A couple of years ago, I watched a young woman tweet about how much she hated her job and her boss. Part of me wanted to message her to tell her to take that stuff off the public timeline. Clearly she didn’t know what she was doing. And then I saw her boss tweet to her, “No worries. You’re fired.”
I’d venture to guess she learned a pretty valuable lesson. But she’s not the only person in the world who takes to complaining online. Just open your Facebook news stream and you’ll probably see at least one or two of your friends who hate their jobs or their colleagues or something else that isn’t appropriate to put online.
The law is very vague. If an employee posts things on his or her personal pages, on their own time, and from their own computers, it’s not a fire-able offense. After all, we can’t change what people say in their own homes. The difference is, now we can see what they’re saying — and so can the rest of the world.