Ethical Issues of Social Media Use in Organizations

.SCHOOL OF COMPUTING AND MATHS, Charles Sturt University
IT Ethics
Your Name
Student Number
Word Count: 1400

1. Introduction
Organizations have been facing ethical dilemmas on various issues. The ethical
dilemma selected for this task is the use of social media in organizations. This dilemma had
been occurred in an organization in February 2018. Social media is a platform through which
organizations are able to stay in regular touch with the potential and current customers. Use
of social media in organizations has helped the exposure of numerous industries as well as
firms (Evonomie, 2018). The use of social media has been an ethical dilemma for the
organization. It helps the organizations in many aspects but it had also affected the working
environment of the company and enthusiasm among the employees. Companies face
various issues while implementing social media into their business (Evonomie, 2018). This
task discusses regarding the issues faced by that particular organization in the perspective of
professional ethics, sociological ethics and psychological ethics.
2. Professional Ethics Perspectives
Using social media in work place has various impacts on the employers and
employees of an organization. The impacts are good as well as bad. The issues faced by the
organization due to usage of social media such as misusing company resources and conflicts
among the interests of people. Some more issues regarding the use of social media in
organizations are mentioned below
 Personal and professional lives: social media use in organization has the chances of
implicating the business concerns. Some employees post on the website of the
company saying about their hectic schedule at office due to some urgent work
(Silverman, 2016). Sometimes they post things like “working in the weekends due to
problems in the ABC product”. This lets people in social media know regarding the
problems faced by the company whereas these information are supposed to be
confidential and not shared in social media. The usage of social media has increased
the online activities of the employees, which has merged their professional and
personal lives (Silverman, 2016). The social media platform is so tempting that
employees tend to share almost all information regarding the whereabouts in their
life; this makes them share confidential information of the company unintentionally.
Your Name

 Social media policy: the policies of organizations are set when the organization is set
up, and they are rarely changed. The changes in organization policies take place
when it is felt important by the higher authority. The use of social media has been
benefitting the companies in many ways (Bryman, 2016). As a result, the
organizations do not tend to create policies on the use of social media. This brings
about ethical issues in the professional life of the employees. Social media policies
help to protect the brand image of the company. It also helps in managing the
actions of their employees and their expectations.
 Sensitive information: use of social media in organizations for various purposes is an
exciting factor for the employees. Sometimes the employees share some important
information on social media regarding the design, architecture or working principle
of the organization that were not supposed to be posted online (Chell, Spence &
Perrini, 2016). This is a major issue, which creates ethical problems in the
organization because revealing such information online might attract unwanted
attention. This as a result might create various problems for the organization.
 Footprints: it is known that social media is of great use for organizations. Employees
can refer to social networking sites for extracting information that is necessary for
carrying out their work (Ngai, Tao & Moon, 2015). In this process, they switch
between various websites, which makes them leave cyber footprints behind them.
With the help of these footprints, it is easy collect information regarding the user
and the organization where the user works. This information can be collected by
private organizations such as Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and many more.
 Recognizing the social media: each social media platform has their individual
language and conventions. This is ignored by most of the employees while posting
regarding any update of the organization and share the same post in all the social
media platforms (What Is the Real Impact of Social Media?, 2018). Sharing the same
post in various social media platforms make the customers think that they are
automated or fake. This is also a professional ethical problem faced by the
organization.
 Ignoring comments: In most of the organizations, the posts made by the employees
are not checked. These posts might get some comments, which can be used as an
analysis of the thoughts of customers regarding the company (Fuchs, 2017). The
Your Name