Sorry no dice. Supreme Court has ruled that government employees have some free speech rights, but this isn't one of them. This is an HR issue, plain and simple.
For instance I have my FB account set up so that only people with whom I am already friends with can see my posts and only my friends (my immediately family and close personal friends who I have “freinded” by choice) can contact me via Facebook or comment on my posts. Otherwise what the “public” sees is very limited. And it can be previewed if you have a FB account by going to “Who can see my stuff?” and selecting “What do other people se on my timeline?” and selecting “View as”- “Public”.
When I do that all I see is my name, my profile picture - current and past profile pictures (and my profile pictures have been my 1st grade picture, a baby picture, my parent’s pictures and some cartoon like avatars – never a current or readily identifiable photo of myself) and pictures I’ve put in my picture folder which are very few and not particularly personal (and not BTW any of the pictures I’ve posted to only to my friends), who I am friends with, some pages I’ve liked; very innocuous stuff like some cooking and other TV shows and Mike Rowe’s page, and whatever I have chosen to say about myself which is pretty much nothing, including not sharing the name of my employer, age, gender, where I live, went to school or any personal contact information. And I also proved this not long ago when a friend of mine told me she was going to sign up for FB. I told her not to friend me as I wanted to see what my profile page looked like to someone with whom I was not already friends with when they searched my name. It was just as I described above.
And even with that, I am mindful of what I post as even though the only people who can see my posts are my friends, people I know and trust, if I comment on a friend’s post, I believe all their friends can see it as well and I might not know or trust them.
As an ex-HR professional, what YOU do in your own free time, is YOUR business and I have no legal right to fire you for something you may have said on the internet..........
As long as your job is that of an in-house employee and not an outside representative of the company with a public profile, then you can say and do what you want.......
I am also an HR professional. And as such I am not FB friends with anyone I currently work with. That’s IMO never a good idea, and I have gotten FB invites from current co–workers and I just ignore them. I might “think” that a co-worker is my friend but in my position it is best not to take chances. And a work place “friend” today might be your “Frenemy” tomorrow especially if you just got a promotion or in my case in HR, had to participate in giving them a verbal or written warning and or ending in a termination.
FB is one of the many social media sites that are blocked by my company on our work computers and network. I do know that our HR manager has access to it but it is not our policy to try to view potential employees or current employees’ FB pages as a matter of routine investigation or even curiosity. The only time I am aware of it being used was when someone working for the company came across posts from a co-worker who he had “friended” on FB who was out on a worker’s comp claim who posted pictures of his recent deep woods camping, hiking, hunting, fishing and cycling trip and also posted recent pictures of him building a deck on his house while allegedly too incapacitated with a severe back injury on the job to work and even had the gall to brag that “workers comp and “XYZ company” was paying for it”. Their FB “friend” was also their co-worker who very much resented this person “gaming the system” and ripping off his employer and turned him in.
And even then we turned the tip over to our workers comp insurance company and let them investigate, keeping it at arm’s length and not commenting on the source or the validity of the allegations.
I don’t have our “Social Media” policy right in front of me but FWIR, it is not particularly draconian, it is a rather standard boilerplate policy and is pretty much limited to making inflammatory, disparaging or hostile comments directly about our company, its management, our customers and vendors and one’s fellow co-workers or conveying any “insider”, “trade secrets” or otherwise any confidential company information while identifying one’s self as our employee on social media sites. Some of that is also covered under our confidentiality and trade secret agreements that every employee has to sign as a condition of employment and extends to former employees under the terms and time limitations of those signed agreement or a separation agreement if they are terminated with a severance.
However, problems and blurred lines can come into play when an employee, even one who is not a “an outside representative of the company with a public profile, and only an “in-house employee” (and I’m not heard that term before in all my years in HR and PR but I’m guessing you mean not a corporate official, officer, marketing or sales person) blurs the lines themselves by publicly associating themselves with their employer by identifying who their employer is on their FB page, linking to and or liking their employer’s website or public FB page and or on other social media sites, having many co-workers, supervisors or customer and vendor contacts as their FB “friends ” and regularly posting things about their employer and their job, even if in a very positive light and not in violation of their company’s policies otherwise , but then they go on to make comments that might be deemed “offensive” or “hostile” in the workplace (say if they stood up in the crowded lunchroom at work and said; "The police need to just start mowing them down with machine guns, purge them,") on those very same social media sites, comments that the employer would not allow in the workplace if it could be deemed as an incitement to violence, endorsing or advocating criminal activity, or constituted threatening or hostile language to certain groups of employees based on race, religion, gender, etc, etc., etc….
In other words, if you make it very “public” where you work and with whom you work with, what job you hold there for all and any to see on your social media sites, then you make what you think are your own personal opinions on those very same sites, unless you qualify that these are your personal opinions alone and not those of your employer, your company, your co-workers and the company’s customers and vendors, they might see it differently because you have already blurred the lines between speaking as an employee of the company and speaking as a private citizen.
It is not certain from the posted article whether this was the case here or not, but just some words to the wise.