Articles Posted in Social Media and the Workplace

Last month, a daughter’s Facebook post cost her father an $80K age-discrimination settlement (more on that here).

Last week, with some Facebook shenanigans, the plaintiff in a sexual harassment case screwed herself over.

(See what I did there?)

Yesterday, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held a public meeting at which it discussed, well, you read the lede. Don’t miss this one employers; the full 411 is after the jump…

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Back in 2011, when y’all were Tebowing, planking and winning, I was blogging about this case where an employer allegedly updated its employee’s Facebook page and tweeted from her Twitter account without her permission while she was on leave from work following a car accident.

The Stored Communications Act prohibits intentional, unauthorized access to electronically stored communications. The employer admitted that it had accessed the employee’s social media accounts. However, it claimed that it had permission because the employee left her passwords stored on a company server. So, the employer moved for summary judgment.

Opposing the motion, the employee argued that, while the company did possess the account passwords, she had told them to leave their digital fingers off of her social media accounts. This would have made the access unauthorized.

I’ll bet the father didn’t “like” that so much. 

Get it?

Dad is the former headmaster at a school in Florida. When the school failed to renew his employment contract, he sued for age discrimination and retaliation. Eventually the two sides settled, with the school to pay $10,000 in back pay, $80,000 as a “1099”, and $60,000 to dad’s attorneys.

The other day, Deadspin tweeted this headline:

That social media policy of yours. The one in which you begrudgingly tolerate employee social media use on their own time and roadblock their efforts to use it at work.

You may want to revise it. ASAP!

Chad Brooks at Business News Daily reports here about a recent study by two members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, which concludes that workplace morale improves when employees use social media on their smartphones at work.

The king is dead. Long live the king!

Teens are beginning to drop Facebook like a bad habit; instead, taking advantage of messaging apps like What’sApp, Snapchat, and Instagram to social network.

According to a GlobalWebIndex study highlighted in this Forbes article from Haydn Shaughnessy, “from Q2 2012 to Q3 2013 the percentage of active users among 16 – 19 year olds fell from 62% to 52% (these are active users in the sense of having contributed content), and among 20 – 24 year olds fell from 63% to 52%.”