There is a debate that is currently circulating around school districts about whether or not to closely monitor the social media accounts of its students using private companies and software to decrease cyberbullying and harassment, the clear outcome of this will be to greatly diminish free speech for students even outside of school. Online harassment and abuse of online social media platforms is a modern day problem, however the truth is that restricting everyone from a basic human right is definitely not the way to solve it. The main reason that doing something so risky online is that it is one of the easiest things to both exploit and avoid. Think about the possible abuse that can come out of an automatic or even human logging system that …show more content…
In source 2 it is stated that these districts are “spending $40,000 to have the firm monitor social media”, these schools are completely wasting their funds on something like this when they could be improving the school or getting better supplies. And with something like a machine, especially with social media it could make an immense amount of mistakes because of slang, word play, exaggeration, and so much more. A machine does not have the ability to understand sarcasm or context, it is only programmed to retrieve and report certain keywords that it is looking for. Another problem with a machine or program that does this automatically is presented in source 1 where it says “sites that have un-flattering messages about certain schools” when referring to messages that would be removed. This specific quote is extremely important because it brings up another important part that comes with the freedom of speech, that being the ability to have opinions and the ability to give constructive criticism. There is already a somewhat blurred line when it comes to bad insulting criticism and constructive criticism with humans, this line would be furthermore blurred with a machine. Take for example if a school has genuinely bad sanitation and a student decides to speak up about it calling it “dirty” or something along the lines of that. No matter how formal or understandable your defense is, a machine only looks for keywords that may imply harassment, a machine wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between “this school is full of dirty losers” and “this school is genuinely a really dirty place and more funding should go to cleaning the