Social Media - Impact / Influences / Risks / Management

The problem in brief:

Social media is increasingly used in the day to day communications between students, staff and other stakeholders in the education system. It is often the means by which improper, controversial or inappropriate communications are transmitted.

Unlike email much of this communication occurs through channels which are not easily in the possession, custody or control of the institutions IT administration. Monitoring traffic over the university networks is possible, but specialised devices are required to differentially treat social media communications based on message formats, ports, channels, IP addresses and other means. Even when this is able to be implemented the retention and analysis of the communication is challenging.

Hitherto the main responses from IT services have been to block traffic, however easy access to the internet does not easily solve the problem. Students and staff typically have easy access to devices which are not subject to scrutiny and which do not go through any type of on-boarding process.

Why it matters:

A broad range of issues have legal, ethical and reputational implications for the institution:

• Bullying, threats and harassment
• Communication with regard to wrongdoing on campus such as assault, theft and consumption of illicit substances
• Evidence of inappropriate communications between staff and between staff and students
• Evidence relating to the mental state of young people at risk including self-harm and suicide.
• Retention of official communications for archiving and record keeping requirements.

The opportunity:

• Rather than considering social media communications to be transitory, volatile and irrecoverable, it is possible to actively monitor and retain key social media using customisable, but sophisticated rules which mirror the institutions concerns.
• An emerging discipline utilising a portfolio of tools can make a range of social media accessible in a compliant way.
• Importantly, the technology needs to complement the policy and risk management frameworks in place so that privacy concerns are addressed.
• Active management of messaging to support management / faculty in monitoring any disturbing social media (bullying) events in their institution
• Collect and provide information useful to management as information to make more informed decisions.

Exploration of key technologies:

• Network appliances which allow on-boarded devices to be monitored and traffic to be retained.
• Account-based collection and monitoring tools – which collect and preserve social media from a variety of accounts in the control of individuals or entities including group and fan pages.
• Social network analysis – to illustrate the nature of connections using social media activity to proxy the physical world
• Geolocation technologies to identify activity within a given area.
• Advanced search to allow Boolean search of publically accessible data streams.