Social Media Risk and the Law

A Guide for Global Communicators

Susan Grantham, Mark Pearson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000440874
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Business Communication

Social media has many advantages for professional communication – but it also carries considerable risks, including legal pitfalls. This book equips students and communication professionals with the knowledge and skills to help minimise the risks that can arise when they post or host on social media. It offers them strategies for taking advantage of the opportunities of social media while also navigating the ethical, legal, and organisational risks that can lead to audience outrage, brand damage, expensive litigation and communication crises. The book uses stakeholder theory and risk analysis tools to anticipate, identify, address and balance these opportunities and risks. It takes a global approach to risk and social media law, drawing on fascinating case studies from key international jurisdictions to explain and illustrate the basic principles. Whether you are a corporate communicator, social media manager, journalist, marketer, blogger or student you will find this book an essential addition to your professional library as the first reference point when social media and legal risks arise.

Part 1
Social media law and risk management

Introduction and context

1
Introduction – defining the boundaries of the theory and practice of social media risk

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180111-2

Glossary

Excellence theory: A landmark organisational theory premised on effective communication with stakeholders, acknowledging equity and a socially responsible approach to public relations as a key and discrete managerial function.

Risk: The chance of adverse ethical, legal and/or organisational reactions based on the combination of probability and impact.

Risk management The process of identifying and controlling risk, and the implementation of strategies to mitigate organisational risk.

Social identity: Defining someone through their many social interests and values.

Social media risk The potential ethical, legal and organisational dangers in social media communication.

Stakeholder theory An important theory of public communication and management that acknowledges the range of participants who might benefit – or be impacted by – the decisions and actions of an organisation, including its social media activities. It stems from business and management scholarship and allows us to identify and map the key stakeholders affected by organisational decisions and announcements.

Abstract

Social media is now a key communication tool used by professional communication practitioners to engage audiences directly. It offers many rewards, but it is just as important to know about its risks. The uptake of social media by professional communicators was initially slow, but it is now an essential part of organisational communication, both internally and externally. This chapter explores the history of traditional communication methods and the impact traditional theory has on the current approach to social media. It further considers the ways social media has become central to organisational communication before explaining how the dynamics of this multi-channel, real-time and global communication method has created significant risks that need to be anticipated, identified and addressed.

In this chapter

• Introduction
• The changing landscape
• Case study 1.1 – Indian Ocean tsunami
• Case study 1.2 – Christchurch terror attack
• Case study 1.3 – Footballer’s post case : Folau v. Rugby Australia
• Understanding risk: ethical, legal and organisational
• Theoretical underpinnings
• Discussion questions and project topics
• Practice tips
• Cases cited
• References

Introduction

Justine Sacco, corporate communications chief of a major Internet company, posted this flippant tweet just before her flight departed from London to Cape Town:

Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!

By the time her 11-hour flight landed, the tweet had gone viral under the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet and had been reported in 24/7 online media. Within a few hours she had been sacked from her highly paid position for her ‘hateful statements’ despite claiming this was not the intention of her post.

That was back in 2013, and you might think corporate communicators would not be as naïve in their use of social media today. Sadly, in each year that has passed since then, there have been countless examples of personnel causing reputational and legal damage to their organisations through their social media posts. This book is aimed at helping you better understand the theory and practice of social media risk management and the law so you learn to pause and reflect before you post something that might damage your organisation and your career.

By 2021 there were reported to be more than 4.2 billion active social media users globally (Smart Insights 2020; Hootsuite 2021). Social media has changed the way individuals communicate with large corporations, governments, media and each other. It allows users to share information and participate in online discussions as part of a networked society (Castells 2011; Eriksson 2016). Organisational use of social media can tend to overlook the fact that people, their intentions and social desires are at the heart of engagement. Although social media has sped up the rate at which information can circulate, the human agency involved in deciding whether or not to engage tends to be underestimated.

Social media has created unique ways to document events, and offers individuals new ways to communicate with organisations, including the media. Citizens can produce factual video or photographic evidence of events either live or very soon after their occurrence, creating a cost-effective approach to news collection, production and distribution. This is also an extremely useful tool in other forms of professional and strategic communication, where user generated content (UGC) can be used to enhance engagement with an audience. It is also a source for crowdsourcing ideas and obtaining specific information from the audience. Social media allows this to occur because it creates a voice for the community to communicate in unprecedented ways and engage with organisations about topics that are important to them. While this is a powerful tool, it comes with risks that need to be anticipated, identified and minimised.

The changing landscape

First, we need to lay the platform for our understanding of social media by considering traditional organisational communication methods. Two-way communication between organisations and their stakeholders has been considered an important approach since the 1980s when Grunig and Hunt (1984) developed four models of public relations. Two of their four models required two-way communication, encouraging an organisation to engage directly with its relevant public and develop an appropriate communication method. Following the development of this important communication theory, the Excellence Team conducted what is still the largest longitudinal public relations research study of best practices. It produced the Excellence Theory, which highlighted the importance of two-way communication. This theory has influenced public relations literature and professional practice (Grunig & Grunig 1996; 2008; Grunig, Grunig & Dozier 2002; Grunig, Grunig & Toth 2007) and has created an expectation for professional communicators to incorporate engagement with the public into their communication practice. Despite the decades that have passed since the development of the original Excellence Theory, there is strong alignment to the use of social media that now involves organisations engaging in direct communication with their publics.

Why do we start here? Traditionally this two-way communication approach would entail focus groups, surveys and market research among other techniques to ensure the communication outputs of an organisation are suited to its intended purpose. Instead, social media use has established direct engagement with the target audience or stakeholder, providing an opportunity for circular discussion – with the potential for gauging whether communication outputs are appropriate for the designated purpose. Success in social media requires engagement. However, engagement through multi-channel communication on social media has allowed the community to develop voices that can be heard by many. It has created an environment for so-called ‘echo chambers’ to form, where people with similar views can come together and strengthen opinions. It has also created a platform for ‘dark social’, which is the space where information can be shared without trackable analytics, providing power and freedom to its users but making it impossible to trace the origin of certain messages. Social media is a positive change to the way organisations can communicate important messages, but it does open up the possibility of serious risk.

One of the most serious concerns with social media risk is the speed at which it has become a key communication tool used by professionals and organisations. Let’s take a quick look at the timeline of social media, focusing on its professional applications:

• 1979 – UseNet. Early stages of a networked society through a virtual newsletter. It is now one of the oldest online communication examples still in use.
• 1988 – Internet Relay Chats (IRC). Designed by a Finnish IT professional, it was the first chat network. It was designed to allow group communication on discussion boards by transferring data between servers.
• 1994 – First blog – Live.net. Created by Justin Hall, it is considered the first blog site that started as a web-based diary. In 2021 it is estimated that one-third of all websites worldwide are blogs.
• 1997 – SixDegrees. The first example of social media, SixDegrees was popular between 1997 and 2001. At its height it had 3.5 million members.
• 2003 – LinkedIn. In its first year the site had 1 million professionals sign up to use it. By 2021, the number of monthly users had risen to 722 million, with more than 55 million companies having LinkedIn pages.
• 2003 – WordPress. Set up as a content management system available to everyone, WordPress now hosts more than one-third of websites on the Internet and is a ubiquitous host for blogs.
• 2004 – Facebook. Approximately 1 million users were recorded in its first year. By 2021 the site recorded 2.74 billion active monthly users and 90 million small business users.
• 2005 – YouTube. In its first year, YouTube had huge success including an uploaded video that received more than 1 million views. Most recent statistics show that YouTube has 2.3 billion active monthly users uploading, sharing and viewing content.
• 2006 – Twitter. There are now more than 353 million users on Twitter with 500 million tweets being sent each day, including world-changing tweets by then US president Donald Trump in the 2017–2021 period.
• 2007 – The hashtag. Now a powerful distribution strategy, the hashtag is what brings the social media community together on topics of interest and allows topics to ‘trend’ across platforms. It has been the core of significant social movements including #metoo and #blacklivesmatter.
• 2009 – Large companies and governments started using social media to communicate directly with audiences in an easy and cost-effective way.
• 2010 – Instagram. One of the first mainstream social media platforms that focussed on images, 25,000 people signed up to use Instagram on its first day and it reached 1 million users within three months. By 2021 it recorded more than 1 billion users.
• 2011 – Snapchat. In 2021 this platform had close to 400 million active monthly users and in excess of 1 billion ‘snaps’ (time-limited multimedia posts) per day.
• 2016 – TikTok. Originally released as Douyin, it was launched as TikTok in 2017 as a video-sharing platform that allows users to share 15-second videos accompanied by a soundtrack. By 2021 there were 689 million monthly users of this platform.
• 2016/2017 – Livefeed video and ‘stories’ added to mainstream social media platforms. This revolutionised the way organisations communicated with audiences and allowed for events, such as press conferences, to be livestreamed for all to witness. In 2021, both Facebook and Instagram recorded more than 500 million accounts using ‘stories’ each day.

While there are many other technological developments that contributed to the use of social media as a professional communication tool, the previous events show how quickly things have unfolded and why social media is still an emerging professional tool. To set the scene, we will look at some key events that prompted significant changes in the way professional communicators engaged with their audiences using technology and social media sharing platforms.

Case study 1.1 – Indian Ocean tsunami

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami claimed more than 227,000 lives and was the first crisis where a large number of sensational first-person accounts appeared in citizens’ blogs and webpages, giving detailed accounts of personal experiences. With Facebook still in its infancy, and Twitter not yet on the scene, these individual posts were seen as unique and extraordinary contributions to mainstream media coverage and precursors of many more to come in the social media era. It created a new way to manage natural disasters and involved the government relying on public engagement to understand the specifics of the incident as it unfolded and how to respond appropriately. This shows us the power of social media for both government and large corporations and reinforces why social media has become the key communication tool used worldwide.

Case study 1.2 – Christchurch terror attack

The 2019 Christchurch terror incident was the first time a social media live video was used to stream such an horrific act to the world. As well as prompting governments to pass laws prohibiting the hosting of such live-streamed atrocities, it has changed the landscape for organisations when planning and managing risk and reinforces that each member of the public holds the potential to be a social actor and to be heard. Although risk has been of concern in social media professional use for some time, this incident manifested these concerns via an unexpected use of social media. It highlighted the need for organ-isations to consider and mitigate risk...