With the rapid rise of social media (as of today, there are 845 million active users of Facebook, nearly half a billion users of Twitter and 150 million LinkedIn members, with numbers growing daily), most companies cannot afford to miss out on the tremendous opportunities for marketing, business development, communications efficiencies as well as talent identification and attraction. In the electronic communications age, social media policies are important company tools to protect the company’s confidential and proprietary information, mitigate against employee discrimination and harassment, and remind employees of their obligations. While much has been written about the dangers of overbroad social media policies chilling protected employee speech pursuant to §7 of the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, we recommend that employers in the U.S. and abroad consider adopting and implementing social media policies.

More and more jurisdictions now have case law that stresses the importance of a social media policy in order to permit the employer to discipline employees for misuse of social media. For instance, Fair Work Australia recently reinstated an employee who had been dismissed for improper social media use. While the commissioner generally seems to have had some doubts that the offensive conduct (various possibly racially derogatory as well possibly sexually harassing comments of a long-time employee on Facebook) was sufficient to warrant termination, it expressly found that the employer’s lack of a social media policy made discipline even more hard to sustain.

This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.

To view this content, please continue to their sites.

Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Why am I seeing this?

LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are third party online distributors of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law customers are able to access and use ALM's content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, The New York Law Journal, and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information.

For questions call 1-877-256-2472 or contact us at [email protected]