Monday, March 27, 2017
QUESTION OF THE WEEK NO. 10
Cyber bullying, student violence at school and
teenage suicide is a growing concern in grades K-12 in schools across the
nation. Some schools are monitoring the
social media posts of students in an effort to combat these problems and
require students to disclose their social network passwords to school
officials. Many students and parents
oppose such monitoring, citing an invasion of student privacy. Is such monitoring sound public policy in today’s
digital world?
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No, I don't agree with all of this. I do think that it is appropriate for schools to keep an eye on public social media postings that relate to the school. However, I don't think that students should have to give their passwords to school officials. Students do have a right to privacy. I wonder if school money being spent on anti-bullying programs, more school councilors, etc. would be better than money being spent to intensely monitor student social media.
ReplyDeleteYes, to some extent. Schools should be able to monitor public posts related to their school and their student body. Beyond that, students should exercise their privacy. On Facebook, students can change their privacy settings to control who sees their posts and comments. Twitter and Yik Yak posts are public, but that's known going into it. I don't see it as an invasion of privacy because the school is using the information to ensure that the school's reputation is intact, and that its student body is safe.
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ReplyDeleteNo. I think that schools should have the right to monitor students if there is a threat or safety concern but should not require students to give out passwords. People can change their social media settings and passwords easily so I don't think would do much good. People who are purposely bullying or threatening someone else might take action to hide this so it won't help for schools to know their passwords.
DeleteNo. I think that while schools do have to protect students to some extent, they should not constantly monitor students social media accounts. Monitoring students social media should be done by the parents of the student. In some circumstances, the parents may not be involved in their students social media usage. In this situation I think that the school may be able to get involved if the victim of the bullying is a student and it is doing significant damage. Ultimately, however, I do not think that giving up passwords and social media accounts to the school is appropriate and it definitely violates the students privacy.
ReplyDeleteI believe that K-12 schools should be able to monitor students’ activities on social media while they are enrolled at the institution. The students are going to interact over these mediums and this is going to affect their school work and life. Social media is an extension of social interaction that they are having/will have at school. There have been many cases that link cyberbullying and self-harm and suicide. Due to this, the safety concerns of students override their individual privacy interests.
ReplyDeleteNo. I do not believe that requiring students to disclose their personal social media accounts is a correct way to address this problem. It is too invasive, and there are an indefinite amount of regulation issues. For one, who has access to the students' information? What constitutes cyber-bullying great enough to require access to a student's personal social media accounts? Will the faculty notify the parents/student if they access the social media accounts?
ReplyDeleteAside from these questions, there is a threat that teachers could abuse this privilege. For example, what if a faculty member accessed the students' social media without sufficient cause?
Also, from what I gather from the readings, schools only enter the students' social media accounts if they recognize that they have been engaging in cyber-bullying. If the administration - instead of accessing the social media accounts - contacted the parents directly, and had an intervention with the student, this would prove more effective. Additionally, the administration could strongly encourage the parents to ask their child to access their social media accounts for them.
Ultimately, I believe that if the school does monitor online bullying, it should not deal with violating the privacy of the students. The school could have its own social media account to view student activity, but anything beyond that is extreme.
No, I don't believe schools should force students to disclose their social media account passwords. The ability to monitor and intervene in instances of cyberbullying is a slippery slope. A school official could justify digging into a student's account for more and more minuscule reasons which could lead to inappropriate action. This degree of involvement should be for parents, not schools. Another aspect of the issue is how the access information is stored and if it is vulnerable to hacking. A stranger getting access to minors' private social media accounts would be a nightmare. I believe schools should be allowed to follow students online as other users could and possibly use word flagging to make the observation more clinical, but gaining access to students passwords could easily lead to misuse of the information, make the information vulnerable to hacking by third parties, and finally create a chilling effect for students.
ReplyDeleteNo. I think that schools need to monitor activity that is within their jurisdiction. This is limited to events, problems, and threats that occur at school during school hours. While schools could probably combat some cyberbullying by monitoring students’ social medias, it is far too invasive of a policy. Surrendering student passwords gives schools access to personal information that is totally irrelevant to school safety. If something comes up on social media that the school needs to know about (for example, a shooting threat), a student or a parent needs to be the one to report this to the school. If a teacher finds out about cyberbullying, they should contact the student’s parents.
ReplyDeleteThere should be monitoring to some extent in order to ensure students' safety. There are going to be many cases involving threats of violence with the threatened parties being too scared to come forward themselves, and if the school is monitoring public social media posts in some way, whether manually or through automated searches for preprogrammed words or phrases, administrators can be made aware of these threats. In any setting, students should be made aware of the school's practices.
ReplyDeleteNo, I do not believe schools should have the right to request students' passwords regardless of the service.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of watching publicly-posted student social media for immediate threats (Mental as well as physical), I don't have anything against such policies except that the money might be better spent elsewhere (councilors to help a student in distress before he brings a grenade to school, etc.)
In terms of preventing cyberbullying (which may happen in private), it would seem to me that an education initiative to make sure students know how to properly configured their social media accounts to block unwanted messages or block unfriendly users would be a more effective and pre-emptive measure than trying to deal with bullying as it happens
No. I don't believe that schools should monitor social media. But I would like to make a distinction between monitoring and investigating. I don't think school districts should actively and routinely review social media posts, or in other words I don't believe a constant surveillance can be justified against the students' expectations to privacy. That said, I do believe they should have power to investigate concerning posts on an individual basis as they are brought to their attention. Now, the methodology of these investigations is where things get mushy. Requiring students to divulge social network account passwords at the request of the administration with the alternative of facing legal prosecution under a definition as wide as the articles we read for this week gives me a really unpleasant feeling in my stomach. There's just so much room for abuse and disregard for rights to privacy with this concept, again, as in the case of the Illinois law. However, keyword triggers based on public posts or perhaps some sort of tip line are rather noninvasive, especially when compared to surrendering account passwords at only the fickle threshold of "probable cause". Is bullying going to continue? Of course, but efficacy isn't the question here. Schools and school districts have a responsibility for protecting their students, emotionally and physically, but that responsibility doesn't warrant constant surveillance or the surrender of privacy rights.
ReplyDeleteNo, it is up to the school if they want to keep an eye on a students social media posts but forcing them to give up their passwords is too much. The time spent on these sorts of programs shoulf be used to educate teachers on how to better provide help to the student or to train more counselors. If the faculty were more reliable cyberbullying would not be as much of an issue since students would feel comfortable reporting it. The issue right now is not that we arent aware of cyberbullying (it is often painfully obvious if it is happening through social media), it is that the current solutions are ineffective for the victim.
ReplyDeleteNo I do not believe that schools should be able to require students to give them their passwords. I feel that this is an invasion of their privacy. The privacy interests outweigh the public safety interests in this case especially because there are other methods of addressing cyber bullying. I believe that there would be too much risk involved and that this power would be abused. It is fine if the schools want to monitor students' activities as long as they are public activities. Because there are other methods to combat cyber bullying, this is not sound public policy.
ReplyDeleteNo,
ReplyDeleteIt’s one thing to monitor the public activity that students post to social media. It’s quite another to take control of students’ passwords to monitor the more private communications that are possible with Facebook or other messenger apps. When I attended K-12, this wasn’t really a problem because nobody used social media. Today, people use social media for everything, and the fact that these social media platforms offer more than just public communications would make school monitoring in this fashion extremely invasive, and unnecessary.
Yes, but I do not believe the school should have access to students social media passwords. I think monitoring publicly posted social media from students is within the purview of schools in trying to maintain the safety of the school environment. I think that it is a logical extension of the role provided by student counselors, in that modern students are much more willing to share certain information on online than in person, and that information could go a long way in dealing with student issues and combating cyberbullying.
ReplyDeleteNo, there is no reason for school officials to have access to those passwords. If private messages are being used to cyber bully, the victim should have the ability to report it to the school, but the school still shouldn't request the passwords of the bully.
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