The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on January 17th, 2012 by tasha
I am continuing my series on social media policies. The last post was on intellectual property laws and thoughts on how to guide your employees so they don’t inadvertently trigger a copyright infringement suit. The social media policy post before that looked mostly at HIPAA and employee social media policies you need to have even if you aren’t publishing on Facebook, Twitter or a blog.
For this entry, we’re going to look at defamation, libel and false light. To be honest, when I started researching this, I didn’t think it was much of an issue for elder care professionals.
Hmmm.
And even if you don’t define yourself as an advocate (not that you should), the weird thing about the Internet is that even one obscure little blogpost could end up being seen by millions. Double hmmm. That puts the stakes a little higher than your average brochure or flyer and makes it wise to understand how to say what you need to say AND protect yourself.
Recognizing that I am not a lawyer, here is a thumbnail set of definitions and guidelines I gleaned from the Citizen Media Law Project of Harvard University:
As a rule, we tend to shy away from controversy. Harsh, critical commentary is not usually the style with elder care professionals. But if there is something you just have to let fly on, it appears that as long as you are extremely clear that this is your opinion, and your facts are true, your legal liability is limited.
Again, I am not a lawyer.
The Citizen Media Law Project recommends some guidelines to consider:
But what if your followers are the ones who post something defamatory?
It turns out, you are not liable. The Communications Decency Act legally protects you from liability for user-submitted communication. As long as the posting was submitted by someone outside your organization, you are not legally on the hook. That said, talk to your business liability insurance carrier. They may have some opinions on the matter.
Regardless of liability, however, what is the tone you wish to set? Controversy is popular. You will get a lot of traffic, especially with spicey headlines. (My most popular blogpost so far was a somewhat feisty anti-ageism piece entitled “Don’t call me ’senior’!“) But is the traffic you receive going to come away with an accurate sense of your business’ personality?
Perhaps being a strident advocate is part of your professional image. (I do get pretty feisty about ageism.) By all means, then, have at it with the above precautions. But if you ask yourself, “What adjectives do I want potential clients to associate with my business?” and you come up with softer ones, such as “warm, caring and compassionate” then statements that might lead to defamation or false light might not be in your best interest.
It’s perfectly fine to remove defamatory comments, although it is considered best practice to publish an inclusion/deletion policy. This will help your staff understand your guidelines, and provide public warning/disclosure/justification for any comments you choose to delete.
For samples of inclusion and deletion policies other healthcare companies use in social media, I recommend the Social Media Governance website.
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