on schools and social media

 (see, there are tech in schools things to talk about besides AI!)

have a little fall photo to break this up

Earlier this month, I got the National Education Policy Center's update on Vermont's passing a law that barred schools from using social media to communicate with students. While the headlines talked about Vermont "falling in line" with other states on cell phones in schools bans, the law added something different: 

Act 72 goes a step further than other state laws, and includes a provision barring schools from using social media platforms to communicate with students, and from otherwise requiring students to have social media accounts to engage in academic and extracurricular activities.

NEPC's newsletter outlined some reasons why this was done, and I want to call your attention to the first two:

• Student pictures on social media can end up in the hands of pedophiles.
• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other government agencies use social media for the purposes of surveillance

To this, we can now add a recent report in The Guardian in which Meta used pictures of schoolgirls from Instagram in advertising to a 37 year old man (who reported it):

The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that Meta’s settings permitted it to do this. One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible. Another said she posted the picture to a public Instagram account. The posts of their children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”.

This has stayed in my mind as I see posts on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter that feature the smiling faces of all ages of school children posted by their school districts.
Cute kids, we know, get clicks, and often such accounts are all about "driving engagement," with district employees competing (in their organizations). 

Public photos of children on social media, we know, are regularly misused and can endanger children. I am now wondering, every time I see another post, if the chances we're taking are worth the "engagement" such posts purport to drive. 

We need, I think, to better center what it is that the public communication of our districts is really about.