California: Glendale Unified School District Hires Company To Monitor Students’ Social Media Posts

What happens if students create Twitter handles using an alias or no name at all? If someone is sharing Facebook posts with only friends or friends or friends will Geo Listening work to become a friend of a friend?
From CBS Los Angeles:

The Glendale Unified School District has hired a Hermosa Beach company to monitor public social media posts made by its students to find out when teens are in trouble or causing it.
Superintendent Richard Sheehan said Geo Listening is analyzing the posts of 13,000 students at eight Glendale middle and high schools.
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“The whole purpose is student safety,” said Sheehan. “Basically, it just monitors for keywords where if a student is considering harming themselves, harming someone else.”
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Chris Frydrych, the CEO of Geo Listening said, “We have provided information to school districts, which has led to numerous successful interventions on behalf of students that intended self-harm, suicide, bullying, truancy, substance abuse, and vandalism. We monitor only public posts to social networks. We do not monitor privatized pages, SMS, MMS, email, phone calls, voicemails.”

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From the Geo Listening Web Site:

Geo Listening works by providing actionable daily reports to designated school administrators and staff, using a robust tier methodology. The daily district report takes into account frequency and severity of a student’s posts in alignment with the following categories:

• Bullying
• Cyber Bullying
• Despair
• Hate
• Harm
• Crime
• Vandalism
• Substance Abuse
• Truancy

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