It's not obvious who you represent when you have list an employer in your title or bio. The point of listing it is that you're adding that affiliation and connection. Worse are not "just words". If that were true, libel wouldn't exist.
Libel can cause significant damage and the connection between your twitter account and your employer makes them a target. So you might want to ask the University's legal department before you assume that they're ok with being connected to you on twitter.
> But let’s say you are an engineer at Meta. And the next time you log into Twitter, your personal Twitter account has a label that says “Meta-affiliated account.” Would that seem fair or accurate?
It seems reasonable to disclose that one works at a company before posting an opinion related to that company online. The statement "I love CeraVe products" is worth a whole lot more from a happy customer than it would be from a CeraVe employee.
It was never much of a thing. If your social media posts cause a financial or reputational risk to your employer, they'll take action to resolve that risk regardless of a disclaimer in your bio.
I work at a large tech company, and they do mention in the on boarding materials that we represent the company, so we should be careful in our social media profiles. My solution to this is to not associate my social media profiles with my employer. This is technically not really what we’re supposed to do, and I might have to change that approach at some point if I move high enough in the org to start getting attention from people, but this works for me better than disclaimers on all my posts.
I would never tell an employer about any of my social media identities. I don't try to hide them, and I stand by anything I say online, but I'd never give an employer my Twitter handle (not that I have one) or any other public ID other than GitHub. That some people are willing to give up their social media IDs at all baffles me.
That said, I don't blame employers for trying to prevent bad PR. If I had an employee spouting racist nonsense and they didn't have the common sense to keep their identity anonymous--or even worse, they connected their identity to my company--I'd have no qualms about firing them.
I doubt an AI, or even a manual solution, can effectively handle this job, though. It's going to continue to be more of a reactionary thing than a preventative thing.
You can absolutely say "I work for X". Otherwise resumes don't work, forget LinkedIn. Telling people you work for X is not the same as claiming to represent X.
The exception here is executives and maybe in some instances management, where they need to be careful what they say because anything they say may be construed as representing the company. But having on your social media that you work for X and having other posts where you talk about normal social media things? 100% fine as long as your don't say something along the lines of "I work for X and our official policy on Y is..." (i.e. claiming to represent them)
My take on this is that if I work for, say, the Chicago Tribune as the person responsible for handling a Twitter account (perhaps @ChicagoTribune?), my employer can require me to give them the password for that account.
This does not distress me.
The other significant part, that employers can request account information for accounts "that the employee uses for business purposes" but can't "discharge, discipline, or otherwise penalize or threaten to discharge, discipline, or otherwise penalize an employee for an employee's refusal to disclose" I see as mostly placing requirements on employers: Make sure your staff is not becoming the "face" of your brand with their personal accounts.
So for this case involving LI, I get my name and employer name isn't protected but there is a section where you describe your role. That is extremely creative, right? There are infinite ways similar work could be described. It isn't just a "fact". So they can't use that information it would seem.
Once their name is found on social media through their photo, it would not take much effort to go from there to their LinkedIn and find out who their employers are.
As we've seen in the past, it's not hard to call a company out on Twitter with information about what their employee has been up to and I reckon it's likely that this will happen.
I hate to say it, but maybe you should tone it down a little bit on your Twitter account. People are always going to Google your name when your resume comes in. Odds are they're going to find your Twitter account. Odds are they're going to find tweets like "Seriously tempted upload a sql.tar.gz that's just an archive full of obscene furry porn from the deepest trenches of fchan's /ah/ board."
If I was an employer and I saw a job applicant tweet something like that, their resume would immediately go in the shredder.
Think about it from the employer's point of view: "What happens if this guy is disgruntled with us for some reason? Is he going to joke about something that'll embarrass us? Maybe he'll turn our website into an archive of obscene furry porn?" Given you're tweeting things like that, why would I hire you?
(and yes, I know that that tweet's referring to the previous "HEAD /passwords.txt" tweet, but it's incredibly easy to take things out of context on the internets)
Good point. I have removed my employers from my bio. I don't think there was any implication that they were at all involved or endorsed anything I'm saying here, but it never hurts to avoid any potential backlash. Thanks for pointing that out.
> I've never been worried about my employer seeing my social media profiles. If I wouldn't do something in public, I wouldn't post it to social media.
Employers (and potential employers, for job applicants) don't use access to social media only to see what you post to social media and judge you by that, they can (and do) use it to see who you are connected to on social media, what they post about you, and what they post about other things, and judge you by that. They can also use it as a pretext to discern things that are protected by anti-discrimination law and which they would not ask you about directly for fear of lawsuits, as a means of difficult-to-detect unlawful discrimination, using, again, not only what you post, but information from others that is connected to your profile.
Now, you can limit your interaction in one of the prime mechanisms of social communication in modern society to mitigate the risks that poses (which itself undermines the point of legal protections, especially for things like religion and, in California, political affiliation), or you can, as many people do, create what essentially amounts to a bogus profile that simulates doing that which is shared with prospective employers, but neither of those are ideal.
So if some outsider leaked a confidential document from your employer and you posted it on Twitter you'd be fine because "it's not related to your work"?
Some companies have onerous restrictions on employees using their names in public, but hinting obliquely is fine. It's a matter of not appearing to endorse random, unvetted public posts by employees, not a matter of secrecy.
Also, contacting someone's employer is far from a slam dunk freedom of speech case. It could easily run afoul of several criminal statutes, not to mention the obvious civil liability.
One more nail in the coffin for Internet anonymity.
Please clarify if it is in fact the policy of the company you work at that employees should be "worrying about their job" based on the contents of their Twitter accounts.
If so, please let me know so I can ensure that I never work with you.
Not trying to poop in the cereal, but take a beat before adding your name to the site; I'd be wary that this will be used to blacklist a whole lot of folks. There's a large segment of tech that doesn't see a tenure at Twitter as a positive, for example. Maybe consider hiding the company name.
It is not. IMO it's a pretty ballsy and idiotic thing to do. That's partly why I am not too active on Twitter. I have a lot of controversial, unpopular opinions that I wouldn't want a potential employer to get a whiff of.
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