Posts on Facebook by Schools and Districts and the Potential Risks to Students’ Privacy

Abstract

For many if not posts schools and districts around the United States, the use of Facebook has emerged as a novel communication practice that serves several purposes, including sharing timely information, building a sense of community, and highlighting staff and students. An element of these posts that neither researchers nor, we think, most schools and districts have recognized is how they may pose a risk to the privacy of the individuals—often students who are minors—recognized and portrayed in them. Our recent social media showed that more between 15 and 20 million photos of students have been shared on the strictly publicly accessible Facebook pages of schools and districts—and that between 150,000 and more than one million photos are of students who are identifiable by name and school and/or district. In this article, we review some of the risks to students that might result from their identification through social media posts and offer practical steps that schools and districts can take to minimize the risks.

Posts About Students on Facebook: A Data Ethics Perspective

“…As social media data and data mining methodologies allow new ways to examine student and family education rights issues and current data use practices, research has the potential to reveal potential harms to students; even relatively low proportions of posts that reveal the PII of students mean that the privacy of hundreds of thousands of students may be risked. Though there are steps educational leaders working in schools and districts can take to mitigate these risks (Rosenberg et al, 2021), we encourage educational researchers to adopt a data ethics perspective to envision how to balance the benefits of social media with the need to honor the privacy of students.…”

How to respond to community concerns about critical race theory

“…To understand how educational institutions have communicated about race, racism, and the role of CRT, we used a list of all publicly accessible Facebook pages of schools and districts (Burchfield et al, 2021;Rosenberg et al, 2021) to examine mentions of "critical race" on these pages. We noticed that school and district leaders often responded to these comments by stating that their curriculum does not include CRT.…”

“…The following is a hypothetical example of a typical social media post from a district leader responding to CRT concerns, using elements aggregated from multiple messages by actual school districts that we found during our research (Burchfield et al, 2021;Rosenberg et al, 2021):…”

“…The following is a hypothetical example of a typical social media post from a district leader responding to CRT concerns, using elements aggregated from multiple messages by actual school districts that we found during our research (Burchfield et al, 2021; Rosenberg et al, 2021):A recent news article claimed that several current members of the school board support the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in our schools. This notion is not at all accurate.…”