Tallahassee: Schools in Florida are renewing a programme that monitors their students’ social media activity for criminal or threatening behaviour, despite causing some controversy since its adoption last year.

Orlando County Public Schools recently told the Orlando Sentinel that the programme, which partners the school system with local police departments, has been a success in protecting students’ safety, saying that it led to 12 police investigations in the past year. The school district says it will pay about $18,000 (Dh66,114) annually for SnapTrends, the monitoring software used to check students’ activity. It’s the same software used by Racine, Wis., police to track criminal activity, and joins a slew of similar social media monitoring software used by law enforcement to keep an eye on the community.

SnapTrends collects data from public posts on students’ social media accounts by scanning for keywords that signify cases of cyber-bullying, suicide threats, or criminal activity. School security staff then comb through flagged posts and alert police when they see fit. Research suggests that 23 per cent of children and teens have been cyber-bullied. Studies connecting social media and suicide have not shown definitive results, but there has been research that suggests that cyberbullying leads to suicide ideation more than traditional bullying.

Orange County Public Schools adopted the SnapTrends programme as part of a “prevention and early intervention” programme. After the Newtown, Conn., school shootings in 2012, the school participated in a sweeping technical review with law enforcement and state emergency experts with a focus on safety. They recommended some sort of social media monitoring programme, saying that threats can sometimes be spotted on social media postings. “We felt we needed to deal with these vulnerabilities,” said Shari Bobinski, who manages media relations in the school system, to The Washington Post.

Orange County schools said that since implementing the software last year, it has run 2,504 automated searches, leading to 215 manual searches by school staff. Details of the 12 police investigations that stemmed from searches in the past year have not been divulged by the school system. They told the Orlando Sentinel that they don’t want public details of the system to interfere with its effectiveness.

Bobinski, however, shared one anecdote from last year in which the software flagged a female student for using the keyword “cutting” and the phrase “nobody will miss me.” Since the software gets a huge number of flags for words and phrases like these, security staff delved deeper into investigating more posts by the student. They discovered that she had two conflicting social media accounts: one that told the story of a happy, normal girl, and the other of someone suffering from suicidal thoughts and depression. The school staff alerted local police, who conducted a welfare check at the student’s home and informed her father. She eventually went into treatment.

The story exemplifies the kind of safety checks that social media monitoring offers. But privacy and social media lawyer Bradley S. Shear, based in Bethesda, Md., expressed concerns about the unintended consequences of using software like SnapTrends. He’s uncomfortable with the collection and storing of information on students.

“Is this data then gonna be tied to a student’s permanent school record? Does the company have proper policies in place that delete this data after a certain period of time? These are some questions that need to be asked,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. An example of an appropriate period of time for data to be stored, he suggested, would be until a year after the student graduates or until they turn 18, a guideline set by a California state law that aims to protect social media privacy for students monitored by schools.

Additionally, kids are very tech savvy, he emphasised, and are likely to find creative ways to evade monitoring. This puts their social media lives even further away from the watchful eyes of parents or other adults.

Shear also expressed fears of the inevitability of highly intrusive monitoring, such as collecting data on students during after-school hours or off school property. A software flag would require school staff and possibly police to track a student more closely. In Bobinski’s story of the suicidal student in Orange County, the original flag was set off on school property (SnapTrend’s “geofencing” technology limits monitoring within a locational boundary), but investigators delved into her posts from after-school hours to confirm her mental health status.

Orange County isn’t alone in choosing to monitor students. Schools in Alabama and California have adopted similar social media mining software. In Huntsville, Ala., 14 kids were expelled due to social media posts in 2014. The content of the posts were not made public, but a school board member told AL.com that expulsions only come from serious offences involving drugs, weapons or sex. Twelve out of the 14 were black, despite the school’s population of about 40 per cent black students compared with 60 per cent white. The expulsions raised concerns from the county commissioner that social media monitoring unfairly targeted black students, according to AL.com. The case raises questions about which students are most vulnerable when digitally tracked by both the school and police working in concert.

But Bobinski from Orange County schools emphasised that the system respects student privacy and only inspects student social media activity, which is public, should software-flagged content cause concern. Online activity would only appear on a school record if it led to disciplinary action. “We’ve been very transparent about what we’re looking for,” she said. “And that is to keep our students, our staff and our facilities a safe learning environment.” She was not able to confirm how long social media data is stored by SnapTrends.

But for lawyer Shear, the allocation of some $18,000 in school funds used to implement SnapTrends that could be used for digitally-minded education is particularly vexing. “[Schools] are not providing children the tools needed to protect their reputation, their privacy and to understand the law. Everything that these kids are doing online might have repercussions down the road,” he said.

“I think that’s something that’s missing in the conversation,” he continued. “I think that these companies are preying on the fears of these parents.”

— Washington Post