Countering Potential Threats with Social Media Monitoring

Harris thinks schools have an obligation to check social media activity.

“For schools, it’s all about, ‘I’m trying to protect this public place that is my campus, and it’s my mission to keep the people on my campus safe,'” he says. “This isn’t an individual tracker. It looks at trends to find issues.”

Malone admits he sometimes sees kids talking about things that aren’t appropriate, but he’s only interested in threatening behavior.

“Unless we think someone’s significantly in danger or there’s a serious issue, we probably won’t intervene,” he says.

Director of Campus Safety for the Claremont Colleges Stan Skipworth, who also heads a consulting firm for public safety organizations, says schools and universities have to use the service consistently and carefully.

“There is a balance that has to be pursued, and the people involved have an incentive to make sure they’re using this technology in a way that is respectful and considerate to people’s privacy,” he says.

At this point, there are no laws explicitly allowing or forbidding the collection of social media data, but Skipworth is aware of bills that have come up “from time to time” in California seeking to fill in that gray area.

Because this is such a new technology, Harris says the policies and legislation surrounding it are still evolving.

“Like any new market, there are policies and procedures that need to get developed, but I think all of that will be addressed in the next year or so,” he says.

Does it work?
When considering the potential risks and unsettled legal questions surrounding social media monitoring, some may question if the service is worth it. Schools that use it, however, don’t seem to question their decision at all.

“The first big moment for us was when I made a technical support phone call to Social Sentinel on an issue and the technician said ‘I want to tell you, you have someone tweeting from the high school gym that she wants to kill herself right now,'” Malone remembers. “And he was able to forward me the posting. So I contacted the assistant principal in the high school, and within minutes he’d identified the girl, looked up her schedule and got a hold of her. It turned out the girl was just making fun or whatever, but it was a big ‘Ah ha!’ moment for us.”

Harris recalls an incident in Kennedy, Ariz., when Geofeedia helped a school find a student on social media who was announcing he was going to kill a teacher and classmates on campus the next day. Administrators alerted police, who detained the boy and searched his house. Although the boy claimed he wasn’t going to do anything, authorities recovered an automatic weapon from his home.

“We’ve had customers call us and tell us that they’ve prevented a suicide; we’ve had customers letting us know they’ve been able to intervene in drug activity and drug sales or identify and address issues during major sporting events,” Margolis says. “So we’ve had many successes in that regard.”

Expect More Robust Offerings in the Future
As the technology improves, more features will be added onto the service. Multiple companies currently have object recognition in their research and development phase, which will allow them to alert school officials if someone posts a picture of a weapon.

“If you compare the cost of a social media platform to the installation of ten surveillance cameras, it’s a fraction of the cost,” Harris claims. “And I would argue that it can be far more powerful in many ways than video surveillance.”

So perhaps it’s no surprise that more and more schools are giving it a try. Margolis was attending a PTO meeting at his daughter’s school recently when the principal launched into an unexpected explanation of the purpose of checking social media.

“I used to be able to look at social media and say ‘that’s not my world'” Margolis recalls the principal saying. “But as a school administrator, I can’t do that anymore. I have an obligation to pay attention to social media and to pay attention to the things students say and the behaviors they exhibit on social media because I have a responsibility to protect my students.”