Our fire department has its own Facebook page and several stations (including mine) have created our own pages. Please correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t the Facebook page belong to the creators, not the fire department? In other words, the fire chief cannot make us get rid of the station page, can she?
Determining the legal ownership of a Facebook page is not going to answer your question. Facebook may indeed consider the creators of a page to be the lawful owners so long as the creators are not misrepresenting their identity. The more important question is whether the fire department can limit firefighters from posting on social media in such a way that they are representing themselves as being part of a fire station within the fire department.
To answer that question, more information is needed. The first question: Are the individual fire stations part of the fire department or are they separate entities? What I mean is, are the individual fire stations independent entities, such as volunteer fire companies, who in turn are part of a larger county fire department or fire district? If a separate entity controls the individual fire station, the fire department’s ability to control the station’s social media activities will be a function of the political and administrative leverage that can be brought to bear. Read More…