Michael Salter & Chris Bryden discuss the challenges of managing employees’ social media activity
We have written before about the dangers of social media usage by employees and the tensions in the law that arise as a result (see “Beware of the web”, 163 NLJ 7569, pp 9-10). We reviewed a number of cases which had been considered by the courts in which employees had been dismissed after misuse of social media, such as Smith v Trafford Housing Association [2012] EWHC 3221, [2013] IRLR 86 the Northern Irish case of Teggart v TeleTech UK Limited [2012] NIIT 00704_11IT and Preece v JD Wetherspoon plc ET/2104806/10. We concluded that this was an area in which guidance was required, and proposed a number of principles. These included that postings on social media sites in free time from personal equipment should not be covered automatically by a reasonable expectation of privacy, particularly where a complaint had been made; but that this did not justify a trawl of social media for disciplinary purposes absent a clear social media policy. We ventured that
