Tweets can return to bite you

'I re-sent my original email to him,' he said, 'and within 24 hours " problem solved!'

'I re-sent my original email to him,' he said, 'and within 24 hours " problem solved!'

Published Oct 10, 2014

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Durban - Twitter and Facebook users should treat themselves “like a celebrity online”, because what they post to social media can come back to bite them.

Media law consultant Emma Sadleir said in Durban on Thursday that students could be expelled from institutions and employees fired from work for malicious tweets.

Speaking at a public lecture on the Legal, Disciplinary and Reputational Risks of Social Media, hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, she said employers were correctly being consistent in taking action and even dismissing employees for comments made on social networking sites.

Sadleir said South Africans were using social media badly in their personal and professional capacities.

“We are living in a generation of digital letters, where we want to document all you do. Whether you’re sleeping, eating, social media is like the CCTV of our lives and something that should not be documented.”

Sadleir said social media got “noisy” quickly, and even if a person had few followers – for example, if they said something racist – people would put pressure on their companies to act immediately.

She cited the example of former US public relations executive, Justine Sacco, whose tweet about her trip to Africa in December read: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Sacco, who said she was a native of South Africa, was fired and apologised for her “needless and careless tweet” after the comment stirred up a firestorm on social media.

CNN.com said the incident, which online publisher Boing Boing called “the tweet heard round the world”, was a glaring reminder that every word uttered on the internet could be heard by seemingly everyone on the internet, sometimes with serious consequences.

When Sacco landed in Cape Town, she had already been fired by her company, whose share price plummeted overnight, Sadleir said.

She said it was “cyberspace fallacy” that once a person was online they were absolved of the real world – the legal consequences came into effect once a published message, tweet or post had been seen.

“The legal consequences kick in once a message is seen by one other person. There is this desperate ignorance that there are no legal consequences.”

Locally, former Hawks spokesman McIntosh Polela lost his job for tweeting that he wished hip hop singer Molemo “Jub Jub” Maarohanye fans had offered him a jar of Vaseline ahead of his first night in jail – a reference to rape in South African prisons.

Maarohanye was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for killing four schoolboys while drag-racing in Soweto in 2010. The sentence was halved on Thursday on appeal.

Polela had claimed that his tweets were for his followers only.

But Sadleir said there was no privacy defence online.

She said for students and professionals, there were ethical considerations over and above the law, and people should also desist from criticising their bosses or institutions on social media.

Sadleir said she was an advocate for freedom of expression, but people should be mindful that they have signed contracts and should adhere to existing codes of conduct.

Defamation, privacy and hate speech were the most prevalent cases being dealt with in social media law in South Africa, she said.

As a rule of thumb, social media users should know that “as soon as anything appears in digital format, you can no longer have control of it”.

Daily News

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