Ah, Halloween. When I think of thee, I think of candle-scorched pumpkin-flesh smell, insulin shock, and the fun in being scared with fake blood and monsters. To celebrate Halloween, the Social Work Tech Guy wants to share one legitimately scary thing in relation to Social Work and Tech.

Your Online Identity

It seems like all of us have Facebook, many of us have Twitter (my favorite of the bunch), and some of us even have our own non-professional WordPress or Tumblr websites. These social websites are a great way to connect with friends, strangers, and people who share similar interests. Some folks I consider to be the best of friends have come from online acquaintanceship.

A brief rundown of aforementioned sites:

• Facebook: a great site if you want to keep in touch with people in your life from the present and past.
• Twitter: much more future-oriented and distraction-free (i.e. no updates on my timeline about your virtual farm) with limits of up to 140 characters per tweet.
• Tumblr: inappropriateness mixed with poignancy, integrated with meaningful relationships.
• WordPress: a platform that allows one to present creative, professional, and meaningful ideas to the masses without looking cheap.

As demonstrated, our online identity allows for us to use different websites to put ourselves out there. As social workers, this can be problematic.

Identifying Yourself as a Social Worker

When identifying ourselves as social workers in our private social media lives, we run several risks, especially when we are found by our colleagues, bosses, and heaven-forbid our clients:

• Judgement upon us for the work that we do – “Is this person qualified to be working with [insert special population here]?”
• Questioning of our professionalism – “OMG! Did s/he really just tweet that?”
• Reinforcing stereotypes that social work professionals are flawed persons – “Why is this person intervening with my relationship when they’re talking about the destructive parts about their own?”
• Having our intentions questioned – “Why is this person tweeting about this client?” or! “Am I the client that this social worker just tweeted about?”
• Opening Ourselves up to attack with those who have previously had negative social worker experiences – “I’m going to judge everything this person does [e.g. drinking, partying behaviors, etc.] because one of them took away my niece and put her up for adoption”

My best advice is, unless you are going to tweet as a professional, do not identify yourself as a social work (or social care) professional.

Here’s an example of a professional who tweets and identifies as a social worker:

And some tweets with commentary!

Identifying milestones and shortcomings in a professional manner

Professional Growth

Taking responsibility and growing up!

This was a very exciting day for me!

I love it when the President acknowledges social workers!

Discussing Yourself, i.e. Over-sharing

Not SocialJerkBlog 😉

• Your sex life, including behaviors/kinks/conquests/etc.
• Your drinking behaviors, including your epic partying shenanigans
• The N-word (I have seen a few twittering social workers have this on their profiles or retweets)
• Opinions that can be considered oppressive to cultures, peoples, genders, etc. that people can identify with
• Anything having to do with your clients (expanded on the next section)

I wanted to add “talking badly about your employer” to the list, but I am sure everyone needs to vent – although this can lead to unexpected, undesired, and unintentional consequences to you.

• Keep in mind that posting nude (or semi-nude) pictures of yourself or dressing provocatively may also be considered inappropriate and may lead to very unwanted situations

Here’s an example of a semi-anonymous blocked twitter account (edited to protect the guilty) that is often inappropriate.

A profile description, heavy on satire, light on class

I blocked out the potty-mouth language, but here s/he is tweeting about getting older.

Tweeting about work… still, indicative of a social worker… sort of… We’re not the only ones to assess Axis II clients.

Tweeting about watching MTV… may negate the smarty-pants vibe presented in the user’s profile.

Over-sharing can have consequences for you if you identify as a social work professional – in short, you represent the profession when you declare that you’re a social worker on your social media platform of choice.

Discussing Your Clients, i.e. Being Unethical

I have an online social work colleague that brought to my attention that I had broken my rule about tweeting about clients by tweeting about clients. Specifically, I tweeted something unfavorable a grievance about the work I was doing and I thought I was safe, due to posting this in a location I thought was blocked. In hindsight, it was very unethical.

Things I [try so hard to] avoid:

• Discussing a client, period.
• Discussing my opinion of a client, favorable or otherwise.
• Discussing specific interventions that I have done with a client (e.g. a tweet: “I just helped a client weigh pros versus cons about staying in her abusive relationship”  <- NO!)
• Discussing specific topics of conversation with the client (e.g. a tweet: “A client talked to me about his severe anxiety and it totally bummed me out”  <- NO!)
• Why you are experiencing countertransference, conflicting emotions, or cognitive dissonance as it relates to your client

The one person who does blogging in this capacity correctly is SocialJerkBlog. She is anonymous, has honest reflections, and cannot be pinpointed as to who she is  or who she works for. Furthermore, she represents an honest reflection of an honest social worker but does not degrade our profession in her description of her work. I salute you, boo 🙂

If possible, I would avoid talking about your clients online, altogether to maintain appropriate boundaries. In a later section, I will discuss this in the context of the NASW Code of Ethics.

Giving Away Your Location

With sites such as FourSquare, Gowalla, and Facebook allowing you to “check in” to locations, I fear being found out and tracked by a company or individuals who can then decipher my behaviors of picking up my morning bagel here,  grabbing lunch there, having a brew with friends out yonder. This can possibly be classified as over-sharing and may turn problematic if you are checking in to the same bar on consecutive days. When people assume that you are at the bar to get drunk and not to meet with friends, messages can be mixed up.

Bonus Tip: If you own a website ending in .com or .org (or etc.), you may want to invest in a PO Box or use a different address than your home address when you register your site. Due to the fact that websites can identify other website owners (by using Google to search “whois” and “domain”) your address is in the public domain.

Facebook

Facebook scares the living bejeezus out of me. Their privacy is so convoluted and confusing that the best advice that I offer is three-fold:

1. Only link to those that you absolutely trust.
2. Lock down your privacy so that only your friends can see you and only those that have your personal email can find you.
3. Assume that everything you say/do/link-to/etc with Facebook will one day be read aloud at an ethics hearing.

I don’t think I can put aside enough time to write a blog about Facebook and Social Work. There are numerous benefits, but I leave you with this story in which a young man in Europe requested his data from Facebook and was given a data CD with “chats he had deleted more than a year ago, “pokes” dating back to 2008, invitations to which he had never responded, let alone attended, and hundreds of other details.” If that does not send you running down the street while gnashing your teeth, then I have failed to scare you on this Halloween.

Potential Issues and Ethical Concerns

Quite possibly the saddest photoshop job ever

Consider how the NASW Code of Ethics for the Profession of Social Work plays into your online behavior.

How can one adhere to the Values (and Ethical Principles) (NASW 2008) of:

Dignity and Worth of the Person (Social workers respect the inherent dignity and worth of the person), if

• the social worker is not honoring their client and disparaging them?

Importance of Human Relationships (Social workers recognize the central importance of human relationships), if

• online behavior can lead to a detrimental relationship due to aforementioned undesireable behaviors?

Integrity (Social workers behave in a trustworthy manner), if:

• your identity online as a social work professional affects how people perceive the entire profession?

Might I suggest, as an intervention, that you check out your online behavior as it correlates to Ethical Standard #1 in the Code of Ethics that outlines Social Workers’ Ethical Responsibilities To Clients?

Take it easy out there! Tweet well, do good work, and keep in touch*.**

*A play on the trademarked words by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac”.

** comment 🙂