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March 14th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Your child’s college won’t ask them to turn in their diary, or let the school wiretap their cell phone. But since at least last year, several colleges have been using software packages like UDiligence to monitor their Twitter and Facebook accounts; even private Facebook posts, according to Catherine Ho of the Washington Post.
An MSNBC story by Bob Sullivan revisited the issue last week, this time also bringing up state government agencies which are asking (or requiring) that applicants for employment grant them access to their social media accounts. Lawsuits spearheaded by the ACLU have helped to restrict the practice, but there are still no federal laws in place to protect private photos and posts. And with a twelve-year-old middle school student being ordered by an armed deputy sheriff to give up her Facebook login details, more parents are being forced to examine their schools’ policies about social media privacy.
The colleges’ monitoring software runs 24/7
It checks student athletes’ tweets and Facebook posts (including private ones) for restricted words. Lists of banned words typically include racial and sexual slurs, and coaches can add words like the names of rival schools. It sends email alerts with screenshots when students use any of the banned words. According to Kathleen Nelson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, students have gotten in trouble this way for things like complaining about the way that police treated an Occupy protester, or tweeting “Coach is an idiot.”
If the students had said these things to each other in person, or over a phone call, it would have been a violation of their First Amendment rights for the schools to monitor them electronically without a court order. There isn’t a great deal of case law involving social media, however, and students are required to click the button saying they allow the schools’ monitoring software access to their accounts.
No right to privacy for employment seekers
With 5.4 million Americans still in the ranks of the long-term unemployed, there isn’t much recourse for them if an employer sets burdensome or unusual conditions for their job applications. In the case of the Maryland Department of Corrections, applicants are asked to log into their social media accounts in front of the interviewers and let them look at whatever they’re keeping private.
They used to be required to give over their login names and passwords, like on this application for employment at a North Carolina police department. This is actually a violation of the Facebook terms of service, which require that you do not give your login details to anyone else. And this practice was eventually banned in Maryland, thanks to an ACLU lawsuit.
The social media screening hasn’t done much to identify undesirable employment candidates, at any rate: Of 2,689 applicants whose social media accounts were inspected, only 7 were denied employment specifically because of things found in them. Out of 80 employees hired in the last three hiring cycles, however, only 5 were approved despite not granting access.
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