Social media monitoring grades are incomplete

May 6, 2016
Security benefits of technology butt heads with privacy concerns on school campuses

The convergence of social media with the proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices has forever changed the way adolescents communicate with one another and the world at large. Unfortunately, not every teen uses these platforms for good, opting instead to leverage the anonymity afforded by the Internet to torment and bully their fellow classmates or, worse yet, levy threats of violence against an entire school.

But there is a silver lining for school administrators. Most material posted on social media is open to public scrutiny allowing them to take preventative action. In fact, an increasing number of school districts have started using social media monitoring tools that are designed to mine through the various posts on sites, such as Twitter, Instagram, and others, to isolate messages that pose a security risk to their facility or their teachers, staff members and students.

However, the use of social media monitoring in and of itself has been controversial in many school districts throughout the country. Just last month members of the school board in Orange County, Fla., which consists or Orlando and several other smaller municipalities, voted to renew its contract with a vendor of social media monitoring software. The move was met with opposition from some who say that using such software raises various privacy concerns.

Providers of social media monitoring software argue they are only looking at publicly available posts that anyone manually browsing these sites could find themselves and are just simply consolidating them into a streamlined user interface.   

“All of these are public communications that we are making people aware of -- nothing private or locked-down.  We are not looking at any private communications at all,” said Mike Richez, executive vice president of business development of OSC World, provider of the Digital Fly Social Media Awareness Software platform. “If geo-location is locked down or a privacy [filter is turned on], we can’t see it. We’re not looking to go into your private communication or peer-to-peer communication. Our objective is to look at public posts and believe me… people are publicly expressing the most remarkable things without any care or worry as to what is being said.”

The company recently got permission from Facebook to incorporate its “Timeline” element into the Digital Fly product, which already features monitoring of Twitter and Instagram posts. In compliance with Facebook’s privacy rules, only the Facebook user is authorized to see posts and the information they contain.

“We’re still only looking at anything associated with the timeline of school districts who put in their district Facebook account and anything associated with what we’ve built in Digital Fly. These are essentially maps surrounding a community that feeds into the school district and then filtered terms, acronyms and sentences that relate to whatever the district is looking to search on – whether it’s inappropriate content or the sentiment of the community in an area that might be related to a board agenda, bond proposal, school closing, etc.,” explained Richez. “Digital Fly can pretty much create a map anywhere in the world and then apply any filtered terms, acronyms or sentences that one would want to search on in Twitter, Instagram and now Facebook.” 

The Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

While the type of intelligence schools can glean from the software varies depending on what they are looking for, Richez said one of the most common things schools are searching for are posts related to students or staff members who have expressed a desire to harm themselves or others.

“If something comes up relative to, ‘I want to kill myself’ or ‘I’m suicidal,’ then you can go into that individual’s account and see everything they are posting, including the filtered terms,” added Richez. “You can then get a sense, again because it is public and not locked down, of what that individual is really thinking about, whether it is videos that are included in that individual’s posts or other things that are disturbing. It has tremendous power.”   

Renowned school security expert Paul Timm, who serves as president of consulting firm RETA Security, believes that investing in social media monitoring is certainly worthwhile for school districts that can afford to do so as evidenced gathered from social media sites can be vital in many instances. Timm pointed to a 2014 survey commissioned by LexisNexis, which found that 86 percent of law enforcement agencies are actively using social media for investigations more than two to three times a month. In addition, 67 percent of survey respondents indicated that social media is a valuable tool in anticipating crimes.

“It’s not like [students] are walking down the hallway and using a lack of discretion or sitting in a classroom and [making their thoughts known], but they are doing it in the open on social media,” said Timm.

Implementation Considerations

Timm advises schools that are thinking about implementing a social media monitoring solution to do their homework on vendors to ensure they are not going to be someone’s “beta test” site and to also ask for references to see how the product is being utilized by other school districts.

 “The other thing I want to know is whether or not my local law enforcement officials are behind it,” added Timm. “If law enforcement is kind of giving me the cold shoulder, I can’t trust that lack of cooperation is going to get me anywhere. I want to know I’ve got buy-in from them and, in some cases; I want to know if local law enforcement is willing to split some of the bill with me, so those are questions I would want to ask.”           

Although people may always have disagreements about how new technology platforms like these should be leveraged when they come along, Timm said that it’s important for schools to evaluate all of the options at their disposal in helping them gather as much information as they can about possible threats.

“I don’t get scared of situations like this, I get scared of people who are ignoring social media entirely and won’t even get their own Facebook account because they think it’s a big waste of time,” he said. “I get more scared of people who dig in there than I do of people who are trying to blaze new trails.”

About the Author:

Joel Griffin is the editor of SecurityInfoWatch.com.