California School District Hires Firm To Monitor Students' Social Media 250
An anonymous reader writes "A suburban Los Angeles school district is taking a novel approach to tackling the problem of cyber-bullying. It's paying a company to snoop on students' social media pages. 'The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40,500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14,000 middle and high school students' posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year. Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety. As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the firm, Geo Listening, $5,000 last spring to conduct a pilot project monitoring 9,000 students at three high schools and a middle school. Among the results was a successful intervention with a student "who was speaking of ending his life" on his social media, said Chris Frydrych, CEO of the firm.'"
Account info? (Score:5, Interesting)
The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40,500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14,000 middle and high school students' posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year.
From TFA:
Frydrych's firm scours the social media postings of Glendale students aged 13 and older -- the age at which parental permission isn't required for the school's contracted monitoring -- and sends a daily report to principals on which students' comments could be causes for concern, Frydrych said.
And how does the school district get the student account information? I know if they had asked me for that info (if social media, nay the Internet, existed when I was in HS) I would have replied, "fuck off." Hell, I'd give that same answer to that same question to my employer now.
Re:Account info? (Score:3, Interesting)
With $40K and a geo-tag, I could screen-scrape enough facebook and twitter to identify 90 percent of the students who are at any given school (who use social media) given:
1) Any seed account , even the principal or superintendant, or someone else at that school
2) A list of student names - and it gets easier with ages
3) Students often post unfiltered information publically, including the names of their sports teams
4) Students are often not even aware that there is an option to mark things private, or that postings are visible to anyone but their friends
5) Friend or follow lists will be highly correlated with school population, meaning I can spider from every new account
6) A specially crafted mascot account for each school can be used, to friend or follow students susceptible to joining things they don't understand
7) A list of trigger words that flag comments for review by a person
8) A social sciences college student who needs money enough to read the postings of 13 to 18 year olds that have been flagged to see if it should go on a report
9) Another college student interested in sociology or psychology willing to vet and approve the automated matches, and look for more that software missed
Oh man, it goes on. It's quite simple, really, and I for one wish I had thought of offering such a service. The kids don't have to volunteer one bit of information directly to the monitoring company - they will volunteer it all indirectly, unknowingly, and will be very surprised when the school calls mom and dad.
I'd still have most of that $40K, and with a story like this I just upped my client list by an order of magnitude, parental outrage be damned.
Re:Again, the ends justify the means? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Simply Awful (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, why don't you just fix the fucked up environment that school's create
You can fix that with one and only one change: students must be able to pick and choose who they want - and, most importantly, don't want - to interact with. Someone hurt you, or is scary - banish him from your presence, for a while or forever. This will be self-regulating, unless the student wants to be all alone (and, actually, that is fine as well.) Those bans must work everywhere - in class, and in halls, and in the street. (Too much to ask for, but that's the spec.)
The whole problem is that (a) students have no say in who they are working with, *AND* (b) they have no means to control behavior of others. Adults have both of those options. I don't know why so many ancient writers say that childhood is the best time of anyone's life ... in my opinion, it's the worst time (aside from deathbed, perhaps.) Children have no rights; everyone is a superior; noncompliance is punished; complaints are not accepted; crimes can be committed against you with no recourse... Hell, as soon as I was done with school I ran away and never looked back. The adult world is simply heaven, compared to the wolfpack-like society of children where only physical strength and ferocity matter.
Re: Again, the ends justify the means? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's not being done on/with school computers, they shouldn't have anything to do with it.
They are supposed to be educators, not full time nannies/social police.
Re:blame 'budget cuts' (Score:3, Interesting)
In my case, properly trained means a four hour session twice a year practicing CPI [crisisprevention.com], along with using the methods it speaks of daily.
It's easy for you to sit on the sidelines and call someone out for a meaningless capitalization typo, isn't it? In fact, in a discussion about bullying, you decide the best thing to add is more bullying.
And people wonder where these kids learn it from...