SOCIAL MEDIA
SPIES The WSS Editorial Board voices their input on the ICCSD’s new social media monitoring policy.
I
n part of a district-wide effort to increase school safety, the ICCSD has recently received federal funding to monitor students’ social media accounts connected with their school-issued emails for indications that a student might harm themselves or others. Most of the funding is being allocated towards hiring a civilian coordinator to lead a new threat assessment team that would implement this plan, along with additional costs that the ICCSD will need to bear themselves. While the ICCSD hasn’t decided what the social media monitoring would exactly look like, the school board members are divided in terms of whether or not they support the plan. The district officials who support it justified their reasonings by citing that in past years, the district’s anonymous texting and reporting platform recorded nearly 30 “significant” reports of students who had intentions of self-harm or hurting others. However, some other district officials don’t believe that social media monitoring is the best solution to find more potential threats. According to Kate Callahan, director of student services, the school district doesn’t even have to use the funding strictly for a monitoring system, and can adjust how they want to use the money as long as the general scope stays the same. With the school board’s members calling for community input on the plan, the WSS Editorial Board feels the responsibility to voice our inputs as ICCSD students. The Editorial Board votes 20-1 that the ICCSD should not continue to implement its plan to hire a company to monitor student social media accounts. One of the first flaws with the plan is that the school district would only be able to monitor social media that students have connected with their school-issued emails. Very few students
34
EDITORIAL DEC. 20, 2019
use school accounts for their social media, but instead connect to their own personal accounts, most of which are on private setting. This drastically reduces the program’s effectiveness because the vast majority of “potentially harmful” messages wouldn’t even be discovered. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the plan steps into the private lives of students outside of school. Granting school authority the ability to constantly monitor the outside lives of students sends a powerful message to the student body that a line of trust is breached between students and administration, with an underlying pressure that they always have to constantly filter what they post or send. SHOULD THE ICCSD CONTINUE TO IMPLEMENT ITS PLAN TO HIRE A COMPANY TO MONITOR STUDENT SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS?
20 1 THE WSS EDITORIAL BOARD VOTED AGAINST SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING.
Moreover, on the administration side of things, deciding how deep the monitoring will go and through what social media platforms will be another difficult matter on its own. In modern day, students have multiple accounts on different platforms, each with their own style, lingo and teenage jargon. How will a company, without an inside view into what it means to be a modern teenager, constitute what a threat is or not? Will they have to examine every comment on every post? How will they access Snapchat, for example, with its system primarily built on photos and text that instantly disappear? It’s all too easy for innocent students to be falsely accused and subjected to examination while any serious
threats go undetected. Additionally, there’s no need for every student to be subjected to this invasion of privacy. It would be far more resourceful to focus efforts on the students reported through the anonymous texting system rather than the entire student body. Even national organizations agree. Brennan Center and the Center for Democracy and Technology express their concerns that monitoring students’ social media is invasive and not an effective indicator for whether a student will cause harm. The American Civil Liberties Union also warns that the practice can lead to students being falsely identified as threats. In light of the overall plan’s ineffectiveness, there’s no need to spend thousands of dollars to hire a company. With the grant money’s flexibility, there are better methods. One idea is to use the grant money to create a social media literacy course for all students to take, or bring in a professional to speak during AFTs or assemblies. The purpose of the course would be to thoroughly educate students on how to notice potential signs of harm on social media and in regular school life. The more educated on the warning signs, the easier it is for students to act through systems such as the anonymous texting system. Because after all, students who go through daily school life are the most observant of their peers in what separates actual concerning material from regular teenage language. That way, the ICCSD won’t need to use thousands of dollars in funding to breach the trust and privacy of all students through social media monitoring but instead, use the money for a better solution. ART & DESIGN BY XIAOYI ZHU