64 | Annual Report 2019 2019-18. Criticism on Facebook of speech made by director of social and employment services was within the limits to municipal employee’s freedom of expression In a post on Facebook, a municipal trainee criticised a speech made earlier that day by the municipality’s director of social and employment services during a staff day. The post included a statement in quotation marks which could give the impression of being taken from the director’s speech. Shortly afterwards, the trainee was summoned to a disciplinary hearing on the grounds that her post was disloyal. The municipality found that the quotation marks gave the impression that the statement was a direct quotation from the speech – but that the statement did not represent the content of what the director of social and employment services had said. The municipality therefore gave the trainee a written reprimand. The Ombudsman stated that, based on the available information, the statement in the post was not a verbatim quotation of what the director of social and employment services had said in his speech. More specifically, the post left the impression that the director had drawn a more express parallel between the problems of high unemployment in the municipality area and child mortality in Africa in his speech than he appeared to actually have done. For this reason, the Ombudsman was understanding of the municipality’s wanting to refute the post. However, the municipality did not have grounds for giving the trainee a written reprimand for her post, which in the Ombudsman’s opinion was within the limits to public employees’ freedom of expression. The Ombudsman stated that public employees have a certain right to express their views in harsh and polemic terms when participating in the public debate about their workplace, and that there is room for using exaggerated expressions to a certain degree as long as this does not result in statements that are manifestly untrue or unreasonably offensive. 2019-27. Teacher’s comment on Facebook not unreasonably offensive In a comment on Facebook, a teacher at a municipal primary and lower secondary school wrote – via his own profile – among other things that the school management ‘monitor and victimise people’. After a disciplinary hearing had been held and the teacher consulted as a party to the case, the municipality gave the teacher a written warning for his comment on the grounds that it overstepped the limits to the freedom of expression of public employees. The Ombudsman took for his basis that the teacher’s comment reflected specific managerial actions carried out in relation to him, as he had – rightly or wrongly – perceived these actions. The Ombudsman stated that public employees are entitled to express their views in, for instance, harsh or polemic terms as long as this does not result in statements that are manifestly untrue or unreasonably offensive, and that there is room for using exaggerated expressions to a certain degree. The Ombudsman further stated that a management must to a large extent tolerate public expression of differences between the management’s and employees’ perceptions of managerial actions. Based on an overall assessment, the Ombudsman found that there were not sufficient grounds for considering the teacher’s comment to be unreasonably offensive. In addition, the Ombudsman found that the comment could not – within the meaning of the applicable rules – be regarded as manifestly untrue. The Ombudsman therefore found that the comment was within the limits to the freedom of expression of public employees and that there was thus no basis for giving the teacher a disciplinary warning.