Behavior:
Adult male massage therapist makes inapprobriate remarks to young female teen
Our client supplies on demand massage therapists (MT) through a phone app to spa's. In this case the therapist was providing massages to both mother and daughter. The mother over heard the MT say to her 15 year old daughter "when you are 18 send me your phone number". We immediately removed the MT from the platform thereby depriving the MT of income.
We and the spa subsequently received an attorney letter representing the MT alleging discrimination, promoting hostile work environment, retaliation, wrongful termination and harassment among other allegations.
Speech:
Wellness proviider spews abuse to Mezuzah holder
This client provides in home health and wellness care with independent contractor providers. In this case the provider, who previously had good customer ratings, began exhibiting abusive, anti-semitic and threatening speech to the customer apparently having noticed a Mezuzah on the door. The provider contract was immediately severed.
We subsequently received an attorney letter alleging our negligence that we allowed our customer to be emotionally traumatized, harassed, threatened with violence, bullied and impaired the safety and security of their home among other allegations.
Images:
Half naked female pictures posted on social media
This is a marketer of healthy nutraceuticals and athlete supplements. The web site is a platform for curated group exotic trips for competitive activities, such as marathons. In one trip during the week long stay scuba diving was a curated activity. Changing from street cloths and/or swim suits to wet suits was occurring on the dive boat. These boats are always disorderly because of the constant motion, heavy gear and often little privacy. One male diver posted on social media pictures of one female diver getting into her wet suit, and they were a bit racy. This despite efforts by a few folks to block the camera and otherwise protect her privacy.
A few weeks later an attorney letter arrived alleging we allowed the woman to be sexually exploited, harassed and taunted and that we allegedly were negligent in not taking reasonable actions to provide a safe environment free from emotional trauma and harassment.
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Learn as we go Risk Management, Trust & Safety (T&S):
The attorney letters had demands in millions of dollars. We also worried about protecting the clients' brand by avoiding bad publicity. We learned by trial and error how to manage these risks.
Here's what we learned:
- Deep social media web scraping uncovers posting by the MT of pictures of erotic poses of teenage girls
- Vendors do sentiment analysis that extract data from targeted indivduals' social media reveals anti-semitic hate speech by the home care provider and
- Web harvesting uncovers unwanted behavior of posting pictures of woman whose requests for removal were ignored.
Our position was strengthened against the attorneys by having records of social media vetting and documentation of decisions regulated by written protocols. This offered the opportunity for much negotiation and brand risk management. Some attorney claims become frivolous and others have much reduced legal expense. Indemnity payments are not usually made and generally there are only legal expenses.
A problem when you have all this information pre-event is what to do about it. Any action has to be carefully considered with privacy and libel laws and simple ethical practices. Also the T&S team must assess the legal and contractural relationship(s) among perpetrator, our client and the alleged injured party. Lastly the Team must come up with effective solutions to the minefield of unpredictable reaction of such perpetrators to our preemptive actions.
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We have had great fun helping our clients develop their T&S teams. This exciting work began way before the term T&S came into common usage keeping our promise of value add and leading edge.
