Beware Pharma: Corporate Facebook walls are now open for comments

As of 15th August 2011, the folks at Facebook removed the ability of Corporate clients to “shut” their walls to comments. For pharma companies this is a headache.

The law is a mess here. A pharma company has a legal obligation to comply with adverse event reporting to the FDA, that is: information about any reported negative side effects of its products and another obligation to provide timely and relevant advice towards physicians and patients about its products. However exactly what it can say about its products is regulated by the FDA.

A pharma company has a broader, non-legal obligation to its stakeholder groups (employees, physicians, patient, disease advocacy groups) to keep up a reasonable dialogue. My understanding is that it would be illegal for a pharma company who were aware of an adverse event not to report it to the FDA to the best of their ability (including making attempts to identify the complainer via their Facebook profile). Any disclaimer would have no impact on this. Facebook privacy settings are ignored by this obligation (and could in theory be overridden!). This means that information about a patient which they have chosen to keep private on Facebook could be shared with the FDA by a pharma company which strictly followed adverse event guidelines as they exist.

The issue of whether the post could afterwards be deleted sits outside this obligation. The FDA’s (somewhat unhelpful) lack of guidance in social media matters means that this is unclear. My sense is that as far as the FDA is concerned, the company could delete the post. However, doing so would create an unfortunate impression and might be considered culpable if any civil legal action resulted from damage being done by their products. As far as Facebook is concerned the page owner has an absolute right to delete a post which falls outside the guidelines of that page.

In relation to the other social networks: of course the same issues remain. They are most severe with Twitter, where comments have to be detected “in the wild” and are not easily found as in Facebook because of misspellings, vagueness, brevity. My sense is that pharma companies can comply with the spirit of the law by monitoring the brand name and comments addressed directly to the Twitter handles they own (@pharmaco). Similarly the liability in relation to LinkedIn conversations exists only where

a) groups are public, or
b) a pharma company – or its officials – have a presence in a particular group conversation

It is somewhat depressing that almost two years from taking its decision to meet the stakeholders in social media in November 2009 the FDA still hasn’t managed to provide even interim guidance on this issue. 57% of Americans use Facebook at least once a month according to an eMarketer survey of February 2011.

For more on this take a look at Market Sentinel’s recent white paper on Facebook and pharma.
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