Social Media Checks

There are a number of reasons that employers find outsourcing Social Media checks useful:

1. Professional screening companies help to solidify that the content you are viewing is for the correct person. This is due to applicable law which states that screening companies must have procedures in place to match the candidate to the available information, which can be tricky and time consuming when performing this type of check yourself. 
2. Background screening companies help to keep consistency within the hiring process. If done internally by several people, their views and how they perform the check will differ from person to person, even with the best training. It can also prove to be problematic legally as candidates can claim that they are being treated differently to others. 
3. Background screening companies can reduce the risk of employers seeing content that may be illegal or off-limits due to company policies. Even if an employer accidentally sees sensitive information, legally it can still be held against them that the information was used in the decision-making process. Such content includes religious beliefs, medical situations or sexual orientation.

Background screening companies follow a law called the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) when performing a Social Media check, which require employers to:

1. Obtain written consent from the candidate before beginning the screening.
2. Provide specific communications to the candidate if contemplating taking adverse employment action based on the information found in the screening process. The candidate must also be provided the opportunity to dispute the information produced.
3. Only view posts that have been made public by the candidate.

Please be advised that the information below includes profanity, obscene language and images that could be upsetting.

• Hate Speech – Derogatory, abusive and/or threatening statements toward a specific group of people typically on the base of race, religion or sexual orientation.
  "My boss is gay and I hate gay people."
• Insults and Bullying – Name calling or derogatory statements toward an individual about their physical characteristics such as weight, height, looks, intelligence, etc.
  "Did you fall on your head as a child? You are pathetic."
• Narcotics – Statements related to drugs and/or drug use including slang words, street names and phrases.
  "Can't wait until I get off work today, gonna get high."
• Obscene Language – Profanity, cursing, swearing or in general crude or vulgar words and phrases.
  "Assholes never even called me back. Company sucked anyway."
• Political Speech – Statements focussed on government policies, actions or specific politicians or ideologies. These often focus on specific issues such as abortion, environmental, immigration, government regulations, etc.
  "Climate change is real and we need to kill all the cows and eat all of their babies to keep our earth from dying."
• Self-Harm – Indications of wanting to hurt oneself or take one's own life intentionally.
  "Is there any point in living anymore?"
• Sexual Impropriety – Includes expressions relating to sexual misconduct that could be considered sexually demeaning or sexual harassment.
  "She is one horny slut."
• Terrorism/Extremism - Statements expressing radical viewpoints typically related to politics or religion and considered outside of mainstream attitudes.
  "Allah will reward us for our jihad against the infidels in the United States."
• Threat of Violence - An intent to inflict harm or loss of another person's life.
  "You do remember that I have a weapon and will not hesitate to stab you"
• Toxic Language – A way of communicating that is considered to be rude, disrespectful, blaming, labelling or using guilt.
  "You'll have to mansplain that to the idiot in Number 10."
• Drug-related Images – Images of pills, syringes, paraphernalia and alcohol.
  
• Explicit/Racy Images – Mostly explicit nudity and some partial nudity.
  
• Violent Images – Images of disfigurations, open wounds, burns, crime scenes and guns/weapons.
  Image analysis also extracts text from images, including memes, and analyses the text in the same way as all text on posts. If the image shows someone holding a sign, there will be an attempt to extract the text from the sign.
  
  Similarly, Keywords can be used to identify specific content which may appear in images e.g., searching for 'jogging' or 'running' to investigate a worker's compensation fraud where they claimed to be incapacitated from an accident.
• Keywords – Flags posts based on matches to custom keywords provided.
  If "Volunteer" is a keyword, then any post containing this word will be flagged.
  
  Keyword flagging does not impact score nor determine if someone is speaking negatively about a particular word. It simply flags the word for a visual indication in the report.