The legal implications of tweeting

The (US) legal implications of tweeting: Can tweets be libelous? It turns out they can be
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/141987/what-journalists-need-to-know-about-libelous-tweets/

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So how can news organizations guard against libelous tweets? It's important, Ardia said, for staffers to have a basic understanding of the legal implications of tweeting.

Under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, news organizations are protected from defamation liability for content that's created by a third party. The law protects YouTube from libel lawsuits, and it protects bloggers and news organizations from defamatory comments that users may post. The law also protects retweets. So if a journalist or news organization were to retweet a defamatory statement, they would not be held accountable. If, however, they added a defamatory remark as part of the retweet, they could be.

Generally speaking, Ardia said, a news organization would only be responsible for an employee's defamatory tweets if the employee's use of Twitter was part of their job or otherwise related to their line of work. If the defamatory tweet wasn't work-related, the employee would be the only one responsible for it.

Having social media guidelines that lay out the legal pitfalls can help. A few months after the AP was sued, the organization updated its social media guidelines. (When asked whether the lawsuit Spooner filed prompted the AP to update its social media guidelines, AP Deputy Managing Editor for Standards and Production Tom Kent said, "Not that I recall.")

The new guidelines, which were issued a week after the AP warned staffers about expressing opinions, didn't specifically mention the legal implications of tweeting.

Some organizations, such as ASNE, have been criticized for creating "strict" social media guidelines that limit journalists' ability to develop their voice and skills on social networking sites. I tend to favor guidelines that encourage experimentation rather than those that limit it. But given that tweets can be libelous, I can see the value in setting stricter parameters.

When updating its guidelines recently, the BBC instituted a rule saying "two pairs of eyes" need to look over news updates for Twitter and Facebook. The extra set of eyes could prevent the BBC from tweeting something potentially defamatory, but that's not why the BBC made the update. Kevin Marsh, a longtime BBC editor who played an advisory role in creating the guidelines, explained that the update is an extension of the more general rules and practices that the BBC follows.

"Recorded content has to go through a lengthy and comprehensive process of compliance," said Marsh, who recently left the BBC after working there for 33 years. "Live content [anything published on social networks] has to go through a different process, for obvious reasons, with the warranty from the editor in charge of the output that there are at least 'two pairs of eyes or ears' across the content, one more senior to the other, able to take action — apology, taking down, correction — if necessary."

At The Guardian, journalists who identify themselves as Guardian employees in their Twitter bios are advised to include a disclaimer such as, "These are my personal views and not those of my employer."

This can be helpful, Ardia said, but it's not a complete shield to liability.