Not long after winter break, Eden Prairie High School suspended 13 students from extracurricular activities for posting photos of themselves consuming illegal substances on the popular social-networking site Facebook. A few weeks later, four students at Woodbury High School were disciplined for similar reasons.
As students hear about these reports, many users are becoming more aware that their on-line pages are not private unless they lock their profiles, meaning that only certain regulated people, such as “friends” on Facebook, can have access to pages.
Many have also reevaluated what they will post on the social-networking sites. High school student Tian Y. of Pittsburgh uses Facebook and has always had her profile locked.
“It is not that I am hiding anything, but rather it allows me some privacy and to make sure my information only goes out to the people I know,” said Tian in an e-mail interview. “After hearing about these suspensions, I’m just going to watch more carefully what I post.”
One Eden Prairie junior knows all too well just how public the Internet is. In middle school, he created a blog where he crticized a teacher he didn’t like. He went as far as calling the teacher a homosexual and pedophile. The blog was reported to a school administrator and the student was suspended from school for five days.
“It has not stopped me from using social-networking sites, but it has made me think twice about what I post about myself or others,” said the student. “The Internet is not a very safe place; there is always a trail that leads back to you.”
“I think it is extremely stupid to post pictures of yourself drinking on a ‘public’ networking website such as Facebook,” said Parry Cadwallader, a junior Eden Prairie High School. “If someone were to post a video of a murder on Facebook, shouldn’t you be able to use it to prosecute the murder?”
On Facebook discussion boards, many students have debated what happened at Eden Prairie and Woodbury. Some supported the actions taken by the school district while others strongly opposed it, calling it an invasion of privacy.
Officials at both schools said they were not snooping through profiles, but were forced to react to the situation once the photos were brought to their attention. At Eden Prairie High School, the photos were given to a school official on a CD while at Woodbury High School, the pictures were used as part of a senior student’s class presentation on underage drinking.
The students who did receive disciplinary action had signed Minnesota High School League pledges not to drink alcohol or consume other illegal substances.
The actions at Woodbury and Eden Prairie High School are not the first of their kind. Recently, a football player at Wake Forest University was dismissed from the team after posting threatening notes on the site. Also, two high school students from Cincinnati, Ohio faced expulsion from the school after creating a group proclaiming a specific teacher as a pedophile.
Cadwallader recently locked his Facebook profile in order to protect his privacy. “Knowing that there is a person out there peering into our profiles looking for dirt made me want to secure my profile. I have nothing to hide, I just don’t want my information floating around freely,” he said.
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