Social Media Monitoring in K-12 Schools: Civil and Human Rights Concerns
Systems for monitoring students’ social media posts are gaining popularity in K-12 education settings. Some schools and school districts are turning to social media monitoring as a response to the threat of mass shootings. Companies are marketing their social media monitoring services with claims that they can identify sexual content and drug and alcohol use; prevent mass violence, self-harm, and bullying; and/or flag students who may be struggling with academic or mental health issues and need help. There is limited comprehensive data, but available figures, as well as statements from the companies themselves, suggest that spending by U.S. school districts on social media monitoring tools has risen substantially in recent years. However, the claims of effectiveness by companies selling these products are largely unproven, and these tools can endanger the very students they are supposed to protect. Surveilling students’ social media activities raises the following serious privacy, free expression, and other civil and human rights concerns that schools, districts, and legislatures should safeguard against.
This brief, from the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Brennan Center for Justice, highlights the civil and human rights concerns we have with social media monitoring in K-12 schools.
Our primary concerns are:
Social media monitoring software for schools is experimental and has limited efficacy.
Resources dedicated to social media monitoring may be best focused elsewhere.
Social media monitoring is not a reliable method to predict mass violence.
Social media monitoring invades students’ privacy.
Social media monitoring can chill expressive activities that are critical for young people’s development.
Social media monitoring can disproportionately burden minority, underserved, or vulnerable students
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
