How A Multinational Employer Can Craft A Global Social Media Policy

Social media is so powerful that some argue Russian manipulation of it changed the result of a U.S. presidential election. In the employment context, social media is not quite that powerful, but employment-context social media is pervasive, reaching interactions between employers and employees, interactions among co-workers, and staff interactions with the outside world.

The bright side to employment-context social media—both the big open platforms and internal employee-chat functions on company intranets—is that it facilitates workplace communications. Used correctly, social media can keep staff engaged, connected and informed.

But management inevitably sees a more complex dimension to employment-context social media. The old expression "never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel" became obsolete when newspapers lost their monopoly on communicating with the public. The new, inverse expression is "everyone with a cell phone is a reporter." Today, social media empowers everyone from the president of the United States down to rank-and-file laborers to bypass regular news outlets and broadcast opinions, photos and re-tweets directly to targeted groups, be they a given company's workforce or the entire online "twittersphere."

As an example, when America's former first lady Barbara Bush died, a California English professor on a semester-long sabbatical from her university tweeted that "Bush was [an]...amazing racist who...raised a war criminal. I'm happy the witch is dead. can't [sic] wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis [sic] have," and added that she was dancing "happily on the grave of someone I despise. It's SO FUN." As the inevitable "whirlwind of anger kicked up," the Los Angeles Times (April 19, 2019) reported that the professor "taunted her critics, bragging about her $100,000 salary as a tenured professor...declar[ing]: 'I will never be fired.'" At a news conference in response, her university employer" call[ed] the issue a personnel matter," announced "the university was beginning a review of [these] tweets" that "would involve the university system's lawyers [and] union representatives," and asked: "Does tenure mean that you, technically, cannot be fired? The answer to that is no."

This illustrates that employers have a keen interest in wresting some measure of control over employee...