This tribunal decision concerns a long-serving employee who was dismissed for making derogatory comments about his colleagues and his employer that he had posted on Twitter up to three years previously.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has considered the fairness of a dismissal for uploading obscene material onto a work cloud storage account, when the employee argued that password sharing was "widespread" in his workplace.
In this Romanian case, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) accepted that the employee's right to a private life had been affected when his employer accessed his Yahoo messages. However, the ECHR went on to hold that the employer's actions were justified in the circumstances and not in breach of art. 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has held that procedural defects in an employee's dismissal for allegedly bullying a colleague who "unfriended" her on Facebook could be cured during the appeal stage.
In the first Scottish appellate decision on Facebook misconduct, the EAT has held that ordinary principles of law apply. The EAT held that the employment tribunal had erred in law and substituted its own views for those of the employer.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal considered the misuse of Twitter by an employee for the first time. The decision highlights the importance of having a robust policy in place relating to the use of social media at work.