The Hearst corporation, a mammoth publishing conglomerate that owns newspapers, magazines, television networks and stations in the U.S. and worldwide has imposed a policy that warns its employees against “liking” or reposting certain posts on social media under threat of termination. The policy applies not only to their professional accounts, but to their personal ones as well, and gives Hearst managers the power to order so-called “objectionable” material to be deleted from an employee’s personal accounts.
To enforce this edict, the policy also requests that Hearst staff inform on other employees who may have violated these restrictions on the right to express their opinions, with Hearst management apparently the final arbiter on what is or is not “objectionable.” Employees are being requested to sign the policy so as to confirm their awareness of it.
The policy of enforced control over political and non-political expressions of opinion appears to have been occasioned by a Hearst editor who expressed her misgivings about Israeli military actions toward Palestinians in Gaza.
As reported by the Washington Post’s Will Sommer:
A new social media policy at publishing giant Hearst Magazines warns staffers that even “liking” controversial content could result in their termination, and encourages telling on colleagues who post content that could violate the rules.
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The new policy comes as divisions over the Israel-Gaza war roil the media industry. Last month, Samira Nasr, the editor in chief of Hearst-owned fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, sparked controversy over an Instagram story where she called the Israeli decision to cut water and power to the Gaza Strip “the most inhuman thing I’ve seen in my life.” Nasr later apologized, calling the remarks “deeply insensitive,” and Hearst pledged to donate $300,000 to charities in the region.
Hearst’s policy, shared with the Post but not linked in Sommer’s article, does not specify what criteria are applied to determine whether any given post is objectionable. Since it appears to have stemmed directly from the act of Nasr in criticizing the actions of Israel, one could reasonably conclude that similar criticism of Israel is off limits for Hearst employees, either in their professional or personal online lives. It’s not clear whether support for Israel, or criticism of Hamas, for that matter, would be implicated by this policy, but it seems like it would be.
As Sommer points out in his article, many media (and other) corporations have social media policies in place governing what employees should or should not be posting online, especially during work hours. However, as Sommer observes, “Hearst’s rules seem to go unusually far.”
The policies apply to personal accounts in addition to professional ones, and they give managers the right to tell employees to delete “objectionable” content. The document also says that “liking” or reposting such content also qualifies as breaking the rules. “Just because you didn’t say something on social media and instead only ‘liked’ it or reposted it, it still may suggest to our audience that you approve of a particular statement or view,” the policy reads.
As Sommer notes, the policy also “urges Hearst staffers to report co-workers’ social media rule-breaking or anything that could ‘impact the reputation or objectivity of Hearst Magazines’ to management,“ in effect, tasking its employees to inform on one another.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prevents laws from being passed that can abridge free speech, but obviously says nothing about what corporations can or cannot do or demand of their employees in furtherance of their profits. Still, as one commenter to the article wryly points out, during the run-up to and prosecution of the 2003-2011 U.S. war in Iraq millions of Americans exercised their rights to post and repost their personal objections and criticisms online, without unduly hampering the business or "reputation" of Hearst or any other corporation. But criticism—or perhaps even supportive commentary—about another war thousands of miles away is apparently so sensitive, and potentially so hazardous to Hearst’s bottom line, that it must be treated as off limits.
As Sommer reports, the vague, open-ended and draconian nature of the policy (which warns that “posts about even seemingly ‘apolitical’ or local topics could be contentious enough to be a problem”) has prompted the Writers Guild of America, East, the union for Hearst publications’ editorial staff, to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. Sommer reports that the Guild contends the policy should have been negotiated:
In its statement, the Hearst union expressed concern that the vagueness of the policy could help Hearst create pretexts to fire employees or “police” how LGBTQ+ staffers express themselves online.
That is certainly true. However, quite honestly it seems doubtful that Hearst intended this policy to chill free speech in the LGBTQ+ community. Perhaps Hearst should simply amend its policy to clarify exactly what opinions can no longer be expressed or shared by its employees in their personal online lives. Then other American companies can do the same. That ought to make things much simpler.