Social Media

[Mitch Henessey]

A little while ago I posted a story about Vinita Hegwood. Hegwood was a Texas teacher, who posted a series of racial tweets about Ferguson. At first, Hegwood was silent about the incident, but she later explained she posted the tweets in self defense during a heated debate about Ferguson on Twitter. After a board meeting, The Duncanville Independent School District Board of Trustees came to unanimous decision to terminate Hegwood's contract. You can read the story here-

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/14/texas-teacher-fired-ferguson-tweet/19020821/

Hegwood is not the first case of someone running into trouble or losing their job over a social media post. Every now and then, a story about a disgruntled and frustrated employee taking to Twitter or Facebook to voice their opinions pops up, and one of the more reoccurring trends involves waiters or waitresses posting a pic of a rude message from a customer after a bad tip or no tip at all. That, or someone posts a controversial opinion on race, religion, current events, sometimes it's a joke taken the wrong way, or someone has a full blown meltdown, and it's enough to spark an uproar.

When you stop and think about it, social media is a strange conundrum. On one hand, you can say social media is a place to connect or reconnect with friends, relatives, old friends, or long lost relatives. It's a place to have a chance to connect with your favorite celebrities or athletes, a place to have some fun, or some use it as a tool to promote themselves with no real strings attached for spending money.

But at the same time, someone can damage their reputation beyond repair, risk a suspension or some other form of discipline from their employer, or they're taking a real risk of losing their jobs over a hashtag or a Facebook post. To add to that, we live in a time, where "cyberbullying" is a thing.

It's a tricky slope for accountability. More often than not, public figures, celebrities and athletes are held to a higher standard for their opinions and crossing certain lines. Sure, they can delete whatever they posted, but with screenshots and other media outlets, they can't simply move on and forget about the whole fiasco. Meanwhile, in certain cases, if the Average Joe posts posts something hateful or controversial, they'll face little to no backlash.

As far as celebrities, athletes, other public figures, or some like Vinita Hegwood being held to higher standard for social media goes, it's a case of using better judgement and being more careful. Freedom of speech is used as a defense in most social media incidents, but sometimes it's more of a crutch, because freedom of speech is a two-way street. Or maybe it's better to avoid social media altogether. I've read interviews from actresses and actors, who refuse to use social media, because the first thought or reaction that pops into your head is never the best one.

Also, and this is something KB said in here a while ago, but is it so hard to use a pseudonym for social media accounts? Or maybe a journal to write your thoughts in, and if you really need to get something off of your chest, you can always open up to a close friend.

When you consider all the potential problems and headaches, is social media worth it? Or is it case of people taking things too seriously?

Is it unfair to hold athletes, celebrities, and public figures to a higher standard?

All thoughts regarding the topic and social media in general are welcome.

 

[Mustang Sally]

Or is it case of people taking things too seriously?

That part is a real problem because of political correctness. Today, just about anything one might say is going to outrage someone......and that's the word I mean to use; when you read social media and regular media, they don't describe people getting "mad" or "angry" anymore. Today, they're "outraged" and it's alternately amusing and discouraging to see the types of things that upset them, sometimes apparently to within an inch of their sanity.

You want to try to inject some gentle humor into the posting? Be really careful, because someone might very well take offense at something that was considered funny years ago.

As for the rest, I had a cousin who worked for a furniture store. She couldn't resist making comments about how unfairly she was being treated by her employer. I warned her to stop....and warned her again, since if I could read the entries, so could her employer.

She laughed.....she kept on posting....she was fired......ostensibly for some reason other than her online shenanigans, but we all knew from whence her troubles started, and she admitted as much.

Use social media at your own risk.....and if you wind up in difficulty because of what you wrote, remember that it's trouble you could have easily avoided.

 

[Jack-Hammer]

Like anything else, social media has its ups and downs. There are more ups than downs but, of course, it's easy to see where some people might think it's the opposite because it's always the various downs that you hear about on the news The thing about posting stuff on internet forums, leaving comments on various stories on news websites like CNN or Fox News is that it offers some degree of anonymity. As a result, it's not at all uncommon for people to post things that they might not ever say in real life, especially if it's a comment on something pretty controversial. Sometimes, people will flat out come off like jerks online because of a the anonymity.

Social media is a bit different because it's easier to find out who you are. If you post something on Facebook or Twitter, people can easily find out who you are as you have to have an account on those sites. Social media can be a good thing when it comes to being able to communicate over great distances and getting information quickly. At the same time, however, some people often abuse it much as they do in any other form of internet communication by posting things that they probably shouldn't.

A lot of people believe that free speech is a shield that's designed to and can protect them from whatever comes along, but that's not how it is. For instance, if you're someone with racist beliefs, then you have the right to voice those beliefs and you're entitled to your racist opinions. However, free speech doesn't offer protection from the possible consequences of voicing those beliefs in a public forum, and places like Twitter and Facebook are public forums. If your employer sees stuff like that and you wind up fired, then be prepared to be fired or severely reprimanded.

At the same time, I do think that some people are overly sensitive and use social media to sometimes blow things far, far out of proportion. We've seen it happen in wrestling a few times in the past several years with Jack Swagger & Zeb Coulter, we've seen it happen with CM Punk & Paul Heyman, we've seen it happen with Rusev & Lana and some others. A lot of the time, I think people post rants & raves on social media just for the sake of doing it. Some people like attention, they enjoy stirring things up and making things controversial even if there's nothing really controversial happening. Of course it's not always someone blowing things out of proportion, whether it be allegations of cyberbullying or making something relatively benign in something controversial.

Generally speaking, I don't think there'd be so much controversy surrounding social media if people used some common sense and behaved with some common decency. Instead, you often have people starting shit just because they have a venue to do so that doesn't require much effort on their part.

 

[rmp0012002]

If something you can post to social media can be misconstrued by someone regardless if it is in defense of something then you should avoid posting it. You can say that's not what you meant or your words were taken out context but that is always going to be a losing argument. Think before you post.