Social Media, Work | featured news

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online. Employers often seek to discourage comments that paint them in a negative light. Don’t discuss company matters publicly, a typical social media policy will say, and don’t disparage managers, co-workers or the company itself. Violations can be a firing offense.

Maryland is poised to become the first state to ban employers from demanding applicants or workers hand over their log-in information for social media sites like Facebook....

Facebook has weighed in on a practice by some businesses asking employees or job applicants for their passwords to the popular social-media site.

A Democratic senator from Connecticut is writing a bill that would stop the practice of employers asking job applicants for their Facebook or other social media passwords, he told The Associated Press on Thursday. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said that such a practice is an "unreasonable invasion of privacy for people seeking work."

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

Employees who tweet or update their Facebook status saying ‘I had a bad day at
work’ could face losing their jobs, says a leading employment lawyer.

Social networking has crept into the enterprise with little oversight.