and comprehensive and that all your staff are signed
up to it as ambassadors of your firm.
If you do not have a formal policy in place, you should protect
yourself by formulating one which is detailed enough to cover the
fundamental issues while being sufficiently general to accommodate
the pace of technological change. For business reasons it may not
be practical or desirable to block the use of social networking
sites within working hours, but parameters of acceptable behaviour
must be set.
The PCC's decision in the Sarah Baskerville case suggests that
by issuing social networking updates which are publicly available,
an employee may be forfeiting their right to privacy.
To protect the employer (and the employee), Twitter accounts
should be locked to limited access to those officially
"following" the user and to limit the number of
followers, so that tweets are not visible to the general internet
public. Twitter accounts and blogs, and any other networking
capability that can be tailored to do so, should include a
disclaimer against the user's profile that "the views
expressed are my personal opinions and are not necessarily
representative of my employer". Facebook and My Space
accounts should be limited to the highest of privacy settings, so
that content can only be viewed by those connected to the user as
"friends".
The problem with Twitter and other "real-time" social
networking sites is that any interesting (or inflammatory) post is
likely to be "re-tweeted" without the originating
user's consent. With a whole section of Google now devoted to
real-time results, a user researching your company could easily
stumble across your employee's comments, potentially propelling
a controversial tweet to a wide public audience.
Employees should be encouraged to take steps to protect their own
personal information wherever possible and proactively to manage
their social networking profiles, removing now (rather than when it
is too late) any content which could cause problems in the future.
Once in the public domain, as well as potentially having an
immediate impact, their social networking updates and photographs
connected with them may also be traceable by anyone researching
their background in the future, such as subsequent employers, banks
or educational institutions.
A salutary tale from across the pond is that of an off-duty 25 year
old trainee teacher who was refused her graduate degree for having
posted a picture on her MySpace page showing her at a party wearing
a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption
"Drunken Pirate". In a decision that will strike fear
into many "work-hard-play-hard" employees, she was deemed
by the Dean of her University to have promoted drinking in virtual
view of her under-age students. Employees would be well advised to
keep their friends close and their enemies behind a firewall.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.