Be Careful What You Tweet For
I truly believe that their is a beautiful and useful side to Twitter. I use it my classroom to keep my students updated on their homework and people can use the service to get themselves out of prison.
But, of course there are those who do not use Twitter wisely and get themselves in trouble. There is the infamous story of the person who got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted about it and, seemed to lose the job. It went down like this:
What You Post On Twitter Can Cost You The Job: The Cisco Fatty Incident | Gradversity.com: Breaking Into The Entry Level Job Market via kwout
Even after this, you still see an amazing number of people post negative comments about their work place and other situations on Twitter. I think part of the problem is that people don’t realize how big Twitter is becoming and they don’t realize how public Twitter can be if their profiles are not set to private.
Well, now we are getting to a point where people are being sued over their tweets. I guess this was inevitable, but we entering into a new dimension of the Web 2.0 world. Here is the summary of the story:
Now, we know that Horizon is a “sue first, ask questions later kind of organization,” so I don’t want to get in trouble with this post. (Although this philosophy makes me think the tenant probably was in the right here.) But rather I’d like to talk about the idea of being sued on the internet.
Since this company filed a suit, I looked up what exactly what libel is to see if this was justified:
So, technically it seems this lawsuit would fall under this category. One aspect I am unsure of is if a company can file a libel suit. The FAQ above mentions when a person is wronged, but maybe it can go either way. In this case, the comment was made about a company. But, in this case the statement was definitely made to more than one person and it was clear who the comment was about. The question I guess would come down to whether or not there was mold in her apartment and if Horizon did anything about it. (Was the statement false or not?)
I think what blows my mind is the mindset of the management company here. Now, this tweet happened on May 12th, and the lawsuit happens two and a half months later. That seems odd. Why bring it up now?
Next, this news story, and their law suit is doing more damage, in my mind, to their company’s name than that tweet, that I never saw, ever did. I got the impression from the story that Horizon doesn’t even really care or want to address if there was mold in the apartment or not. Maybe this tweet was necessary and accurate. Continue Reading…
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