The dark side of social media

..She ended up losing her job, getting scolded by strangers online, being called names and declared a “white b***h” – and all that happened while she was on a plane to South Africa..

Every month, the world’s online population spends an equivalent of four million years on the Internet. Of that, the most popular activity is social media, at 22% of the time.

In Malaysia alone, there are 17.5 million Internet users and nearly 90% of them access Facebook. There were 13.3 million Facebook users in Malaysia as of July last year.

These incredible statistics, based on reports from ComScore and DigitalBuzz, show how social media has transformed modern life, from the way we communicate to how advertisers promote their products or employers hire staff.

For all that is good about social media, there is also a dark and ugly side to it.

When the public relations head of InterActiveCorp, Justine Sacco, tweeted that she was flying to South Africa and “Hope I don’t get AIDS … just kidding, I’m white!”, she probably thought she was making an off-colour joke and that nobody would chastise her for it.

She ended up losing her job, getting scolded by strangers online, being called names and declared a “white b***h” – and all that happened while she was on a plane to South Africa.

Anton Casey, a British expatriate in Singapore working with wealth management company Crossinvest Asia, infuriated Singaporeans last month when he posted a picture of his son in the MRT with the caption “Daddy, where is your car and who are all these poor people” and followed it with a picture of his luxury car with the caption: “Normal service can resume, once I have washed the stench of public transport off me.”

Screen captures of his post showed that he had set his Facebook post privacy to “friends only”, but somehow it had gone viral. When it did, it led to a veritable social media scandal which ended with him losing his job and being forced to flee to another country.

The one thing Sacco and Casey have in common, besides their sheer thoughtlessness, was that without social media, their lives would not have been negatively affected over a careless remark they posted on Facebook and Twitter.

One may argue that such racist or bigoted people deserve the backlash they got and their terminations justified.

However, did their actions really warrant getting the sack? After all, the companies they worked for were not directly named, nor was it proven that their companies were adversely affected by those remarks.

And, if the comments had not gone viral like they did, would Sacco or Casey have been fired?

While there has not been any report of similar cases in Malaysia, employers here are very aware of the grey area that is social media.

Malaysian Employers Federation executive director Shamsuddin Bardan told The Heat that inappropriate postings on social media that damage the reputation of an employer are grounds for dismissal.

“If there are inappropriate postings made by an employee that directly implicate the company, employers have every right to take action. Postings that belittle the company, refer to the company with rude names, or are false and malicious are some examples,” he said.

However, he noted that in the case of Casey and Sacco, their terminations were difficult to justify and there is a grey area.

“If the situation is a comment made but does not mention the company name directly, or is unrelated to the company’s business, then it is a different scenario altogether,” he said, adding that the two were fired only because the public response was intensely negative.

It is worth noting that the Employment Act 1955 does not specify social media behaviour as grounds for termination of service, only “misconduct”.

Does this mean that our employment Act is woefully backward?

A human resource practitioner of 25 years, Lucy Ng said the Employment Act does not list out the grounds for dismissal with the exception of unexplained absence from work.

“Misconduct and misdemeanour falls under the Industrial Relations Act, but even then, sacking an employee is one of the hardest things to do in Malaysia,” she said.

She explained that in the case where an employer has found an employee to have stolen from the company, conducted himself or herself in a manner which damages the company’s reputation, or committed a crime, the company must hold an internal inquiry and provide evidence of the misconduct.

“Only when the employer has proven the misconduct before a board of industrial relations officers under the Human Resource Ministry can the employee be fired,” she said.

The Ant Daily