Issue 11: Is Employer Monitoring of Employee Social Media Justified?

Summary of Sides

The rise of social media and the near ubiquity of its use has led to an increasing trend of employers screening potential hires and monitoring existing employees through their social media activity on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The ethicality of such monitoring has been questioned by ethical scholars Brian Elzweig and Donna K. Pepples argue that employers have a responsibility to their organizations to ensure that employees are not negligent in their actions that directly affect the company or that might negatively reflect upon the company. More to the point, these authors argue that there is no real expectation of privacy on social networking sites and that employers could not be violating any such expectation, as "a general expectation cannot be relied upon just by using the privacy settings" (p. 195). Employers are upholding their duty...
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