In today’s technology-driven society, individuals are finding more and more ways to use technology in their everyday lives. One of the largest and fastest growing phenomena in the technology realm is that of social media. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs. There are hundreds if not thousands of different ways for individuals to connect with others on the internet to share information. For purposes of this discussion, all such sites will simply be referred to as “social media.” Individuals share pictures of children, catch up with lost classmates, follow interesting people’s lives, and, as shown recently, even coordinate political uprisings.
The business world has clearly been affected by the social media boom. Employers are finding new ways to use social media to market their products and services to a larger market. It is difficult to think of any large company that does not have its own Facebook page or Twitter account. Kim Kardashian makes a living by having companies pay her $10,000.00 per “tweet.”
However, this boom in social media has quickly created new and unique legal issues for employers. Can an employer search the Facebook page of a prospective employee and have that page factor into hiring decisions? Can an employer fire an employee for a Twitter post that disparages the company? What happens if an employee posts private information about a co-employee on MySpace?
Although it seems hard to believe now, social media1 actually got its start in the 1990s with bulletin boards, chatrooms, and instant messaging created by internet service providers such as Compuserve and America Online.2 These forms of social media allowed large numbers of users to gather to discuss various issues of the day and allowed each individual user to create a profile that gave basic information about himself or herself.
Social media, as it is known today, truly got its start in 2002 with the creation of Friendster.com. Friendster allowed users to create a profile, together with a profile picture, and allowed each user to add other users into his or her “Circle of Friends.” Friendster promoted the idea that a rich online community can exist only between people who truly have common bonds. Just a year after its launch, Friendster boasted more than three million registered users.3
In 2003 both LinkedIn and MySpace were created. LinkedIn keyed on the professional working class with the idea that you could meet and maintain business contacts through the internet. MySpace took a decidedly more social approach, allowing users to share music and videos. Facebook was created just a year later, in 2004. Originally designed only for use by college students (a valid college e-mail address used to be a requirement), Facebook now allows anyone with a valid e-mail address to create a profile.4 Several other similar sites, such as Twitter and YouTube, were created in the following years, all with the same goal—allow users to quickly interface and share information with each other.
Today, social media can be described as gigantic, enormous, or a plethora of other over-the-top-yet-accurate adjectives. Twitter now has more than one billion “tweets” per month.5 Facebook now has 600 million users worldwide, generating an estimated 770 billion page views each month. The average Facebook user visits the site 40 times per month, spending an average of 23 minutes (23:20 to be precise) on each visit. That adds up to an average of 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook in a month per user. Together, all Facebook users combined spend 9.3 billion hours on Facebook in a month, which is the equivalent of 1,065,449 years (and these facts do not even include time spent accessing Facebook through mobile apps).6 If those statistics were not enough, YouTube serves up 1 billion videos per day which are viewed 12.2 billion times each day just in the United States alone.7
What these statistics show is that social media is not going away any time soon. If anything, social media has just started. However, because social media is still new, many employers are not fully aware of the unique legal issues that social media brings to the workplace.
Over the new few weeks, I will post several articles that discuss many of the larger legal issues that employers face as a result of the boom in social media so that employers can hopefully be better prepared to deal with the onslaught of legal issues that is the likely by-product of the social media craze.
1 As used in this article, social media only refers to social media on the internet. To be sure, there have been numerous ways for human interaction prior to the advent of the internet, but the social media context in play in this article is only that which is found on the internet.
2 http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-social-networking/.
5 http://www.huddleproductions.com/?p=600.
6 http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/02/04/facebook-youtube-our-collective-time-sinks-stats/.
This column is published for informational purposes only. It should not be construed as legal advice and is not intended to create an attorney client relationship. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s law firm or its individual partners.