Why your news organization’s social media policy may be illegal | Poynter.

If Barrett Tryon does get fired today by Freedom Communications, as he expects, he may find the National Labor Relations Board has his back.

Tryon, a multimedia journalist at the Colorado Springs Gazette, posted on his personal Facebook timeline a link and quote from a Los Angeles Times report about the sale of his parent company, Freedom Communications.

A Gazette manager told Tryon to remove the post, citing the company’s social media policy that “prohibits you from posting disparaging or defamatory statements about the company” or “communications that might be misconstrued in a way that could damage the company’s goodwill and business reputation, even indirectly.”

Tryon refused.

Unfortunately for the Gazette, this is exactly the kind of restriction the NLRB has been labeling an “overly broad” gag order on workers’ rights.

via www.poynter.org

My recent experience in writing guidelines for public media employees tried hard to veer around the use of "rules" and thus the "legalities" of setting social media usage policies. Mine was an ethical appeal. (See http://pmintegrity.org) But as employers try to implement social media policies and enforce them, we're like to see more of this type of face-off.