Rights & Responsibilities when using Social Media

Your Rights, Responsibilities & The Law When Using Social Media

Social media is regarded as being very similar to most other methods of communication, including telephone or text message and regulated by the same laws as E-Mail. However it is much harder to protect yourself in comparison to other methods. With so many social media sites around, each has different methods of protecting the users.

Protecting yourself on Social Media

The most common way to protect yourself is by altering your privacy settings, only to allow people you approve, or people you are friends with, the ability to see what you post and view your profile. Furthermore, the ability to block people prevents whatever they post being shown on your social media feed or timeline.

What to Avoid:

Many users believe that anything they post on social media can simply be deleted, but it isn’t that simple. The majority of social networks store messages, images and videos after they have been deleted.

To avoid offending or causing harm to people, users should consider censoring status updates, tweets, videos and images which are posted.

It is not just original content that users publish. Images and Videos are reposted by thousands, if not millions of people. However, copyright laws apply to the content being reposted, in order to comply with these laws, the content is required to fall under the category of “Fair Use”.