What you should and should NOT post on Facebook

This past political season has been full of heated debates, finger pointing, lies and mis-direction and not necessarily all from one political party or the other. It seems that everywhere you looked there was someone posting on Social Networks something political in nature.

One of my favorite Memes on Facebook are the SomeeCards that are constantly being posted and this one is truly reflective of the past political season:

But even with as many political posts as I came across on Facebook, nothing was quite so alarming as some of the posts found on a newly elected Kansas State Representative's facebook page.  Now it's one thing to post such content on your page and keep the privacy settings limited to just your friends and entirely different thing to post that content to your page publicly for all the world to see.

Rightfully so, people began complaining about his Facebook content to the local news station, which eventually prompted an investigative report which aired on the 10 o'clock news.  I was asked for my professional opinion related to these posts, which I replied immediately that they were in violation of Facebook's rules of conduct.

See the entire interview here:

If you read Facebook's rules, you can clearly see several items which the Kansas State Representative was in violation of.  I explained how you can report the images to Facebook to have them deleted.  Facebook has been known to close your account if they find you in violation of the rules, so it's best to play things on the safe side, especially when you are a public official.

Visit the Facebook Community Standards Page

 After reviewing the rules and the images and videos on the good Representative's page, it was clear that they were in violation. Even though the images were posted by someone else and shared to the page, the Representative can still be held accountable for the content.

There are ways to report the images to Facebook, which did on several of the images. Surprisingly enough, Facebook refused to take the offensive images down.  It's not clear whether more people need to complain before Facebook will actually enforce their own rules, or if it was just a matter of not having a real person to follow up with the claim.  We'll make sure to stay on top of the situation to see what Facebook's response will be.

For now, it is unclear what is really allowed on Facebook. The rules should be evident enough, but with no one to enforce them, it really is like having no rules at all.

What do you think? You can watch the interview and see the images in question for yourself and we'd love to hear what you would do.