Can They Post That? Plan Ahead For Social Media Posts From Rogue Employees - Corporate/Commercial Law - United States

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We’ve all seen the YouTube videos. The boy taking a bath in the Burger King sink. The Golden Corral manager who was allegedly hiding expired food from health inspectors. The, um, grossness of the adolescent fantasy the Domino’s Pizza employees. Employees who “go rogue” on social media and do damage to their employer’s brands on social media.

It’s a question that I and the other franchise attorneys at Fox Rothschild get a lot: what can we do to attempt to head off employee social media activity that might be harmful to the brand? The answer is that you need a written social media policy that is effective and legally enforceable. As my colleague Christina Stoneburner noted in an article written for Inside Counsel, you need to be careful when drafting such a policy. Recent court decisions tell us that social media posts by employees meant to be private are just that: private. An employer cannot coerce its employees to provide passwords to private sites. Similarly, the NLRB has determined that one employee simply “liking” another employee’s post on social media may be “concerted activity”.

Source: www.mondaq.com

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