Blogger Bill of Rights

The Queen of the Sky (aka the Delta Flight Attendant who got fired from her job for blogging pictures of herself; you can read it yourself here) has proposed a Bloggers' Rights bill. Lots of people are jumping on the proverbial bandwagon to sign up and you'd think my bleeding liberal lovin' heart would be right there too. But, believe it or not, I disagree about the whole idea of bloggers having special rights of free speech.

Here's the thing. When you choose to blog, you choose to become a public person. When you choose to blog, then you have to choose what you will or will not make public. The people in your life, they may or may not choose to go public with you and that's their right and ought to be respected. The same applies for the company you work for. Whether you name the company outright or not, whether you talk about your co-workers in a public forum or not, you take the risk of getting disciplined for what you say.

A company's reputation, the reputation of its workers, those are intangible assets that must be protected at all costs -- even if you think the information is only going out to a handful of people, it's still out there for the world to see. You can't just go around talking about the company anyway you want; when I was working for Very Big Insurance Company and Very Big Publishing Company (neither of whom can fire me now, btw, since I'm already gone), we had strict guidelines on who we could talk to and what we could say. When in doubt, transfer to PR. So even on company time and in company atmosphere, I couldn't speak freely about company affairs, so why is it any different on the internet?

If I chose to blog about people and company in an unflattering way in this here blog and my supervisor found out about it, yes, I would expect disciplinary action of some kind. See, here's the thing, as bloggers, we control what we write about, we control how we write about it, and we control who sees it.

Employment is 'at will'; you don't have a 'right' to a job. You are able to leave at any time, your company is allowed to let you go at any time. That's how it works and unless you're a whistle-blower or otherwise protected by the EEOC, bloggers aren't a protected class of citizen and given the amount of freedom bloggers have inherently over their actions, I don't think they ought to be. Instead, I take the responsibility on myself to watch what I say about people or the company I work for.

Discretion may feel overrated in the anonymous, "let it all hang out" blogosphere, but seriously: Don't. Blog. About. Work. If you can't take precautions to screen your audience, keep your writings away from the general public, then don't do it. It's seriously that easy. See, the company has to look out for itself, and the company can easily say, "I have a right to not be talked about on the Internet in a way that's not approved by my PR department and is not put out by our PR people." And let's make one thing totally clear: you don't get fired for the actual act of blogging, you get fired for what you blog. Big difference.