Should we be Facebook paranoid?
I’ve been asking myself this question ever since I’ve had a series of conversations with a teacher friend of mine. A police officer had come to his school district to give a presentation on the “dangers” of social media, and a point he made is that employers can easily request your Facebook record (whether or not they themselves can access your profile) from Facebook itself; and the company will readily comply.
To me, this sounds like utter bullshit, but my friend has reassured me that this is a) part of the Facebook TOS, and b) the reason why employers can do this is because Facebook is “technically” a public domain website. To be honest, I’m not so sure and I’m no legal expert, but I find it hard to believe that employers and Facebook have some carte blanche agreement where user information is so readily given. Of course, if someone knows better please leave a comment!
But getting back to the question: should we be paranoid of Facebook, to the point we very carefully analyze our decision to post something? My teacher friend cited a case where an employee was fired for posting a Facebook status critical of NJ Governor Chris Christie (again, this reeks of civil rights violation to me). Or do we just need to rely on old common sense?
Like I’ve said, I find it hard to believe employers can so easily request your information. Personally, I enjoy Facebook and I like having one because it puts me in control of my online identity. I recommend my friends to have a Facebook so they can do the same, and some businesses I’ve worked with I’ve implemented Facebook Pages. But my teacher friend? He won’t even go on Facebook anymore.
April 28th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
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April 29th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Based on what I know about employment law I’m going to say that can’t be true. There would be no faster way to a disparate treatment lawsuit than making such requests from facebook. A company would be insane to do that. And, I’m quite certain that facebook can’t give that info out so readily. Not only would they be opening themselves up for more legal woes, but imagine the time & cost of answering all those queries from employers? What would be their motivation for doing that, especially given the high probability of backlash to them (legal & reputational)? It just doesn’t make sense. Anyway, on the off chance it’s true (which would really be shocking to me), who the hell would ever want to work for a company that did that? Not me, even if I was desperate for a job!
April 29th, 2010 at 8:54 am
Legally, FB does not and cannot give your info to potential employers (I tried); so it’s up to you / how you set up your FB privacy settings.
I can tell you as someone who hires hundreds of people / year, I do typically look at their FB pages; but only because I like to see people have ‘lives’ outside of work. I like to see their interests. I have yet to not hire someone because of their FB page and typically do not look (if I even have time to look at all) until after i’ve hired the employee, however I’ve found that as a manager – it has helped me to know what people like…it’s far easier to quickly build relationships this way.
On the other end of the spectrum…my FB page is “me”. What you see is what you get…and I DID get into trouble for posting, “work sucks today”. I actually got written up and my ‘punishment’ was that I had to write the social media policy for the company to follow…that being said, I didn’t apologize to the company nor have I changed my settings; what you see is what you get. If you don’t like it; fire me.
April 30th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Jamie, thanks for stopping by to weigh in on this! I’m also really happy to hear from someone on the “front lines” of hiring that having a negative Facebook status doesn’t immediately destroy your career. It’s also great to hear that Facebook actually helps in some cases: like you said, namely in helping build relationships with your employees.
I think it boils down to people on all sides are paranoid, and that’s because of the present economic climate and keeping (and retaining) your job. People are encouraged more to “fit” and may not express themselves. This is why I object to the concept of personal branding – presently, it reeks so much of people being disingenuous and not truly who they are. I think so many people really don’t understand the value and true purpose of social media. I’ve told my friend that he should continue to have a FB page – it allows him to control his online brand, as it were. But no.
April 30th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Thanks for commenting, Sarah! I completely agree with you, by the way. When my friend brought up the presentation he sat through, I started to comb back through all of the I/O notes (and yes, I STILL have all of my notes from grad school!) to look at information. It just didn’t make sense to me that companies could a) do this without a soepena, b) what company has the RESOURCES to do this for every applicant/candidate, and c) how did the media NOT jump all over Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook for this?
All in all, it sounded like a lot of scare tactics from an authoritative legal source to discourage teachers from having social media profiles. Good ol’ New Jersey, right?