Update: Social Media, take a bizillion

It's been a few (maybe three) weeks since the PHS students started a Princeton thread on High School Memes and a week or so since I posted about them. I've been checking in every couple of days and flagging individual posts - particularly those particularly nasty about individual students - when they were offensive. Yesterday when I checked in, however, I noticed that all of the meme posts had been deleted and replaced with just these two...

In the site's terms of use, "We do not undertake to review all content submitted to us, but we reserve the right to do so. We also reserve the right to decline and/or take down any content that we deem to inappropriate, and the right to deny access to any user who uses the site and/or any content in any manner that we deem to be inappropriate, all in our sole and absolute discretion." Some of the memes were admittedly offensive (some toward students, some toward administrators), but they certainly weren't all offensive. I had flagged some of the posts, and those were taken down. Honestly, I assume that the site barely has time to glance at any flagged images so they automatically take them down.

Possibilities of what happened...

• It's possible that some student went through and flagged all of the memes and that they were taken down.
• It's possible some administrator went through and did the same.
• It's possible some administrator contacted the site directly and expressed displeasure, asking the site to take down the entire thread.

Which of those happened really didn't matter because the truth won't ever be known. The meme posts are gone, and how it happened doesn't matter in the least.

Here is a selection of what's been posted since the first round of meme posts were taken down.

What does matter is the reactions that the students have had to the disappearance of the memes. They assume it was one of the latter possibilities: that the administration betrayed them. Our administrators use social media extensively (Twitter, Facebook, wordpress), and they don't always pay attention to the negatives that can come along with using them.

When you encourage students - people, honestly - to have a voice, then you get the good AND the bad from those voices. If you choose to selectively allow them to use their voice, to censor their free speech that you claim to have been encouraging, then you run the real risk of serious backlash.

It's far tougher to teach someone how to use something properly - to educate them about the positive and negative aspects to speaking out - than it is to blankly act like something is entirely positive and then overreact when its negative aspects rear their ugly head.