Slashdot Mirror
Anniston, Alabama To Censor Employees' Facebook Pages
ISurfTooMuch writes "If you're a city employee in Anniston, AL, you'd better watch what you say on Facebook. Under a proposal being considered by the City Council, employees would be banned from posting anything 'negative' or 'embarrassing' about the city. Note that they aren't talking about official city pages here, but employees' personal pages. Anyone care to educate these clowns on the existence of the First Amendment?"
If I paid taxes in that town, I would be sort of pissed off that the town officials were spending time on something like this, so I wouldn't call it perfectly reasonable.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
No, it isn't reasonable at all, not when you're a division of the government. The first amendment exists so that individuals can speak out against government acts with impunity - you can't be held accountable for speaking out against the government. By instituting this rule, they're essentially saying that the first amendment doesn't apply. Legally speaking, they have no right to do it, and morally speaking, it's abject in every sense of the word.
Your employer has no right to censor your speech - period. Even less so when that employer is part of the government who's supposed to be upholding that right in the first place. Conflict of interest.
Actually, government employees do have more rights when it comes to speech (due to the 1st amendment) than private employees do. They can't just say any old thing, but if their criticism of their employer or the town is found by the court to be "of public concern" it could be considered protected speech. This law actually probably is unconstitutional, particularly if it's very broad (it could be written in a way that only banned non-protected speech, but my guess is they didn't think it through that well).
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
It's never a good thing to see my home state on Slashdot, let alone my home town.
I have to say, I don't like this policy. One is not generally supposed to badmouth one's employer, but badmouthing one's government is patriotic and should be encouraged. That's how things get fixed.
If you are a government employee, the 1st amendment actually does protect you to some degree. Your advice is absolutely correct if you're privately employed, but government employees have more protections when it comes to issues like this.
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news