Best Practices For Social Media To Avoid Libel Litigations

Best Practices for Social Media to avoid Libel litigations

Vanessa M. Mares

SNHU

Best Practices As social media for business and personal use grows, the risk also grows with using it. The success that comes with it is makes using social media unavoidable, but there are some great practices that a business can follow to make sure that they avoid those legal pitfalls that can occur. Social media sites also can serve as the starting point of rumors and spreading gossip, and these can have very serious consequences. But, like I mentioned before, there are some great tips to consider when communicating on the World Wide Web or social media. These best Practices may seem self explanatory but they can go a long way for a business to avoid any legal problems.

“Libel is a published untruth, written or broadcasted, that does harm to another's reputation. It falls under the general category of "defamation"-statements that causes injury to a third party’s reputation.” (Snow, Jensen and Reese, 2017). Basically, it happens when someone makes a statement against another person that can be harmful to his or hers reputation. Let’s look at this example. Jeff, who is suspicious of his co-worker, Johnny, but doesn’t haven any evidence to prove this, goes on Twitter and tweets, johnny has been stealing funds from the company to pay for his pool. Other co workers read these tweets and their boss, who decides to fire Johnny. Johnny would have a very strong case for libel and defamation because of Jeff’s false statement that cost her job and reputation. It was also posted online. With some good effort and detail, this could be