Students who post their personal information at online social networks like Facebook.com should realize that posting such information makes it freely available to the online community – including possible employers and university administrators.
Facebook.com is often used as a means for finding information among students, but its use can extend to more than just students alone. Last year, when two Boston University students were killed by a commuter train, The Boston Globe published an article on the story including information from one of the student’s Facebook profiles.
Even this newspaper admits it uses the Facebook to help with verifying the spelling of names and other details to ensure accuracy in stories. In the pre-Facebook era, finding such information was not nearly as easy.
Though there are ways of restricting access to profiles to certain groups of people, before students publish any information online they should first consider it with caution. Students in the Facebook group “Crack Cocaine!” may be joking about their addition to the illegal substance, but some may take it seriously. The same applies to the Facebook groups “Lazy Kids Now on Academic Probation” and “My parents spent $40,000 on tuition and I spent all my money on beer and crack.” Any potential employer who might come across a student’s membership in such groups, whether a joke or not, the employer has reason to be suspicious about that student’s capability as a serious job candidate.
With a new high school edition of the Facebook in the making, university admissions officers can easily click on a prospective student’s name and find out more about that candidate. Though administrators should avoid using the Facebook as a tool in deciding applications, no one can be sure they’re not doing it. Admissions officers might look with skepticism at a student whose group memberships on the Facebook include the “Smash N’ Grab Coalition” and the “Get Plastered and Steal Parking Cones” group.
And the Facebook isn’t the only online social network that administrators and employers have access to – tickle.com and myspace.com are other examples of blogs in which students should cautiously consider what information to post.
In a most recent example, administrators this summer fired a College of Communication professor for calling a student “incredibly hot” on an internet message board. This shows that even a right to free speech will not guarantee that posting certain information online will go unchallenged, let alone unnoticed.
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