Social Media - Private, Public or Other?

Social media privacy - it sounds like an oxymoron, right? For all intents and purposes the point of posting something to social media is to make it public. In a perfect world nobody would care about what you posted and there would be no consequences for posting anything and everything, but we don’t live in a perfect world.

The company I work for has a very strict social media policy. Employees are not to post or publish anything online that could reflect badly on the reputation of the company including the reputation of the people who work for the company. Last year there was an “incident.” An employee posted a negative comment about police officers in general. Some of the general public recognized that this employee worked at one of our locations and began sharing and re-tweeting the message along with where they worked and inferring that the company supported this employee’s remarks.

You can guess what happened then. The people connected with that person shared it with others who passed it along until it was on the verge of going viral. Fortunately, the PR department was able to react quickly and distance the company from the employee who eventually lost their job for violating the company’s social media policy.

Was that fair to the employee? She/he was only expressing their private, personal opinion to people they regarded as friends. The problem arises when that opinion is shared in a public place to people who knew her as a representative of the company. When the company, through no fault of their own, was initially silent about the remarks, some members of the public saw it as tacit approval (which it wasn’t). Was that fair to the company?

So where is the line between our private lives, privately public lives and our public lives? Without a clear definition of where those lines are, we are all just stumbling around trying to figure it out until someone hands us a clue.