A topic growing in controversy is that of how freely employees can express themselves on social media at the risk of losing their job or not being hired at all.

A Wall Street Journal Blog post reports that the majority of business executives believe that they have the right to know what their employees are doing on social-networking sites. A Deloitte survey found that of 500 respondents with managerial job titles, 60% shared this sentiment.

What bollocks!

Why not hack into your employees’ personal e-mail accounts and listen in to conversations had during a lunch break? Social media exploded into the online scene because it allowed individual expression. With so much policing and control already limiting freedom of expression, it appears that companies now wish to put the cuffs on social media!

If Facebook and MySpace are now to become another tool through which to positively promote your company’s brand while leaving your ‘personal brand’ dry and regimented, why bother?

That is not to say that the public slander of one’s boss or company should be tolerated. On the contrary, if someone does not possess enough tact to understand the consequences of publicly displaying dissatisfaction with one’s boss, perhaps it is time to change bosses or in this case, employees.

What should not become the status quo is a monitoring of employees through Facebook or other social media platforms. It has an eerie ‘Big Brother’ ring to it (not in the TV show sense, but rather as per Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four).