Yet again we’ve discovered that corporate social media policies are primarily devices for discipline and control — particularly in the media. They come as window dressing to demonstrate that this company is hip and with it. But always buried deep in their words are control tools ready to be taken down and dusted off when required.

And usually, they’ll be found to be required when a political leader complains about a journalist.

We saw this last week in the US when sports broadcaster ESPN suspended Jemele Hill, the co-host of their 6pm SportsCenter program, for two weeks for breaching the network’s social media policy. Ostensibly, it was about a series of tweets engaging with viewers over the kneeling controversy that is roiling US sports.

Hill was defending football players caught between orders from their NFL owners that they stand for the national anthem and the rolling campaign of players kneeling to protest police brutality and racial inequality.

She tweeted that the Dallas Cowboys’ owner’s order that players not kneel “has created a problem for his players, specifically the black ones. If they don’t kneel, some will see them as sell-outs”. She followed up by saying the owner “turned this into them choosing football over the community they represent and that isn’t right”. Concerned fans, she said, should not blame the players, but take it up with the club and advertisers.

The suspension followed demands from the Trump White House back in September that Hill should be sacked from her job after she tweeted then: “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.”

 

The use of social media policy to discipline journalists who attract attacks from political leaders and activists is not unknown in Australia.

Most notoriously, in 2014, Mike Carlton resigned as a Sydney Morning Herald correspondent in protest at the threat of being suspended after a series of robust responses to Twitter attacks. Shockingly, Carlton had even used the f-word!

In 2012, the ABC’s Eric Campbell left Twitter after a series of tweets based on a dad joke, satirising sexism in the then public-debate in Australia. The ABC initiated a disciplinary process after Senator Eric Abetz raised the matter in a Senate estimates hearing. Not many jokes can survive that sort of dour scrutiny. Campbell came back to Twitter as @ericperipatetic in 2015.

Both last year and this year, journalists have been attacked for commenting on Twitter or Facebook in insufficiently respectful terms on what has apparently become our most sacred day: Anzac Day. (Although, according to Bob Katter, when Macklemore was to perform Same Love at the NRL grand final, that day had, confusingly, become our most sacred day after Christmas.)

It’s not just journalists who get muzzled by social media policies. The federal government’s social media policy for public servants says:

“[I]t is not acceptable at any time to … post comments or images that are so harsh or extreme in their criticism of the department, Government, a Member of Parliament from another political party, or their respective policies that they could be perceived to have an impact on your ability to work professionally, efficiently, impartially or apolitically in the [Australian Public Service].”

“Could be perceived” …. good luck knowing what that means before it happens!

Given Hill’s suspension, The New York Times could have chosen a better time to release its own revised social media guidelines that included a warning that “journalists should be especially mindful of appearing to take sides on issues that The Times is seeking to cover objectively”.

Hmm …”appearing to take sides”… what does that mean in the context of a president that blasts any report he dislikes as “fake news”?

A number of commentators focused on the feel-good rhetoric in the policy and welcomed it. Others saw it in context, with Arizona State University’s Dan Gillmor tweeting one word: “Capitulation.”

From a management perspective, a lack of clarity is a good thing. It gives a lot of space to respond to complaints by punishing the journalist. It makes it easier to slap the journalist than explain the principles of freedom of speech. And it’s no accident that the attacks come from the political right seeking to shut down debates they don’t want to have, or only want to have on their own terms.

All social media policies come complete tricked up with high-sounding phrases about embracing the power or tool. But always buried within is the trap for anyone who takes the rhetoric too seriously.