Posts About Students on Facebook: A Data Ethics Perspective


Published Online in:
Educational Researcher
November 2, 2022

Joshua M. Rosenberg, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Conrad Borchers, University of Oxford
Macy A. Burchfield, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Daniel Anderson, Abl Schools
Sonda Stegenga, University of Utah
Christian Fischer, University of Tübingen

Public schools and districts use social media to share announcements and communicate with parents and the community, but alongside such uses run risks to students’ privacy. Using a novel data set of 18 million posts on Facebook by schools and school districts in the United States, we sought to establish how frequently photos of students were shared. Through sequential mixed-methods, we estimated that around 4.9 million posts included identifiable images of students and that approximately 726,000 of these posts also included students’ first and last names and their approximate location. We discuss these findings’ implications from a data ethics perspective.

Read the full open-access article

Read the press release: "Research Finds Earlier Start Times Have Little Effect on Elementary School Outcomes​"

Video: Co-author Joshua M. Rosenberg discusses major findings and implications of the research

Study Citation: Rosenberg, J. M., Borchers, C., Burchfield, M. A., Anderson, D., Stegenga, S. M., & Fischer, C. (2022). Posts about students on Facebook: A data ethics perspective. Educational Researcher. Prepublished November 2, 2022. https://www.doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221120538.