California Conservative

An employee at Technorati, a small San Francisco-based technology company that tracks blogs, recently learned a lesson about blogging: No matter at what level within a company you work, your blogging activities may be censored.

After posting a satirical piece of artwork on his personal blog which critized “the growing fears among corporations over the blogging activities of their employees,” his employer stepped in.

The New York Times reports:

As the practice of blogging has spread, employees like Mr. Kennedy are coming to the realization that corporations, which spend millions of dollars protecting their brands, are under no particular obligation to tolerate threats, real or perceived, from the activities of people who become identified with those brands, even if it is on their personal Web sites.

They are also learning that the law offers no special protections for blogging - certainly no more than for any other off-duty activity.

Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others have cautioned that employees must be careful not to confuse freedom of speech with a freedom from consequences that might follow from what they say. Indeed, the vast majority of states are considered “at will” states - meaning that employees can quit, and employers can fire them, at will - without evident reason (barring statutory exceptions like race or religion, where discrimination would have to be proved).

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2005 at 11:47 am and is filed under Blogging, San Francisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.