A little legal background can go a long way and describe the importance of knowing a locale’s law (like Iowa’s), when you are leveraging digital communication tools like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram to build a relationship with an audience. Local law and national law will inform how you can leverage user generated content into your communications strategy.
In this case, we’ve got Iowa Drug Testing Laws applicable, and after that we’ve got some insights into how those laws impact how we manage accounts like @SedgwickCountyGovernment and account @HarrisonCoIA (which are clearly written, but very difficult on every single marketing firm wanting to promote 10K+ Twitter followers for things like #SocialMediaWeek). Here’s some action items for any reader of this blog to know.
Iowa Drug Testing Laws will impact how content moderation is managed. This means thinking through moderation policies on content such as user-generated content in the form of comments on Facebook, YouTube videos and comments on blog posts. For example, if you’re a county having to enforce a set of drug testing laws or a drug free workplace. That may mean defining profanity at one level for drug testing laws (e.g. the full version of a 4 letter word in the 4 letter word family might make you fail a test). But for content publication, you may define profanity at a different level (e.g. “sh*t” may not be considered something that would result in a drug testing incident, but in a public blog or video comment arena, the four letter word in the 4 letter word family may get your comment deleted).
And these types of local laws (e.g. drug testing, alcohol testing, blood testing) will influence things such as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, or what can be done with those FOIA (and FIOA-type 1 laws).
For more information on drug testing laws, you can visit this Wikipedia page.