With the enormous growth of social media use, teens are taking advantage of their First Amendment rights with constant status updates and blog posts. While they are enjoying their free speech, their teachers may not feel the same way. A new Knight Foundation study concluded that teens' uncensored use of Facebook and Tumblr is not a right their teachers think they should have.
The study was conducted through interviews with 12,000 students and 900 high school teachers in the United States during spring of 2011. A small percentage of students believed that they should be able to express their opinions about their school's faculty online without punishment. Also, only a small percentage of teachers though that students should be able to report controversial issues in their school newspaper without authority approval. Even more surprising, they found that 26% of high school teachers in the United States believed that government approval should be needed to publish freely on these websites.
Dr. Kenneth Dautrich, the author of the study, found a correlation between teenagers that advocate free speech and use social media websites. 91% of the American teenagers that use social media on a daily basis believe that people have the right to express unpopular opinions.
The study also found that the vast majority of high school students use the Internet as a resource for school assignments and not surprisingly more American teenagers use text messaging on their mobile phones as opposed to making calls.
Do you think students should be required to have their online posts monitored?
Read more details on the study here.
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