By Mike Mulvihill
Photo courtesy of PadiProductions
Yes, prepare to defend yourself.
Social media isn’t exactly the place where people have tended to be careful about what they say. It’s Wild West, say what comes to mind in much of the social media world. But you’d best start being careful what you say lest you get slapped with a law suit.
Just this week, Clorox announced it is looking to hire a Social Media Lawyer to help police social media about the Clorox and Brita brands. Citizen Media Law Projects posted just this week about appeals courts in Maryland and New Jersey reversing jury verdicts because of social media use by jurors during trial. And several libel and defamation lawsuits were spotlighted during 2009 — in fact a libel suit was just dismissed in favor of a Chicago tenant who Tweeted about her moldy apartment.
All this adds up to the simple acknowledgement that social media is here to stay and is getting bigger all the time. A January 21 post by Andrew Kipsman on comScore.com reported that, “In the past year alone, Facebook more than doubled its U.S. audience from 54.5 million visitors in December 2008 to 111.9 million visitors in December 2009. It went from being the #11 ranked property to the #4 ranked property. It now accounts for 7 percent of all time spent online in the U.S.”
And it also points out that there is risk and liability a plenty for individuals who post foolish words and photos – just as there should be. But more importantly, organizations recognize that they have risk. And where there is risk, there are lawyers there to do exactly what they are trained to do and do well – mitigate, preferably eliminate, risk.
Mark Greenfield’s recent blog regarding a webcast from the University of Florida sponsored by The Levin College of Law and University of Florida Strategic Communications Planning Committee called Social Media: Promises, Pitfalls & Perils, puts the age old dichotomy between legal advice and marketing/communications advice in context. To quote his blog, “Overall, I felt there was too much emphasis on the risk and not enough said about the reward. While it was billed as a seminar on the safe and effective use of social media, one could have easily drawn the conclusion that safe and effective are mutually exclusive.”
I’ve blogged about it before – as have many others. Control is not something that works well in social media conversations. Companies are afraid that an offhand remark about using a product like Clorox could lead to lawsuits, especially if made by an employee. Granted, these are valid concerns. But it’s going to be real interesting to see how much bad social media will be created by lawyer tinkering. Or how many draconian social media policies will be created that basically stifle any meaningful use of social media by organizations with much to give and much to gain.
This will continue to be a hot topic, as what someone says or days in social media will become actionable. IE if someone apologizes for product or service shortcomings…that’s an admission of guilt. Could someone use that tweet or blog post to sue for refund, damages?
Where there is reward, there is risk and fully open social media does not work for all companies and brands. Some cultures will embrace social media, others hide from it behind the legal fine print. FWIW.
I find this very interesting, as there are no libel/slander laws set in the world of social media. How can we as bloggers protect ourselves? After all, the majority of blogs are mere opinion pieces anyway – they don’t have the same level of authority that professional news organizations do. Do we really need to worry about defending ourselves?
On the other hand, how many times have we all seen pictures or comments our “friends” have posted about us on Facebook that we’d like to see taken down? Do these people own the rights to our images or private conversations? Must we start hiding our faces from the populist paparazzi to keep unflattering pictures off the internet?
I’ll be very interested to see how privacy laws will evolve to deal with this in future.