Cambridgeshire Council shared their Social Network and Blogging Policy on Public Sector Forums the other day where they have set out the rules for what they expect employees to do in terms of using blogs and contributing on social networks.

Before even reading the policy, I can tell that this is a good idea. This is something that Councils — and other large organisations — need to be dealing with. If you don’t have a policy about it, employees will do it anyway, and will share information on Facebook and so on. You need to be aware of it, and you need to ensure that your employees are aware of their responsibilities in this regard.

This is a particularly good example of such a policy because it is short and punchy. You don’t need, and don’t want a fifteen-page policy full of legalese and incomprehensible management-speak. The document clearly sets out who the policy relates to and why:

…details the ground rules for employees who should ensure that the content of their blogs/social networking sites does not bring the Council into disrepute or breach their obligations under the Code of Conduct [...] This policy applies to all Council employees and Members.Cambridgeshire County Council Blogging/Social Networking Policy

The Council provide simple advice — if you can, try not to mention your work or reference the Council on the web. If you do mention/reference however, you need to make it clear that any views you express are your own and are not necessarily representative of the council, and in addition, you must not breach the Data Protection Act; disclose any information not already public; post illegal material such as child pornography; breach Council copyright; make defamatory remarks about the Council, colleagues or service users; publish anything that could undermine public confidence in you or the council; and not misrepresent the Council.

For the most part, this is a sensible list of things a council employee shouldn’t do. However, I think that in the case of some of the issues — such as breaching the Data Protection Act or posting child pornography — the Council would be quite within their rights to take disciplinary action even had they not mentioned them in the blogging policy (and indeed the employee may have more significant issues to deal with — such as criminal prosecution — than an internal disciplinary matter). But it does no harm to mention them in the policy, I suppose.

I’ll just be clear: I fully support Cambridgeshire County Council having a policy, I think it’s great that it’s so simple and straight-forward, and I think it is fantastic that they have chosen to share it with others. However, that does not mean I have to agree with all of it.

Firstly, let’s look at “publish material or comment that could undermine public confidence in you as an employee/Officer of the Council”. The problem with this is probably that it is too broad. What would be deemed to “undermine public confidence”? If you go out on a works leaving do, and some photos of you and colleagues the worse for wear end up on Facebook, is that undermining public confidence? Would that be the same for members of the Drug & Alcohol teams? Is it undermining public confidence to express your political views, if clearly stated as your own? Would that be the same for BNP supporters?

On the other hand, I think it’s important that the Council don’t try to get bogged down in too much detail: if examples of the sort of thing that might undermine public confidence are available elsewhere on your intranet, just link to those — I’m sure this sort of thing will apply to your behaviour in public as a whole and not just online.

But I am also unclear about precisely what the council mean when they say:

make defamatory remarks about the Council, colleagues or service usersCambridgeshire County Council Blogging/Social Networking Policy

…simply because there appears to be key differences between some definitions of defamation:

The accepted legal definition of defamation is “the publication of a statement which tends to lower a person in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally.”Weblaw.co.uk

Defamation law exists to protect the reputation of a person from defamatory statements made about him/her to a third party without lawful justification. A statement is defamatory if, when said about a person and published to a third party, it would make ordinary people think less of that person.Channel 4

Any disparaging statement made by one person about another, which is communicated or “published,” may well be a defamatory statement and can give rise to an action for either libel or slander in English law.

Generally speaking, slander is when a defamatory statement has been made orally without justification. If the statement was made in a permanent form, for example, recording words onto tape, it would not be slander but libel.

Libellous statements are those that are recorded with some degree of permanence. This would include statements made by email or on on-line bulletin boards.

Out-Law.com

There’s a slight difference in implication here. Some seem to suggest that any negative statement may be defamation, but it would only become slander or libel under other circumstances (for example, it not being true). I would assume that the Council would be using the term ‘defamation’ meaning ‘untrue and negative remarks’, but this isn’t entirely clear.

After all, if they were simply using it in the ‘negative’ sense only, this would mean that if I was a resident and an employee of a local authority, then I would have less rights to complain about something the Council was doing badly than some other resident would have. And surely that can’t be right.

But while I might call for clarity on that point, Cambridgeshire County Council have already done more than many other Councils. They’ve given their employees some guidance on what they can say. And it’s a very useful starting point for any other Councils (or similar organisations) wishing to do the same…