When you next feel the urge to vent about your boss, write something unseemly about a co-worker or complain about the job, don’t do it on a social media site. Consider the case of Gloria Gadsden, a sociology professor at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, who was suspended after updating her Facebook status with complaints about work that alluded to violence.
In January, she wrote: “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman? Yes, it’s been that kind of day…” Then in February: “had a good day today. DIDN’T want to kill even one student. :-). Now Friday was a different story.”
University officials became alarmed after the postings were brought to their attention by a student, and in a meeting with Gadsen, they even mentioned the recent shooting spree by a disgruntled biologist at the University Alabama-Huntsville.
Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have become a primary means of communication for millions of people around the world (500 million members on Facebook alone) and courts all over the world are dealing with the question of whether the information shared on these websites is private.
“These social media sites are extremely powerful tools and many people don’t realize the number of people who read their complaints about their employers,” says Verlie Oosthuizen, a lawyer specializing in employment law. “It is easy for their superiors to obtain this information and use it in disciplinary hearings.”
Many employers have blocked access to social networking sites on the company systems, derogatory statements made about superiors or the company could still be used against employees. Courts have issued subpoenas for e-mails and text messages in both civil and criminal cases and most postings on social network sites are not that difficult to obtain.
Not only do employers want to control their online image as closely as they can, but they are also vulnerable, like anybody else, to hurt pride.
“When you badmouth your boss and the boss is hearing [about it], whether you’re doing it online or at the coffee maker, the boss isn’t going to be happy,” says Jonathan Ezor, assistant professor of Law and Technology at Touro Law Center in Huntington, N.Y. “The fact that it’s online makes it more easily findable and have a broader potential impact.”
And if postings are made during work time using company equipment, it makes the arguments about the right to privacy all the more difficult. At the very least, denigrating your work place superiors or the company you work for can be a breach of that relationship.
“There will be little that employees will be able to do to defend themselves if they are discovered writing rude remarks about their company, superiors or colleagues on a social networking site,” says Oosthuizen. “It is difficult or even impossible to permanently erase anything written on these sites and a canny IT specialist may be able to find the offending comments long after they have been forgotten by their author.”
The moral of the story: Use discretion and be careful what you say and write.
