<p>"The Glendale Unified School District has hired a Hermosa Beach company to monitor public social media posts made by its students to find out when teens are in trouble or causing it.</p>
<p>Superintendent Richard Sheehan said Geo Listening is analyzing the posts of 13,000 students at eight Glendale middle and high schools.</p>
<p>The goal is to give school administrators critical information as soon as possible." ...</p>
<p>Coming soon to a school near you? A budding NSA?</p>
<p>If the monitoring is limited to the ‘public’ portion of the posts then I see no problem. Students/children old enough to use social media should also be aware of the consequences. This stuff is NOT private! It’s really just another step in the process of enlarging what a school is supposed to do for the welfare of the kids. We’ve already turned over the feeding, medical decisions, before school hours and after school hours to the school system. They know the financial, social, familial issues with families…It seems reasonable to turn this over to them also. After all - if they monitor thousands of correspondences they may find ONE person to help. This again, is the model of the system.</p>
<p>As for advice to the kiddles…if you wouldn’t want your mother to see it, don’t put it on a social media site.</p>
<p>^^^^this^^^^ I think employers, schools, etc. are getting way too involved in what individuals express on social media sites. What people do on their own time is their own business, the only exception being cyberbullying, which affects others.</p>
<p>Cyberbullying is a real problem. I don’t see how schools can prevent it without some moderation of social media sites. </p>
<p>In several of the recent sexual assault cases, videos of the assaults have been posted. In at least one instance, the victim committed suicide. Again, how do schools prevent this sort of thing without some monitoring?</p>
<p>Hazing, especially by sports teams, is too common. Again, in at least some instances, photos and videos have been posted . Monitoring might limit this somewhat.</p>
<p>Free speech is NOT the same as being able to say whatever you want. Is it ok to yell “fire” in a crowd and cause a panic? Is it ok to incite a riot? How about slander? See, it’s not that simple. </p>
<p>Anyone who does not have their Facebook or Twitter locked down so only their friends can see posts is an idiot. Lock your posts down and this monitoring is not an issue.</p>
<p>Students with any sense at all will make their accounts private when they learn that this is being done.</p>
<p>
I agree with this, but the problem will come when a student posts on his facebook account that he can’t stand the principal because he is an idiot. That isn’t slander, but I predict the speech will be punished.</p>
<p>I agree it isn’t libel. I also think that your concern is exactly WHY it makes sense to hire an outside company. If school personnel do it, they WILL pass on the remarks about the principal to the principal. If you hire an outside company, you can define the types of posts you’re concerned about and have reporting limited to those concerns.</p>
<p>If the students are smart they will put their accounts under nicknames and NOT post any identifying features such as e-mail, address or telephone # so they cannot track who actually owns the account. Also, as mentioned setting your account to private is another good method.</p>
<p>Is it a slimy intrusion of privacy done by a school board that has taken it on itself to police student interactions even when outside of school? Yes. </p>
<p>Is it legal, yes- people need to understand that sites like Facebook already share all your data (set to “private” or not) with market research and ad companies, businesses and schools just scanning your public page is becoming par for the course.</p>
<p>Hopefully students will learn to not post any information on these social media sites that they are not prepared to let the whole world see.</p>
<p>One might ask whether it should be the responsibility of schools to prevent these things. </p>
<p>I am certain that schools should act immediately and firmly to stop bullying and harassment AT SCHOOL, or at school-sponsored events/activities.</p>
<p>I am not so certain that schools should be in charge of monitoring the social lives of students outside of school. I think that a line must be drawn somewhere. I am concerned that schools have been lumbered with more and more social issues to monitor and correct. Yes, it is true that schools do this partially to facilitate learning: students need to be prepared to learn, and cannot do so if they are hungry or ill, for example. It is also true that in many situations schools are the most efficient place to deliver services. But sometimes it seems that schools are experiencing mission creep to the extent that people wish them to solve all of society’s ills. It is bad enough that schools that cannot compensate for the deprived and/or dangerous environment their students live in are routinely labelled as “failing,” as if THEY were the ones who created the situation.</p>
<p>Schools already have little enough time for actual instruction, and few enough resources to support it, without spending money on this.</p>
<p>NO! Unless a student has ALREADY made themselves a problem at a school (threats, bullying etc) and you want to strengthen your case there is no reason to monitor anything. It’s a scare tactic from a company to make money. And the first time that company does hit on anybody no matter how minor the offense (see, it works!)–then it will be “necessary” for all school systems to protect themselves from some law suit. It’s ridiculous. Just ask the kids and the teachers–they already know who the troublemakers are and how much trouble they are likely to cause. Real live people.
And heaven forbid YOUR kid gets caught up in this cesspool of technology .</p>
<p>I can see it now: your kid said on facebook that X (fill in the blank with the thousand forbidden things for teens) is fun. Or maybe they “liked” it on somebody else’s page. Now your kid is suddenly part of some “something” (again, fill in the blank).
Your kid says “Mom, Dad, really…it’s just a stupid facebook page”. You say okay, you’re a good kid but stay off facebook.
The company says…see! We have thwarted x number of forbidden things that teenagers do and have done for a million years. Pay us a bunch of money. And in the meantime we keep a record of your teens transgressions for the next 100 years.</p>
<p>One of my friends has a child who was being bullied by classmates on social media. The bullying involved taking surreptitious pictures of him AT school, then posting those pictures after school, along with cruel comments. Because part of what was going on was at school, the school monitored social media to bust the perpetrators. It’s easy for students to take pictures behind the teachers’ backs or at lunch or in the bathroom and post them on social media.</p>
<p>Parents, go on the public Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc. accounts of your children’s friends and classmates. With various degrees of probing, you can find bullying going on right there, sometimes during school hours.</p>
<p>I think schools should confiscate phones, iPods, etc. until after classes end. However, suggest that and some parents go ballistic. Moreover, short of metal detectors or body searches, it’s nearly impossible to confiscate all those devices. The parents have to buy into the solution. They have to restrict access to mobile devices and monitor their use. So many parents have no clue what their children are doing online. I know one mother who told another what her daughter was saying on Twitter, and the girl’s mother was in total denial. No, her daughter would never do that, etc. Then she looked at the tweets herself. She was appalled and took action.</p>
I see no issues regarding ‘freedom of speech’ since the students are ‘speaking’ to their heart’s content, often way more than is prudent, but someone else is ‘listening’ to that ‘speech’. It’s only when one tries to stop the speech itself that there’s a violation of free speech (outside of the ‘fire’ in a theater circumstances).</p>
<p>Unfortunately there are a whole lot of people now who seem to feel the need to post way too much personal info about themselves for whatever often narcissistic reasons they have for doing so. Worse - there are a lot of young people who think this is actually normal and appropriate when it’s not. Parents really need to guide actively in this area (although some parents don’t do so well at this either). They need to tell the kid to not post anything they wouldn’t mind having the parents and grandparents and total strangers see.</p>
<p>Maybe knowing that their social media accounts might be monitored by an entity as close to them as their school will encourage them to either not use the sites to begin with (the best idea IMO) or at least use them appropriately and with appropriate security (fwiw - these places have been hacked and the sites themselves mine the data).</p>
<p>I’m not saying I condone this level of monitoring and really don’t think it s/b necessary and do view it as an invasion, not of privacy, but of an outside of school life where the school has no business.</p>
<p>With schools being held legaly responsible for more and more acts by students that they either knew or coulda shoulda known about thay are forced to do things like this-lawyers. blech.</p>
<p>I’m not taking any sides here. But every time I see a conversation where people start talking about “freedom of speech” and the First Amendment, I wonder how many are truly familiar with the way the First Amendment is worded. Here is the exact text:</p>
<p>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.</p>
<p>Notice the amendment ONLY speaks to Congress establishing laws that would prohibit free speech. It doesn’t say a school cannot act if a student publicly says (or posts) something threatening or offensive. Granted this type of monitoring can lead to years of court battles, but it does not violate the First Amendment.</p>
<p>And really…again…this is PUBLIC information to anyone else who has an account. The school is not logging into the private portion. It’s already public, as in…you speak and others can listen (or not). If you don’t want it heard, don’t say it or say it in private. Really, what is the problem here?</p>
<p>Wouldn’t be cheaper for the school to hire a company to bombard all the phones with advertisements for eight hours a day so that the miscreants (whoops, I mean students) couldn’t get a word or a picture in edgewise?</p>