Tweet and be damned
Social networking can oſten blur the boundaries between private and professional life. So what are the implications for doctors and dentists? Paul Motion and Lindsay Urquhart of bto solicitors offer some insights
HUGE number of people are now engaging with the world through the internet. Te benefits of the internet revolution are well documented and easily identified. Less well understood are the downsides. What are the risks associated with internet postings and what can you do when it all goes wrong?
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Te collective reputations of the professions are reinforced by ethical codes which are not simply a matter of personal choice. Tese codes are also used as a standard against which professionals are assessed and judged. A professional’s reputation is of fundamental importance, reaching wider than professional ethics and crossing the boundary with personal integrity. It is perhaps in this area that social networking poses the greatest risks for doctors and dentists. Most internet content is generated in one of two ways – either an individual can create and post it themselves or it may be created and posted by a third party. Some programmes and web spiders go further, replicating, blending and aggregating content from several search engines. We may not think there is any risk associated with our own postings but bloggers and social networkers should beware.
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Te good news is professionals can manage the risks of self- authored information with a little self discipline.
Comment with care
No doubt it can sometimes be useful for professionals to express their views online but they should exercise the same level of editorial control and self criticism as if they were placing their comment in a professional journal. Te GMC provides guidance for doctors on providing or publishing information about services or otherwise putting information into the public domain (see ‘Additional resources’). Comment posted online could potentially reach a far wider audience of professional peers and patients than a journal article. Te ease with which blogs and forum posts are made can lead to an informality inappropriate for the expression of professional views. Internet postings can remain as cached information on search engines and sites for a long time, leaving the embarrassed professional dealing with the fallout of an ill-considered remark for longer than anticipated. Social networking sites that encourage spontaneous comment, such as Facebook and Twitter, require particular
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