The big topic of conversation this morning in the GTA news was that three Firepersons (you’ll understand why I’m being extra gender neutral shortly) were terminated from their employment by the City of Toronto for tweets sent from their private Twitter accounts.
These tweets included excerpts from shows such as SouthPark (you killed Kenny, you bastards!) and The Office. The tweets all referenced the superiority of men over women, of course, given the shows from which they were taken, in truth they were sarcastic and actually showed how ridiculous the statements were.
I have not seen the City of Toronto’s code of conduct for its’ employees. If it requires that all private correspondence being hyper politically correct, then they are correct to terminate the employees violated the policy.
Does your business have a Social Media policy? If you don’t, how do your staff know what you expect of them. If you want to be able to fire people for comments they make on personal accounts on their own free time, you need to be clear on this, or you will lose in Court.
It’s the Twitter Age – everything you tweet will be held against you, even if it is funny and sarcastic.