That’s what they said: Social media and the workplace and the lawsuits

One social media-related post in October. One may be good enough for the Red Sox — eat it, Detroit — not here.

So, with a little help from my friends, I’ve got three stories on the the impact that the technology in the workplace has on litigation proceedings.

Over at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog, Venkat Balasubramani writes here about a recent decision in which a court found that a passenger’s social media rant against and airline employee may not have been defamation, but it was enough to create a claim of “false light.”

Molly DiBianca at the Delaware Employment Law Blog (here) details a case in which the discoverability email is at issue. There, the court found that the employer defendant had to preserve relevant email from the personal email accounts of three of the company’s former officers, because, the company should have known that these individuals were conducting company business from these personal email accounts.

Finally, we have this complaint I saw filed in Maryland federal court last week, where the plaintiff alleges that his former employer violated his First Amendment rights when it fired him for what the plaintiff described as “a satirical comment concerning assault weapons legislation” on his Facebook page. Specifically, the plaintiff wrote, “My aide had an outstanding idea …. Let’s kill someone with a liberal … then maybe we can get them outlawed too! Think of the satisfaction of beating a liberal with another liberal … its almost poetic…” He then “liked” a Facebook friend’s response, which read, “But … was it an ‘[assault] liberal’? Gotta pick a fat one, those are the ‘high capacity’ ones. Oh pick a black one, those are more ‘scary.’ Sorry had to perfect on a [sic] cool idea!”

Can’t wait to see how that one turns out.