Jun 25, 2016 3 min read

The old saw has it that if you give people enough rope, they’ll hang themselves.

We’ve certainly seen that happen when it comes to some folks and how they approach social media. The tenure of state Rep. Jesse White, who represented the 46th Legislative District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, came to end in large part due to revelations that he was creating fake identities online in order to attack his critics and sing his own praises. And then, of course, there’s Wendy Bell, the former news anchor at WTAE-TV, who lost her job earlier this year after a posting on Facebook about a backyard ambush in Wilkinsburg that many people took to be dimwitted at best and racist at worst. Bell crept back into the headlines last week when she sued her former employer, demanding her job back, along with back pay and attorney’s fees.

Last week, Washington County updated its own social media policy, a move that was probably long overdue, so that it can save itself some potential embarrassment, and, perhaps, make some of its employees think twice about the consequences if they share random, incendiary thoughts with the rest of the world.

While emphasizing that employees have the right to have private social media accounts and express themselves, the new policy asks that if they identify themselves as county employees on their social media page that they include a disclaimer along the lines of “the views I express on this site are my own and do not reflect any official view or position of the County of Washington.”

It also prohibits personal insults, ethnic slurs, profanity, sexually explicit images or any other material that could violate county policies when it comes to equal employment opportunity and harassment.

Although Washington County Commission Chairman Larry Maggi denied that the policy was updated because of a specific employee, it was necessary. Sure, county employees are entitled to beliefs and opinions, just like anybody else.

They are human beings and not robots. However, it can muddy the waters if someone who identifies himself as a county employee posts, for example, a string of bile on a social media account about a religion and its practitioners. Can adherents to that faith expect fair treatment from that public servant? There’s the risk that they would come to believe that the views of one employee reflect the feelings of the entire county hierarchy.

Maggi explained, “Whether you like social media or not, it’s an important part of what we do to disseminate information. Although you can’t control what employees do, you have to put limitations so you limit the liabilities of the county from what someone may put out there. We’re not trying to impugn free speech or anything like that.”

In refreshing the county’s social-media policies, Maggi cited an instance in another Pennsylvania county where an employee pretended to be a spokesperson for the county when they, in fact, did not have that role.

The last time Washington County implemented a policy on electronic communication was in 2003, when Facebook was still a glimmer in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, Twitter was three years away, and the iPhone was four years in the future.

Given the pace of technological change, the county should probably not let another 13 years go by before it updates its policies again.