Schools Tracking Kids' Social Media

ABCNews reported today that the Glendale Unified School District (in Southern CA) has hired the electronic surveillance company, Geo Listening, to track the social media posts of its 14,000 middle and high school students. Geo Listening expects to be tracking approximately 3,000 schools by the end of 2013, which demonstrates the scope of the social media abuses amongst K-12 kids.

Obviously, a company such as Geo Listening can not monitor kids' social media accounts with human eyes, but instead must rely on computer algorithms to do the searching. Geo Listening provides daily reports to administrators which take into account the "frequency and severity" of student posts, especially in the areas of cyberbullying, crime, substance abuse, and even truancy. By watching kids' accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and blogs, Geo Listening watches for keywords and location timestamps. Of critical importance to schools is whether or not potentially harmful posts are created while kids are on school property or not, and whether the posts refer to schools specifically.

Geo Listening is currently the only company providing social media monitoring services, although individual consultants are able to do this as well, and with 3,000 customers, I wouldn't be surprised to see more companies jump into this market for a wide variety of circumstances ranging from monitoring school kids to monitoring parents at work.

Source:
GeoListening.com
ABCNews