Privacy, Legal Implications, and Ethics

         In an age where many people’s first instinct is to post whatever is on their mind, many questions about important issues arise. What level of privacy settings should you use for each social media platform? What online information can an employer require you to give and what are you allowed to post in association with your place of employment? What is ethical to post? I hope to answer as many of these questions as possible in this post.

         With the evolution of the different social media platforms throughout the years, choosing who can see what content has become a challenging decision when applying for jobs. When you are applying for a job, employers will search for you online, and very social media settings can seem suspicious to prospective employers. So the question arises, what kind of media presence do employers want to see in their candidates? Recruiters tend to be less suspicious of candidates who have the privacy settings that are most commonly used on that specific platform, so a good rule is to choose the most common privacy setting.

         Two of the other most common issues involving social media and the workplace are tied to legal implications. The first issue that arises involving the law is to what degree of access to your social media account your employer can require. Until very recently employers could require their employees to disclose their social media passwords so that the employers would have total access to their accounts, but thankfully many states have banned this practice. At our current time nearly half the states across the country have either enacted or introduced legislative bills prohibiting employers from requiring their employees to disclose this information, and if you are curious if your state is one of those states, you can click this link to find out: http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/employer-access-to-social-media-passwords-2013.aspx . Another social media issue that has been connected to legal implications are the employee social media policies that most companies require employees to sign. Most of these policies are used to prevent employees from disclosing sensitive information about the company and require access to social media pages, but some companies require their employees only post socially appropriate things on the company social media. This means that companies are constantly monitoring their employee’s online activities to prevent any blunders or fire the person responsible for a serious media blunder like the one on Chrysler Autos account in 2011:

         The final issue involving social media would be the ethical debate of employer’s right to view vs. an employee’s right to privacy. It is already generally agreed upon that employers should not have the password to an employee’s account, but other important ethical questions have risen as modern social media platforms reach their tenth anniversary.  Should a company monitor an employee’s social media? Should companies require employees to sign social media policies? To learn more on social media ethics in general, click this link: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/internet-ethics/resources/unavoidable-ethical-questions-social-networking/ .

         

What is Social Media?

          What is social media? This is the question that my professor posed to us this week in class. I could give you the textbook definition for what social media is, but the definition would change from textbook to textbook because social media is so dynamic and massive that an author would never be able to condense the full definition in just a few sentences. This is why I have decided to change the question to this one instead, What is social media to me?

          Social media, to me, means having a platform that allows you to share your ideas and content virtually with people around the world in order to communicate with others in an open forum (the level of openness can be controlled by user settings). Today, I am going to present three different social media platforms to show just how different the ways open forum communication can be.

           Twitter is one virtual platform that people use to communicate through short sentence posts. For example, I was scrolling through my feed on Twitter yesterday morning and came across this post:

just minutes after CNN tweeted this post, friends and fans of Alan Rickman made posts of their own expressing their sadness and sharing memories. Twitter was being used as a platform to express their grief.

          Twitter is just one of many social media sites that people use around the world to communicate. Pinterest is another social media website that people use to communicate with one another, but in a very different way than Twitter. On Pinterest, people communicate things that interest them to a virtual bulletin board like this one: 

instead of messaging each other.

           Facebook will be the final social media platform that I will present this morning has its own unique forms of communication. Many Facebook users communicate by typing up paragraph long Facebook posts like the one below:

and through Facebook webpages created by organizations that allow a group of people to contribute articles and updates on one central page that alerts the followers whenever the page is updated.

Introduction Post

Hey everyone, welcome to A Millennial’s Survival Guide to College, I would like to take this time to tell you guys a little about myself. My name is Joie. I am currently a junior communication major at the University of Louisville and am originally from the Northern Kentucky area. I have started this blog as one of my projects for my social media class and hope that this will help other university students learn many of the skills needed to succeed in college for the next several years. I also hope that this project and the class that assigned this project will help improve my social media writing skills and help me learn how to use social media to improve my workplace.

            After graduation, I hope to work in something involving public relations or advertising, but cannot really go further into specifics. I am currently considering doing something involving account management or event planning after college because I have enjoyed coordinating the internship fair and the mentor luncheon for Young Communication Professionals. The great thing about being in college is that I still have plenty of time to decide what I want to do with my life. I hope you guys enjoy my blog!