Invisible Discrimination: Employers, Social Media Sites and Passwords in the U.S.

Authors

Richard L. Pate, Sacred Heart UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2012

Abstract

With the advent and popularity of social networking sites, the boundaries of the relationship between the employer and employee/prospective employee have stretched well beyond the workplace and working hours. Predictably, this relationship expansion has led to uncharted adversarial scenarios between the respective parties. Unfortunately, in this new, vibrant cyber world, employment law is struggling for deference and attention. Notwithstanding this ostensible indifference, each phase of the relationship is heavily impacted by social network media. Applicant recruitment, information gathering and applicant selection stand to be impacted by the social network communications made by employees or prospective employees. This article examines whether present and proposed law protects job applicants from potential, unlawful discrimination resulting from the employer’s use of social media in its applicant recruitment, information-gathering and applicant selection processes.

Comments

Version posted is prepublication.

DOI

10.1177/1358229112470300

Recommended Citation

Pate, R.L. (2012). Invisible discrimination: Employers, social media sites and passwords in the U.S. International Journal of Discrimination and the Law 12(3), 133-146. doi: 10.1177/1358229112470300

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License