Legal Commentary

BC Election candidate quits over racy Facebook photos

By David Canton

A BC NDP candidate just dropped out of the election because of some racy photos on his Facebook page.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt points out that he had a post 3 years ago that suggested this might happen based on an article I wrote at the time.

Mike comments that we have not yet reached the point where such “youthful indiscretions” posted on the web are ignored.

The dividing line between ?youthful indiscretions? and something serious enough to impair one?s career is very subjective.  It moves with the type of thing one is applying/running for, the entity one will be working for, and the person/people who are making the decision or evaluating the individual.

It might be interesting to track this over time to see if we become more tolerant of indiscretions posted on the web, and the nature of the indescretions that are tolerated and not tolerated.

Perhaps someone should start a wiki and track the “social network indiscretion index”, or “SNII”.  (Now there’s an acronym for a Wired magazine bit. :))

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on April 23, 2009 (boomark / email).