I recently spoke at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for the Prevention of Discrimination & Harassment in Higher Education (CAPDHHE) held in Winnipeg from May 7-9, 2014. This year’s theme was “Moving Beyond Theory: Best Practices in Advancing Diversity & Addressing Discrimination and Harassment.” With this theme in mind, the knowledge that I would be speaking to an audience of folks working in institutions of higher learning and based on the years I have acted as the University of Manitoba’s Investigation Officer, I knew precisely what it was that I wanted to speak to the conference attendees about – social media and its impact on the University workplace and learning environments as well as its impact on the investigation of harassment complaints coming out of those environments.
As I explained to those who attended my session, over the past three years, social media has become a force to be reckoned with in the vast majority of complaints I have been hired to investigate. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – you name the platform and I can provide an example of it being used for, shall we say, less than polite purposes. It has become very clear in the work that I do that social media has opened up opportunities for harassment to invade environments that we live and work in in ways that were never previously imagined.
Here is the slide deck from my presentation which will, hopefully, give you some insight into my discussion. And whether you are an employer or university administrator, within those slides you’ll also find my recommendations for preventing or, at least, minimizing the risks of the misuse of social media in your particular environments.
