Rights and responsibilities in social media

What are my rights on social media platforms? At work users are often prohibited from visiting social media sites during work hours. Most often turn a blind eye on break times but some do not! Always remember to read the small print on your respective contracts. While it is not illegal for an employer to ask for your username and password you can always flat out say you don’t have one. Whilst general lewdness and egregious statements go unpunished you still can be held liable for your statements online and in social media; people have been imprisoned for hate crimes due to their social media postings.

What are my Responsibilities?  On social media you are often thought to have responsibilities and while you don’t have to obey them-social media is practically anonymous; it isn’t as if you’re easy to be found and held liable- being nice is generally the good thing to do. While trolling might be ‘funny’ if it isn’t happening to you just remember that its causing a real person real stress which is something that you’d –hopefully- try to prevent if you saw it in real life. The general rule of trolling is that the more impassioned someone is about a topic the funnier it is to annoy them about it so always remember to be modest about your hobbies. Never reply if someone does target you, even if what they said was the nastiest thing you’ve ever seen someone say, you’re only doing what they want. Blocking them without a word is probably the only way to defeat a troll, while they’ll never admit they’ve been defeated; they have.

Online and in social media always try to stay on topic. If you see a conversation about cats don’t bother commenting in the thread about your Xbox…no one cares, the conversation wasn’t about Xboxes. Spamming is something else to prevent while you may think it’s funny to copy massive walls of text and post twenty statuses about them others won’t see the funny side and you’ll find your friend list decreasing very quickly. Be responsible about the content of your postings, while you and your little sicko friends might enjoy laughing at pictures of dead people on 4Chan or whatever; your family and loose acquaintances on Facebook won’t.