A ruling from the Fair Work Commission means that you might need to be a little more careful next time you decide to purge your Facebook friend list. While you might think that deciding who you ‘friend’ or ‘unfriend’ on social media is a matter of your personal choice, but it could have much wider consequences.
Employers around the country will be scrambling to update their social media policies after a decision by the workplace tribunal found unfriending someone on Facebook can constitute workplace bullying.
Rachael Roberts, an employee of real estate agency VIEW Launceston, went to the Fair Work Commission (FWC) in February this year alleging she was being bullied by sales administrator Lisa Bird and her husband James, the business owner. – News.com.au
Of course there’s more to the story than just unfriending someone on Facebook but the act of removing someone from a list of Facebook friends was significant in the commission’s findings.
When I first started using Facebook I would accept most friend requests. I later decided that I needed to maintain a little more privacy and so I created a new public Facebook page to give me the opportunity to interact with many more people while keeping my personal page a little more … personal. (Feel free to connect with me on my public page.)
What’s your policy regarding who you ‘friend’ or ‘unfriend’ on Facebook? I’m sometimes tempted to remove friends who post offensive and ill-informed statements and articles about other people groups, faith, politics and other issues but I generally resist because I know that I don’t have to agree with everything someone believes to be a friend. I also realise that I need to hear what others are thinking, even when I can sometimes feel the anger beginning to rise.
Are you ‘friends’ with your work colleagues? If you friend one or two colleagues do you feel you should friend them all? I’d be really interested in your thoughts.
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Sadly it’s always been a part of school yard life and while we’ve woken up more and more to the often devastating effects of bullying, in the past our children would at least have the safe haven of our homes at the end of the day.