Jacob
Halvorson
American
Government
3rd period How many of you would like the school to go on your social media accounts?
Should schools be able to adopt policies giving them the right to monitor your online accounts? Personally, for me, I know I wouldn't want them to be able to. Well schools are now thinking about accessing students Social Media accounts if you are suspected of bullying or making threatening comments about people. I do not think schools should be able to access your account if you are bullying someone because its not on school property and it breaks our first amendment right.
The First reason I disagree with this proposed policy is that its not a high percent of kids are being bullied online . Only 25 percent of girls and 16 percent of boys have been bullied in their lifetime. When you look at both sexes, only 7.0 percent have been bullied in any way in the last 30 days .(Doc A) Also, when talking about bullying of teachers, only 15% of teachers have been bullied in school and 38.6 percent of those teachers said it didn't affect them at all.(Doc B) These statistics show that right now bullying online is not a really big thing and that schools and people are overreacting.
Everyone is forgetting that there has always been bullying in school and it wont go away. Social media is not increasing the amount of bullying that is occurring.
The second reason that these policies should not be adopted is there is always going to be bullying whether it is face to face, online or even texting the person you
dislike. Even before there was technology there were still bullies and it was worse than social media because you couldn't do anything about it except tell your principal or teacher what most people are scared to do because they think the bullying is going to get worse. Also the bully is in your face unlike social media were its over computer.
Also, its easier to get rid of the bully on the internet because you can just press a couple of buttons and they will be gone from your timeline or your twitter feed unlike in real life where you can't just block them. It is true that bullying online is sometimes a little more cruel because people have a tendency to say worse things online than to your face but you can always ignore or delete or block the items online. Unfortunately, you are not able to block the items said to your face.
Finally, the third reason why these policies should not be adopted is it’s breaking our first amendment rights. Our social media account should be our private
