If a potential employer requested your password to Facebook or asked that you “friend” him, would you comply? If you are already employed and an employer fires you over content on your facebook, do you raise a fuss?
As it turns out, your response might depend on your age.
Following reports that potential and current employers have begun relying on social media for background checks, Rasmussen recently surveyed 1,000 adults on whether a potential employer should have access to interviewees Facebook pages as part of the hiring process and whether an employer should be able to fire workers for something they post on Facebook.
Of the adults surveyed, only 19 percent thought it was “appropriate” for potential employers to ask for access to their Facebook page, but 33 percent thought it was totally fine for an employer to fire someone for “inappropriate Facebook content.”
In other words, one in three people thought it was OK for employers to fire employees based on their behavior on facebook, while only one in five people thought facebook activity should affect companies’ hiring decisions.
To compare this to a distinctly college-age group, I unscientifically surveyed a random selection of my peers at Hillsdale College. Of the 21 students who let me query them:
Most students (57 percent) neither a problem with employers having full access to their Facebook pages, nor firing them based on something they post.
Keep in mind that I surveyed 1.5 percent of my campus’s population, while Rasmussen surveyed only .0000032 percent of America’s population.
This very unscientific survey seems to conclude that conservative college students have less of a problem with handing over Facebook information to employers. They would even be OK with being fired on account of something they posted on Facebook. But why?
I have two theories. The first is well-stated in the words of Abigail Obert, a junior at Hillsdale, who told me, “I mean, I have nothing to hide.”
Granted, Hillsdale is known for its cautiously moderate students, whose Facebook status updates usually consist of quotes from Aristotle or something remarkable their professor said in class. Most of the people here feel they have nothing to hide. So, this “I have nothing to hide” sentiment might not be universal among conservative students nationwide. But, as Canada’s CBC stated, “the current younger generation is self-focused and image-conscious like never before.”
Many of today’s young people/ carefully guard their lily-white reputations on their Facebook accounts, posting happy pictures and happy status updates, and untagging themselves from less flattering ones, or at the very least, making those photos private to their parents, the public and certain groups of friends. Of course they feel they have nothing to hide.
A second theory is that the “Facebook Generation,” if you will, simply has no sense of privacy. When Janelle Wilson, Ph.D., wrote about this topic for Psychology Today in 2008, she said, “The notion that privacy is a ‘right’ that individuals should have is likely lost on the Millennial.”
Wilson’s point in the article is that lines between the public and private image have been blurred, or as Wilson says, they have undergone a “conflation.” While the older generations have a deep sense of privacy and see Facebook as an invasion of that privacy, young people bare it all on facebook – sometimes quite literally.
The privacy argument would certainly explain why my poll of my school showed that younger people have less reserve about giving employers a peek at their Facebook profiles.
If “likes” and status updates are a valid extension of self and what you see is what you get, then why keep it from a potential employer?
Whatever the reason, it seems (based on my questionable research) that young conservatives at the very least do not see the information they share social media as a threat. It will be interesting to note the affect the trend of blurring the private with the professional ultimately has on our culture throughout the next decade.
