Will Your Next Tweet Be a WSJ Headline ? (There Are Alternatives!)

Browsing through the RSS feeds today and I see an article about a “press court” ruling in UK…  it seems that an employee of the Department of Transport made some comments about “not liking her job” and she was “nursing a hangover” at work…  well… it is not unusual to hear these things in face-to-face conversations but when they are on twitter it just might be tomorrow’s headline !

“Worker Confession – Trains are unsafe !”   could have been the headline from those “minor comments” in a public social medium.   Well, that doesn’t sound fair, isn’t there some way to stop journalists from using your tweets in their stories ?  “I was just tweeting to my followers” sounds like a good defense in court, but this “press court” in UK made the following ruling:

“In reaching its decision on the case, the Commission judged that the publicly accessible nature of the information was a “key consideration”. It was quite clear that the potential audience for the information was actually much larger than the 700 people who followed the complainant directly, not least because any message could easily be retweeted to a wider audience.”

To her credit, she had included a clear disclaimer on her Twitter feed that the views expressed there were personal, and were not representative of her employer but the court still ruled that one can reasonably assume that this information will become public !   Ahhh…  reminds me of the wiki-leaks case as well !

So in conclusion, if you are in a PUBLIC FORUM then you are speaking PUBLICLY.  Your only alternative is to participate in a forum that both implements technical security measures and  states that the purpose of your account is to conduct PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS with followers.    These exist !

Click here to read the entire PCC ruling article.