Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring After schools on the west coast started monitoring students' social media posts and comments; many opinions have come up. Many students feel that their privacy has been invaded and that their rights to freedom of speech have been taken away. For starters students didn’t even find out through the school that their social statues were going to be monitored by a third party company. Rumors came up around school that the school might be watching over them, but it wasn’t confirmed by administration. I believe if a school feels the need to monitor the students they should at least inform the students or even make them sign an agreement to let them snoop through the online media sites. A school district in California paid Geo Listening $40,500 to patrol their students’ sites and monitor for signs of bullying or self-harm. Which is absolutely ridiculous, that a school spent that much money on something they can’t even prove its helped in any form. The quote from the superintendent that “We think it’s been working very well,” just proves that they can’t back up the ridiculous sum of money they paid to monitor against bullying and self-harming. If students were to all change their privacy policy to strict, the school would be wasting over 40 thousand dollars, because the company is only allowed to search public accounts. If no student has been disciplined following a social media post then that just once again proves that students aren’t using social media sites to harass or intimidate others and that school districts stress too quickly and make impulsive decisions that cost the district money and take away from students learning. And if disciplining students for what they say on media sites outside of school imposes on their freedom of speech rights then how does Geo Listening plan to go about dealing with a potential bullying or self-harm threat. The idea to protect against these threats is good, but I feel there are better ways to go about it