Please read the below essay and provide a response in 50 to 75 words.

Social Media:

            It’s the way to communicate and interact with people was different when compared with traditional media. It’s very hard to control content as social media gives us an option to comment and share the content to n number of users.

Even large companies and organizations use social media for their business purpose and made part of employee’s daily use in the office. This made to identify integrity risk as one of the main ethical challenges with regard to social media. Which means a threat to an organization by the member of organization. When an employee posts a bad comment, replies in an irresponsible manner in social media, revealing companies trade secrets etc., while he is representing an organization or company. Then it leads to integrity risk of company (Mintz, 2014).

Employee should know what is okay and what is not okay when he or she is posting or commenting about their employer. Often, we can see employers take action when employees post inappropriate or wrong information on social media which eventually cause harm to the company reputation. Here the information can be in the form of harassment, disclosure of company’s secrets, posting unnecessary or irrelevant comments related to any sensation events etc., This might lead to employees to be fired from the company. During these scenarios’ employers should have a clear and concise social media policy to their employees (Jackson, 2016).

Example 1: One of the working professionals lost her job by revealing her company’s new client on Instagram. A young lady who works in a HR company revealed her company’s client, as per the companies & client policies it wasn’t supposed to be revealed. Which eventually lead her to lose her job (Brooman, 2019).

Example 2: Recently an employee name Rochelle Robinson who works at Brookfield Zoo had post at her work in Facebook saying, “At work serving these rude a** white people”. After this comment gone viral, Brookfield Zoo authorities replied saying, the comments made by one of employee is unacceptable and action was taken against her by termination of that employee. Here in this case, the employee did not comment anything wrong about her organization, but she made an unacceptable comment against her customers which leads the reputation of the company to goes down and leads for racism (Brooman, 2019). 

Even when employers hiring a person, he can be judged by his personality based upon the information given in his social media accounts. It eventually can lead to employers and employees right to privacy. But now a days it’s very often for the recruiting team. Privacy is one of the most common ethical issues raised in employer’s discussion when they search for applicant information over social media. Employers and HR should train their employees they can use social media until unless if it is not affecting the company policies and employees should know that posting company’s and vendors information in social media without any permission is illegal. Finally having social media policies maintained by employers is very beneficial. This helps and encourages employees to increase the brand of employer, prevent security breach, maintain brand identity across multiple platforms and etc., As per employers’ obligations, employer has enough right to monitor the computer activities that an employee does in his daily office routine. According to ECPA i.e., Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, when an employer provides a computer and free internet access to his employee, then employer has right to monitor each and everything does employee does. Even companies have some software that monitors for the keywords for example promise, sex, porn, beat, credit card details etc., that an employee is using in his daily email and chat conversion with his fellow employees (Fairness, 2020).

For example, in my previous company one of the employees started misusing the credit card given by company. He shared the details of the credit card one of communication channel called “slack”. My previous company has software which monitor all the keywords and credit card details that are been used across the communication channels in the company.  Then he was fired from the company. As per the company’s obligations it was clear mentioned in the policy using those details and sharing the info is illegal and which eventually can cost the job.