Social media tracking: an invasion of privacy or a safety precaution?
One of the many services that tracks and manages social media includes Hootsuite, but schools may use more in-depth, surveillance-type systems to ensure the safety of students. “The safety of our students should be a priority,” Pre-calculus and Geometry Support teacher Angela Milani said.
October 5, 2017
The semi-recent Netflix original, 13 Reasons Why, made numerous schools and parents concerned about their students and children. A multitude of events occurred in the past couple of months. For example, a school in Alabama hired an FBI agent, and another school hired a tech firm in California for $157,190 in order to track all students’ social media.
It appears that a number of teenagers post and comment as much in a day, if not more, times than they work in class in a year.
“It [social media] is a good way to keep in touch with friends,” sophomore Haley Kish said.
However, unlike Kish, other students share a strong opinion on how social media can ruin or take over their lives. It presents a certain thought process for people with different personalities that contradicts or accompanies their aspects on life. Different views and different opinions relate to how one sees the common age with teenagers and the Internet.
“I think it [social media] is bad, it gets to my head. People devote themselves solely to social media, when it can literally ruin your whole life,” sophomore Joey Fitzgerald said.
Kish felt that this technology in schools could harm or benefit student success, but needs thorough testing and debating before a real decision follows through.
“It [looking through social media accounts] may lower the chances of cyber bullying and other issues like the racial debacle that happened last year, but it is still an invasion of privacy,” Kish said.
Overall, the students at NC know that it could help the students, but monitoring and watching all student social media accounts could stretch it a bit too far.
Teachers, on the other hand, feel somewhat differently about the issue. They believe that we should absolutely work on a tracking software to monitor student’s social media accounts.
“Young adolescents should be held accountable for their actions at school as well as outside of school, including within the social media world,” Precalculus and Geometry Support teacher Angela Milani said.
At the end of the day, people respond differently based on their position in the school and their outlook on the environment within social media. Social media tracking can exist as preventative matter for school shooters and threats and student suicides. It can save lives, and it can end futures.
