~ryanlowe/blog: Blogging Might Get You Fired

Blogging Might Get You Fired

It's dead easy to start a blog these days, and so we see more people doing it. Once they have a blog, people will talk about anything online -- it's almost as if they don't realise that anyone in the world with an Internet connection could read what they're writing.

Some bloggers might think that most people won't care about their insignificant little blog. This may be true until someone searches for a person, place or thing in a search engine and comes across your remarks on the subject. Google might put your blog front and center on a topic and there's not much you can do about other than deleting the blog post.

The global reach and the searchability of blogs is what gets people in trouble with their employers. Even though you might be blogging on your own time, what you say reflects on you as a person and ultimately reflects on your employer. If you talk about the details of your job expecting that no one will read them, that's taking a big risk. If you express an opinion that looks bad as an employee, you run the same risk.

It's not just blogging this applies to, it's just that everyday people aren't used to having a truly worldwide publishing medium like the Internet at their fingertips. They don't take the same care speaking publicly that, let's say, a Canadian Member of Parliament might use while speaking to the press each day. An MP is familiar with their publishing power, most bloggers don't seem to be aware of it.

If an employee wrote an editorial in a newspaper criticising their employer, they could very well be fired for it. Same for TV or radio. Why would blogs be treated any differently? It's not as simple as "blogging is something I do on my own time, so I can say whatever I want."

A recent example was a woman in Nunavut that was fired for candidly discussing the city on her blog. Normally this wouldn't raise eyebrows, right? But she was a tourism marketing officer for the city.

Rather than showing Nunavut as a squeeky clean tourist haven, she told it like it really was -- like posting pictures of a piles of rusted junk and criticising the bus service. The inside look at the city was pretty cool and she did this outside of her job, true ... but is this good marketing? Does it reflect well on the city?

A contract employee of Microsoft was fired for posting pictures of Macs sitting in a loading dock. An employee of Friendster was apparrently fired for blogging about their recent migration from Java to PHP server technologies.

The interesting thing about all three examples is that apparently none of them were warned -- they were just terminated. Surely there are bloggers that have been warned and removed offending posts, but the ones we hear about in the blogosphere are the ones with no warning at all.

The Internet is not a permanent medium necessarily; the posts can be removed and all of the attention in the blogging community avoided. There are things like the Wayback Machine that permanently record websites at a certain time, but it's possible a post can be removed before it does a lot of reputation damage.

Maybe this is a better road to take for employers, rather than seeming like bullies and drawing attention to the offending posts, which are often left up on the Internet after the firing anyway. Or maybe not. Maybe once the post is up the damage has been done. I'd be interested in a lawyer's opinion on that.

These firings aren't going to let up I don't think -- they'll be a regular occurrence. As the number of people with blogs increases exponentially, less bloggers will know about these firing precedents and the care they should take while blogging.

Some people don't know what's appropriate to blog about and what isn't. Maybe their managers should tell them, yeah, or maybe it should be explicitly in their contracts. Maybe employers should get employees to sign NDAs all of the time. That will make it nice and explicit and save employers a lot of trouble while saving employees from being fired. Unfortunately, all of that paper and legalese costs money.

But for employees of companies who don't make a blogging policy explicit, I suggest you tread lightly. Google, the Wayback Machine and others are watching you, even if your boss isn't.

Posted at September 05, 2004 at 12:50 PM EST
Last updated September 05, 2004 at 12:50 PM EST

Comments

On Polar Penny

You make some really good comments. I have always admitted it probably wasn't smart of me to mention where I worked in my blog. And I was naive in thinking no one but my family and friends were reading it. Live and learn, right?

The difference here is I never actually said anything negative about my employer. In fact, I didn't comment on my employer at all. They were simply mentioned in passing. I put a link to their site because, well, I thought it was a useful site for anyone interested in visiting the territory that I had made my home.

My comments were directed at my place of residence. And even then they were pretty benign. Plus, my observations were meant to be about living in a city in the arctic -- not about tourism. The only strangers (three - to give you an idea of how little traffic I actually got) who ever emailed said they liked my site and were thinking of visiting or moving.

So where does free speech end and begin? I don't think there is any one answer here at all and I don't feel prepared to discuss it with any kind of solid ground. But I am glad to see discussion about this taking place so people are aware of what can happen to you. Metafilter had an awesome discussion -- with comments from all sides. And I think the fact that legal aids, law students and lawyers are approaching me says that this is still a pretty controversial issue.

As for good marketing -- that is a matter of perspective. I don't think promoting a destination by leaving out the negative does anyone any favours. Afterall, wouldn't you be pissed to discover that a destination marketing as "undiscovered" and "pristine" was actually littered with trash for months of the year, until it was put out of sight by snow and ice? Most tourists arrive in the 6 weeks when the snow is melting, incidentally.

Since this story came out over a month ago, I have had over 9,000 hits on my site, and many visitors have left comments in my support. Compare that to the 1,700 hits I had over a six month period prior to getting fired. Most comments I have read on other sites tracking back to polar penny are sympathetic to my situation.

Is that good marketing for my former employer? It has been for me, that's for sure.

Cheers and thanks for the well-thought out comments.

Penny

» Posted by: Penny Cholmondeley at September 5, 2004 01:39 PM

there's really no such thing as free speech. we pay for it one way or another.

the company I work for has the right to employ me or not. I don't have a right to work there.

if I were to post something bad about my company in my blog, I would expect them to be upset and show that in any way they saw fit, i.e. firing.

like you said, you have to "tread lightly" but that's the way it goes when we ask other people to put food in our mouths.

dd
http://www.jadbury.com/

» Posted by: Dave Diamond at September 6, 2004 06:16 AM

I like how you used the Member of Parliament example. Well, as for me, I think I have mentioned once where I work. Which entry? I have no clue.

[[5 minute search]]

Ok, I just found it. It was in a comment I made. I have now modified that the entry lol! Google can't find it because the entries are on the Haloscan server.

Anywho, yeah. That's a tough break. I mean, I've been doing so much stuff online over the last 11 years that I don't even wanna know what I've said. I say, "Who cares." None of us are perfect, and if we happen to point out the obvious and get punished for it. So be it.

It's a damn shame though that it's come down to this.

» Posted by: roy at September 6, 2004 11:41 PM

It's interesting that you bring up the past instead of the present. It might be a lot harder to fire someone for something they said in the past (ie. before being hired), since a search on Google by the employer should have picked it up. Do companies do this? Probably not. They should be doing it just so they know what you've said in the past and can cover themselves or even just assess the risk of hiring you.

The employer is in effect hiring you in spite of anything you may have said earlier. It's so hard to prove that you still have the same opinions as when you wrote the post. Maybe you were just young, naive and foolish. If you wrote something inflamatory online while you're working at the company though, that's likely easier to get fired for.

» Posted by: Ryan at September 7, 2004 12:02 AM

the past? well that's totally different. let me flip-flop on this issue after a bit of consideration. honestly, if they want to vet someone starting work, that's one thing. but once you're hired, you're hired.

dd
http://www.jadbury.com/

» Posted by: Dave Diamond at September 7, 2004 06:37 AM

I wrote some negative things about my employer. Which would most likely get me in trouble if she found my blog and read it. But I googled my name and it did not lead me to my journal, so I think I'm in the clear. Having people though, accidently bump into your site through links and then being questioned about certain entries you wrote, is pretty weird. I want to say it is almost like, waking up after a drunken night and thinking about the little things that you did, which would cause someone to hate you. Then trying to take steps to remedy the situation or erase it completely. That is why I like the delete button and I use it often.

» Posted by: Tanya at September 8, 2004 07:27 PM