Could Twitter have saved me?

The impact of social media on misconduct

First, yes, I know it’s “X” but I am old school when it comes to branding!

Now onto the topic 👉🏼 One of my favorite parts of client work is ‘questions and answers.’ It’s not too often over the last decade that a question surprises me, but last week at a town hall for a biotech company, one did:

“Do you think that if social media was as prevalent as it is now, back when you were engaging in bribery (1997-2007), do you think it would have changed anything?”

Now that was one that I never heard before, and it got me thinking, even if speculative.

And I think the answer is yes (sort of). Why?

Part of my calculus, albeit irrational, was optimism bias, in that I would never get caught. Operating all over the world, traveling 250 days a year for over a decade, my being so remote made the concepts of criminal deterrence and being caught, as abstract concepts. But social media might have changed my thinking.

When I was in the Middle East, as the guest of a third party at a beach-house ☀️ locale where I should not have been (a story I shared during the town-hall), would I have been thinking about what if somehow that was memorialized on someone’s smartphone and shared on social media? I addressed such risks in an article via The Harvard Business Review (here), relating to the perils of being discovered and shared on social media, talking to competitors at industry events. Yet I never thought about my conduct being captured and shared on social media.

As Alison Taylor, author, Higher Ground shares, “we live in a world of hyper-transparency” now, but that was hardly the case when I was in the field. Yet, if hypothetically it was back then, while I still might not have been deterred by regulatory enforcement, I would have been attuned to the risks posed by being in the ‘wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person,’ somehow being chronicled and shared. Maybe it would have been posted on social media, and then sent to my former employer, or even perhaps come to the attention of enforcement agencies. With all those ‘what ifs, ’ I think I would have at least been concerned.

Would that have stopped me entirely? It’s hard to say. Would it have deterred me? Absolutely yes.

In sum, for those in ethics and compliance, trying to keep your programs strong in our environment of chaotic enforcement, maybe now’s a good time to remind the workforce that, regardless of regulation, we live in a world of smartphones and social media, where Alison’s ‘hyper transparency’ can catch anyone off-guard.

And if misconduct is somehow captured and shared, regardless of the regulatory regime, it’s not going to lead to anything good.