Freedom for safety is trade-off everyone has to make in order to live in a prosperous society. It is a social contract between all individuals that we collectively must lose some rights in order to gain protections. The more freedom a person is granted, the less protection they have and vice versa.
In the age of information, America has tended to forgo rights for security by passing legislation such as Patriot Act, which allowed any information suspected to be related to terrorists to be seized by the government. Effectively, a person’s right to privacy had been rendered defunct in the name of national security.
Now, Indiana schools want to hire private companies to monitor and track their students' social media to check for concerning behavior. We find that this one step too far. Not only is this extremely unnecessary, but it is also wouldn’t be effective.
For one thing, we live in such an ironic society that a tweet can be posted ironically but also unironically at the same time. It can be impossible to discern whether the person meant what was said or was joking or somewhere in between. It would take someone's best friend to decipher his or her finsta account. Therefore, understanding a lot of students' social media content would take more work than merely searching for buzzwords.
The companies the schools wish to hire for the job have not perfected the science of threat detection. Key words and phrases mean nothing when taken out of context and, even in context, can easily be misinterpreted.
How long before a student posts a harmless joke on Instagram gets an out of school suspension or worse?
Further, we already have people monitoring students' online activity — students themselves. Students are very aware that any one of their classmates or former classmates could potentially wish to harm them. Thus, they are more likely to report another student for suspicious online activity. They would also be more accurate than a random investigator as they would know the person.
Students shouldn’t have to think that tweeting a in-joke among friends would result in getting a disciplinary hearing. It would just make students distrust schools more than they already do.
It is not a school’s place to be a watchdog agency. In fact, any money that would be going into surveillance program should be going to something like a school’s health and wellness programs instead. Protecting and nurturing a student’s mental health is far better than letting a student worsen to the point where a social media post would tag him as a potential threat.
If a school wants to be preventive in school violence, they shouldn’t start at the last possible stopping point. They should start at the beginning by making sure students feel respected and cared for while at school. That is a far better alternative than lazy, ineffectual surveillance from lucrative companies that would only bolster a student’s distrust in the school and authority in general.
