The biggest misconception about social media law

Last month I attended a social media course at UCT run by the UCT Law@Work project. After two super-intense days with an energetic group of lawyers, I emerged more cautious than ever about social media use, but also armed with more knowledge than ever about its potential dangers. I say potential, because like many things, social media is only dangerous when used incorrectly. 

But the key takeaway from this course is that social media's biggest danger possibly is that there actually ISN'T any such thing as social media law. Lawyers and courts are having to draw from existing laws, and looking to other countries to see how they are dealing with individual cases, where perhaps an employee has brought their company into disrepute, or someone has infringed on the rights of another. 

Now, I am not a lawyer, but to me, this makes social media dangerous because no one quite knows what the outcome of a particular case will be. I'm running a workshop with our staff at school, giving them feedback from this course, and we'll be including it in our social media lessons with our students.

Of course, legal dangers are easy to avoid. If you follow the good old T.H.I.N.K. rule, you'll be fine. In fact, I always tell my students if they can't remember what all the letters stand for, just remember the advice from the last letter in the acronym...can't go wrong with that.