If you’ve followed my previous blog posts, you’ll remember that I wrote about being yourself online in order to build better professional relationships. I added a specific caveat to the exception of if you were an “unlovable monster”.

As if the universe was intentionally trying to prove me wrong, my Facebook wall has been filled with examples that have made me reconsider enough to add one more scenario to the exclusions list. If you feel the need to spread hate messages about specific groups, you might want to consider keeping your professional and your personal pages separate.

Now, all the points from my previous post do still apply to these people too. By posting these things, you’re probably only going to attract like minded people, and you’ll probably enjoy working with them more. By posting things on your Facebook wall including long winded rants about how “There is no difference between Nazis and Islam” you probably aren’t going to attract many Muslim clients, which you probably prefer. And I can understand the hypocrisy of my telling people to be themselves, and then suggesting that someone with a different opinion to mine should keep their opinions to themselves for the sake of professionalism.

In a case like Facebook, the damage of posting unpopular opinions goes beyond just not attracting clients. There is a hazard for other professionals appearing on your friends list. Realtors and mortgage brokers generally will add just about anyone to Facebook, and showing up on the friends list of someone posting hate speech might look negatively on them too.

So where then do we draw the line? Only voice the opinions you have that are popular? You know, I don’t actually have an answer to this one. I would fully welcome an open discussion on this topic, because I would be curious to see what people think. But I think I’ve hit my “being PC” limit for the day.

What I will say is my own opinion is this: If I see one more ignorant, racist, uneducated scare tactic rant on my god damned feed from someone in my industry, your ass is getting unfriended so fast it will make your head spin.