Diving into the political maw of social media is more tempting than ever. But a tweet fired off in the electricity of the moment can have unintended consequences for employees and their employers.

In the past few days, a dean at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. was suspended for a tweet. A professor at Georgetown University is facing calls for her resignation, also over a tweet. A Fox News contributor was fired, again for tweets. And the New York Times had to answer for a reporter's political tweet.

So why the Twitter trouble now? The answer is Brett Kavanaugh. All of those tweets were related to the embattled Supreme Court nominee, whose dramatic hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee over sexual assault allegations whipped observers into a frenzy on social media.

“Everyone's going to want to reflect on this, unless you're a Zen monk on top of a mountain,” said Ethan Wall, founder of The Social Media Law Firm in Miami. “But you have to be very careful talking about politics. It's just with some people logic and reason seem to fly out the window when it comes to politics.”

The Georgetown professor? She tweeted that Kavanaugh's supporters in the Senate “deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps.” And the aforementioned Fox News contributor? He referred to the three women who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault as “lying skanks.”

These are difficult times for employers, who are under increasing pressure to craft social media policies that can help protect their brands without encroaching on workplace speech rights protected under the National Labor Relations Act or individual state laws.

“Private employers don't face free speech requirements under the First Amendment and they can and some do regulate the speech of their employees,” said Charles Johnson, an employment lawyer at Robinson Bradshaw in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The key, though, according to employment attorneys, is to avoid inadvertently making employees believe that they can't talk about sexual harassment in the workplace or speak about any other issue that falls within the NLRA's protections.

It's also wise to avoid overly broad social media policies and instead carve out specific types of speech that are frowned on, according to Wall. He noted that private employers are free to fire employees for tweeting about Kavanaugh or Trump or some other controversial political figure, but “whether that would have public relations implications is a different story.”

Asked if he tweets about politics, Wall said: “While I'm happy to comment on the legalities of it, I keep my political views off social media.”

And Johnson? The Charlotte lawyer said he and his colleagues discuss Kavanaugh on a daily basis. But he's not tweeting about it.

“I don't use Twitter,” he said.

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