It didn’t take long for visiting New York University professor Geoffrey Miller to start damage control last week after he told "obese PhD applicants" they wouldn’t have the will power to finish dissertations if they “didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs.”
Hours after Miller's fat-shaming tweet attracted the Internet's viral ire, the evolutionary psychology professor tweeted two hasty clarifications: One claimed the infamous tweet “obviously” didn't reflect the views of his employer, while the other claimed his “idiotic, impulsive and badly judged” statement -- a statement, mind you, he actually defended before later claiming was scientific research -- didn’t even reflect his views.
Miller, whose profile is now private, originally got off lucky. Offended Twitter users quickly called for his job, but by the next day, NYU considered Miller’s regret sufficient, his job still in place and the case closed. Now, they're taking another look, as is the University of New Mexico, where Miller also teaches. Don’t think his backpedaling will help him out, however. Whether your bio warns that “views are my own” or that “RTs aren’t endorsements,” Twitter disclaimers won’t save you when questionable social media use gets you in hot water at work.
“It certainly doesn’t have any legal effect,” says Dan Schaeffer, an attorney at law firm Neal & McDevitt who focuses on technology and intellectual property law. “It’s not going to prevent your employer from firing you if you say something that reflects badly, and it’s not going to prevent people from associating your views with your employer.”
Bradley Shear, a Washington, D.C.-area attorney who runs a blog on social media law, agrees. "A lot of people don't realize that just by tweeting or retweeting something, it doesn't matter what type of disclaimer you have," he says. "The fact that you are disseminating information, there are legal liabilities and risks."
Basically, if any of your conduct -- both online and off -- is deemed harmful to your company’s brand or reputation, it pretty much has the right to give you the ax. Your views? Still your own. Your job? Not so much.
Now, there are some exceptions to when tweets can get you fired: Discrimination laws prevent companies from terminating employees on the basis of race, religion and other characteristics, and these protections apply to tweets, too. Certain contracts and unions govern specific grounds for termination, while certain behaviors, such as complaining about workplace conditions or your boss online, can be considered protected concerted activity -- activity for which you can’t be fired. But unless you find yourself in situations like these, you might as well stop wasting precious characters.
“If I send a drunk tweet or talk about naked ladies, my employer’s not going to not fire me because I put that [disclaimer] in my bio,” says Jessica Miller-Merrell, the founder of Xceptional HR who consults on social media and human resources issues. “They still can fire you for those things, just like, depending on the state, I could move to terminate you if you were wearing the company uniform and went out and got really drunk.”
And yet, these phrases still show up in profile after profile. According to Schaeffer, people just don't fully understand what they're posting. “Views are my own” and “RTs not endorsements” are examples of a handful of legal-sounding, bite-sized expressions that spread across the Internet like urban legends nobody bothers to check. Often, they have to do with copyright: Music fans on YouTube will upload artists’ songs and videos without worry, thinking that as long as they note “no copyright intended” in the comments, they’re safe. (Wrong.) Blogs and websites will grab photos they find on Google Images, thinking that as long as they identify where they found it, they’re in the clear. (Also wrong.) And on Facebook, users circulate cut-and-paste chain statuses -- like this hoax from last fall -- they believe exempt them from the terms of privacy or content control. (Still wrong.)
“What happens is people latch on to ideas that circulate through the non-legal culture,” Schaeffer says. “These things become talismans that people wave in hopes of fending off legal liability. It’s not true, and it’s not legally valid, but people believe them. I’m not sure why.”
Occasionally, it’s the employers and HR departments who require the disclaimers. Including the phrases certainly doesn’t hurt, and they can clarify what’s a professional account and what’s a personal account, but in most cases, Miller-Merrell says it’s the same type of misinformation that leads higher-ups to request the warnings. “Having a disclaimer in a Twitter bio is a way to make the boss feel better if they don’t necessarily understand Twitter,” she says. “It’s something that makes you sleep better.”
So if no magic jargon will save you, how do you avoid a social media disaster on the scale of the NYU professor? The answer, according to Miller-Merrell, is regular training and information. There’s neither a one-size-fits-all disclaimer nor a company-wide social media policy that will definitively outline when a tweet will or won’t cost an employee a job, but continually reviewing what employees should or shouldn’t be posting means they won’t need to bet on weasel words when the inevitable strikes.
“These are things employers have to be thinking about," Miller-Merrell says. "It’s not a question of if it’s going to happen. It’s a question of when and, then, what's your strategy.”
