Ethical Social Media Use in Higher Educations Institutions 249about their company if it was in the news, 53 percent say they
share information about work projects once a week or more, and
more than a third say they often comment, on their personal sites,
about managers, co-workers and even clients. As a result,
workplace secrets are no longer secret and management must
assume that anything that happens at work; any new policy,
product or problem, could become publicly know at almost any
time [...]” (ERC 2013: 8-9)In South Africa, social media are also being used to mobilise groups,
engender solidarity and support and in an increasing number of
cases, effect personal, reputational, professional and institutional
damage and destruction. Much of this is currently ascribed to the
need for accelerated transformation and/or political agendas, both in
the public and private domains. One thus finds higher education
being drawn via social media, into a highly-charged socio-political
environment and being used as a vehicle for socio-economic
transformation via agendas which have sometimes tenuous links to
traditionally mandated university business. For higher education
institutions this has, for example, meant an unanticipated onslaught
of issues ranging from unprecedented student and labour demands;
demands for the inclusion of a wider range of stakeholders in all
university decision making and operations; serious disruptions to
institutional meeting, planning and budgeting cycles (and finances);
and significantly disruptive impacts on core business in terms of
management and staff’s time, that has been diverted to addressing
these mostly ad hoc issues, which have often assumed crisis
proportions.
An example of this dynamic is the #MustFall movement. On 10
March 2015 a group of University of Cape Town students flung
human faeces on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes calling for the