Should Facebook be banned in schools? Kyle Elvin J. Calica Fathma Czerissa S. Sulaik Chineeh Aira J.

Mamburam

Submitted to: Mrs. Mayme Olegario

Even though the advances of Facebook are opening up to whole new possibilities for education, Facebook should be banned because it is distracting, unnecessary and unsafe. Facebook, being the most popular social networking site, is the most go-to place for people to seek information and as a tool for communication, but with all this options that Facebook gives, there will always be some negative aspects that go with it. As we all know, Facebook is very hip especially with young adults. They use it for different purposes, both positive and negative. Facebook is a lovely tool for networking and connecting with all people all over the world. Not only that, but anyone between high school age and an old age can set up their own Facebook profile. Musicians, artists, celebrities, and regular working people can connect to share all sorts of info about events, opportunities and life in general. The only problem is most students uses Facebook during class hours and that causes them to lose their focus on their lessons and classes. We have presented three possible reasons for banning Facebook in schools. First, Facebook is distracting. According to a survey conducted by Oxygen Factory, an organization of youth and self-development experts, found nearly 80 per cent of students aged 11 to 18 said social networking sites were a distraction from their studies (Templeton, 2010. N.P.). Facebook with all its features and applications can be very entertaining at times but if abuse and use it in our schools it can really divert the attention of students to the screen and not in the blackboard. Facebook may be the biggest distraction, but students still are able to get their work done. However, they may not get it done as quickly as they could. The other major distraction Facebook causes that could affect students grades, is when taking notes in class. If a student is using their computer to take notes, how could they not be tempted to check Facebook? Second, Facebook is unnecessary. Facebook for some is very necessary as they perceive Facebook as a great source for information but for some it can be deemed unnecessary because they saw it as a possible burden in the future. Facebook can sometimes be unnecessary by means of application and pictures. The application requests that keep reoccurring can be very pointless at all times, especially when you are a user who doesnt play games or any applications. Also, some pictures in Facebook are very useless like some person posing the peace sign near her face which is very annoying. Finally, Facebook is unsafe. Remarkably, with almost 400 Million users, Facebook is measured to be one of the most celebrated social applications across the globe. All these social applications such as Facebook are designed so that users can access online content and share some data as well. Unfortunately, over half a billion people on these social networking sites have disclosed huge amount of their private information. There is a great likelihood for third parties to expand an access to the information through applications installed on social networking sites like games and social interaction tools. This information can be used against you as liabilities and can potentially harm your personal life. It can also be a great threat to us for sharing private information with strangers can be very crucial. To sum it all up, Facebook can be very useful and satisfying at times but we have to acknowledge the risk of it if we abuse it in school. Facebook was launched in February 2004, owned and operated by Facebook, Inc. As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users, more than half of them using Facebook on a mobile device. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and three of his classmates, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. It was

first called Facemash, which was the predecessor of Facebook. According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash use photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person. To accomplish this, Mark Zuckerberg hacked into Harvards security network and copied the student ID images used by dormitories and used them to populate his Facemash website (Kaplan, 2003. N.P.). Harvard at that moment did not have a student facebook or a list with photos and basic information, though individual houses had been issuing their own paper facebooks since at least the mid-1980s. Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online. The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion. Ultimately, however, the charges were dropped. According to The Crimson, Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images to a Web site, with one image per page along with a comment section. He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes (Kaplan, 2003. N.P.). Then, on February 4, 2004, he created thefacebook which was a site open only to Harvard students. He was inspired to make this due to the overwhelming success of Facemash but this quite stirred some controversies. Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product. This ended up with them filing a case against Zuckerberg but in the end they lost the case. Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites on the web. Facebook is primarily focused on high school to college students. Facebook has been gaining market share, and more significantly a supportive user base. According to Yadav, since their launch in February 2004, theyve been able to obtain over 8 million users worldwide (Yadav, 2006. N.P.). Yes, it is big and pretty popular to young ones especially students. Students are drawn to Facebook because it provides entertainment like games, quizzes, horoscopes, and gossip but we also use it for schoolwork. I, for one use it to connect to my classmates and ask about homework, schedule, or deadlines and thankful that my classmates are happy to give me answers. For some, Facebook is nothing more than a medium for communication, and yet, it is so much more than that. Facebook is part of our life now. People live and breathe Facebook. We do certain stuff just thinking about Facebook like taking pictures of ourselves for our profile picture. It has become a big part of our lives that we no longer think of it as just a harmless social networking site but a very popular, influential site that can either build or break. Facebook through the years have earned tons of criticisms from its users, critics and haters. It was said at one point that Facebook has taken so many lives of teenagers due to cyber bullying which is often done in Facebook. There are several criticisms on Facebook. First, is Facebook has online privacy issues. Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, providing to thirdparties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Privacy can

entail both Personally Identifying Information (PII) and non-PII information such as a site visitor's behavior on a website. For example, in Facebook, age and physical address alone could identify who an individual is without explicitly disclosing their name, as these two factors are unique enough to typically identify a specific person. The fact is Facebook cannot be trusted with this kind of information as it can be seen by literally everyone on the internet. Second, Facebook has child safety issues. As we all know, Facebook has contents that are not necessarily child proof or child friendly like pictures, videos and applications, but in our times today, even children possess Facebook accounts at a young age. The children can be overexposed with these kinds of contents and can potentially damage their psychological and mental health when they grow up. Young adults can also easily adapt to this contents and they can The only solution to this is parents responsibility, if they become more involve with their childs growth and morals, they have to equip themselves with values that their child can adapt to. Lastly, Facebook has hate speech issues. Hate speech is, outside the law, communication that vilifies a person or a group on the basis of color, disability, ethnicity, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristic. Facebook is a place with great diversity in races, color and religion. The downside of this though is there can be a lot of haters and racists in Facebook which causes discrimination between Facebook users around the world. Facebook users has established hate page/group which goal is to choose their target, set up a site, and then recruit members (Perry and Olsson, 2009, N.P.). Anyone can make a Facebook group at any time. The creator invites followers to post comments, add pictures and participate in discussion boards. According to Wikipedia.org, a Facebook "page" is similar, except one must "like" the page to become a member. Because of the ease of creating and joining such groups, many so-called "hate" groups exist only in cyberspace (Meddaugh and Kay, 2009, N.P.). Although Facebook has stirred up a lot of controversies, its benefits still overflows through all of these. One benefit of Facebook is in means of communication. Facebook can be a great source of information as it is now more reachable to all. You can read blogs, invite friends to events and ask questions in Facebook. Whether you are traveling or out in town, if there is wifi connection, you can easily gather information even though you are far away. Another benefit of Facebook is it boosts your self esteem. Spending time on the social networking giant also makes people feel good about themselves, according to research. According to a study conducted by researchers at Cornell University, they were the first to show a psychological benefit to using Facebook, revealing that people get a self-esteem boost just by looking at their Facebook wall (Hancock, 2011. N.P.). Researcher Jeffrey Hancock said, the results are most likely the effect of Facebook users being able to put their best image forward by choosing what they reveal about themselves. In addition, the positive feedback friends and family bring to a Facebook wall also contributes to the self-esteem boost (Hancock, 2011. N.P.). Lastly, Facebook is a great opportunity for businesses to make their products known. Facebook is home to more than 400 million users around the world, and is growing everyday. This number of users will be the market of any advertisement posted in the website which is why businesses are taking advantage of this opportunity. Facebook could greatly benefit these businesses by increasing their income through advertising.

Also, due to Facebook being cheap and accessible, it is the go-to place for the on the go business people. This only shows that Facebook can also be an angel sometimes for us technology savvy people. Facebook, with all its success and popularity, will always have some disadvantages and shortcomings especially with students. Many students out there who pass most of their time on Facebook most likely know some of the disadvantages of Facebook. First of all are the annoying games and application requests. 'Farmville' and 'Mafia Wars' might be fun, but if you don't want to play them, the constant invites are infuriating (Morris, 2009, N.P.). Many Facebook games are like Ponzi schemes; the way to succeed is to get more people playing. And once you've managed to filter out one game, another pops up (Morris, 2009. N.P.). Second is the distracting newsfeed. Facebook friends keep posting something intriguing and distract us from our study. In December 2009, Facebook removed the privacy controls for the News Feeds and Mini Feed. This change made it impossible for users to control what activities are published on their walls. Since people can post anything they want, this allowed people to post things that could target certain groups of people or abuse others users through other means. Third, it has unsafe contents. Many hackers would put videos or links for people to see and invite them to click it only to find out that its a scam. The most common trick would be when phishing a website that looks like Facebook to make you think that youre still on the official Facebook website (Choudhury, 2010. N.P.). Lastly, Facebook was not created for privacy. We must always remember that Facebook is a social networking site. Everything you post will be seen worldwide. It is said, Facebook had shared user information with outside application developers, contrary to representations made to its users. (Sengupta, 2011, p.B1). We must be more careful because it is clear that Facebook has its disadvantages. Facebook also some have some advantages but there will always be refutations to it. First, Facebook is a great place for entertainment and music. Facebooks new technology and accessibility makes it more convenient to the users to scan music and games through the search box. It is said that people are more drawn to Facebook because of the entertainment that is a great boredom killer. It is also said that frolicking in Facebook through games improves your heart rate. Spending time on Facebook can help people relax, slow down their heart rate and decrease stress levels, according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Milan (Brooks, 2012. N.P.). In a study published earlier this year, researchers studied 30 students and found that a natural high was sparked when they were on the social media network that led to the relaxed heart rates and lower levels of stress and tension (Brooks, 2012. N.P.). The negative aspect of this though is Facebook gives useless application requests. Word puzzles and typing tests are among the games offered by third-party applications on Facebook, they can be fun, but they're not for everyone. If you aren't interested in a particular gaming application, repeated requests from your friends to join a game are likely to become annoying. Luckily, game requests from a particular application or friend are easily blocked in just a few seconds. Blocking something on Facebook is never

permanent. Your block list affords you the ability to remove an application until you're ready to use it. When you log in on your Facebook profile, the first thing you get is hundreds of useless application requests in your notifications. This will most likely be exasperating and can cause you to have second thoughts in deactivating your Facebook. Notifications on Facebook are meant to provide prominent but lightweight heads-up about interesting changes to content relevant to users but it is up to the users if they find it irrelevant or not. Second advantage of Facebook is reconnecting with old friends. You've probably wondered what ever happened to your best friend from junior high or maybe your high school sweetheart. Life takes people in different directions, and it's easy to lose touch with one another. Fortunately, with Facebook it's now easier than ever to reconnect with old friends. With Facebooks metabase data system, you can easily find friends you have lost contact with and find friends you never knew where they are in the earth. The only problem is Facebook causes unwanted friend requests. Receiving an unwanted friend request is a tricky situation that happens to almost everyone who owns a Facebook account. You know what I am talking about. You may have received a friend request from an old enemy or coworker you despised -- or even worse, an old ex. After all, one of Facebook's main uses is to reconnect with people you've lost touch with over the years. While it is great in some cases, it can be a burden if someone you want no connection with tries to become your friend. You may be suffering from paranoia that they are doing it just to spy on your profile, or maybe you just prefer to maintain silence with the person. Either way, you will send some type of message to that person. If you ignore or reject their friend request, you are showing them that they no longer interest you. If you accept out of curiosity, you may let them into your online world, and they could send you a personal message that you might feel the need to respond to, this according to Wubayou (Wubayou, 2011. N.P.). Another advantage of Facebook is advertising. Facebooks advertising platform is a vehicle worth exploring. The tool allows you to place small display type ads in the right sidebar of Facebook pages and profiles. At this point its not as effective in pure response as well targeted Google AdWords campaigns, but its not really the same kind of vehicle and you wont find AdWords in Facebook, at least for now. Like many things Facebook, setting up and running successful campaigns isnt as straightforward as it could be. The big advantage of Facebook advertising is how super-targeted you can make it. If youve cater for broad demographic, you can tailor your ads to each segment of this. If you have a smaller target market, you can really focus your efforts in on that particular segment of Facebook users. You can easily set up your business in Facebook because of its accessibility and cost. Since Facebook is literally home to almost a quarter of the world, Facebook can be a great place for advertising and due to its cheapness, businessmen will never going to pay a dime for publicizing their products. The only thing to argue about this is the misuse of Facebook profile. The information you write if you buy products on Facebook can potentially be misused by the seller himself. The information that can be tampered like ATM pin can be easily be taken away from you. This will be used against you as liability. Also, one can easily create an account and impersonate another person, such as a celebrity, often for malicious or mischievous reasons and to harass or deceive others. Identity theft leaves potential problems to celebrities and public figures that use Facebook to reach out to fans but because of identity theft, it can lead fans confused of the many Facebook profile it makes, it makes it almost impossible to prove the authenticity of the celebritys profile. Finally,

Facebook is a great medium of communication. According to Mcluhan, the medium is the message (Mcluhan, 2012. N.P.). Facebook (96%) is now the most popular communication tool, followed by SMS (93%) and email (91%), according to a new survey from Prompt Communications (Sachoff, 2009. N.P.). When consumers were asked which method they used most frequently to communicate, 37 percent said SMS followed by Facebook and the phone at 28 percent. Respondents feel that email is now less important than social media, but only 20 percent said they could live without it entirely. Facebook can be a great source of information in our times today, which is the electronic age. Like students, we rely on our group page to find out any assignments, quizzes and exams and we can ask questions with are classmates in our group. It can also help parents on locating their children if where they are now. The last argument is the obstruction of privacy. Facebooks privacy policy states that it will share information if they see it as a good faith belief to prevent any illegal activity and fraud. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers and the government. This could possibly be used against Facebook users and could lead to a whole lot of trouble. Government and local authorities rely on Facebook and other networking sites to investigate crimes and obtain evidence to help establish a crime, provide local information establish motives, prove and disprove alibis and reveal communications. Facebook has many cases that invade the privacy of other people like the case the British cameraman on July 24, 2008, who paid 22, 000 Euros for breach of privacy and libel. This was said to be the first successful invasion of privacy and defamation in a social networking site. The privacy issues of Facebook are the gravest criticism that it ever receive. Due to this, many people are getting more careful in posting on their Facebook walls. Facebook is very needed in our times today. It brings us information, communication and attraction to our everyday lives. Without it, we may never know specific details of what is happening nowadays. The only thing is, as students, we are required to be responsible enough for our studies and lessons. We must be liable to know what is right and wrong, and opening our Facebook accounts during class is very wrong. We suggest that Facebook should be banned because it distracts students from their work and subjects. The time youngsters spend on the internet, and more specifically on social networking sites, is a huge challenge for parents and those of us in education. Youngsters are not only using lesson time but often quietly continue late into the night, leaving them short of sleep and irritable the next day. We also suggest that it must be open to students during dismissal time and during the weekends to keep up with the interest of the student as Facebook also can be good sometimes.

Bibliography Templeton, A. (2010, March 24). Facebook distracts school children from studies: survey. Retrieved from Couriermail. http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/technologyold/facebook-distracts-school-children-from-studies-survey. Kaplan, K. (2003, November 19). "Facemash Creator Survives Ad Board". The Harvard Crimson (Cambridge, MA). Retrieved February 5, 2009. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-adboard-the/ Yadav, S. (2006, August 25). Facebook-The Complete Biography. Retrieved from Mashable. http://mashable.com/2006/08/25/facebook-profile/ Perry & Olson, (2009). Facebook Hate Groups. Retrieved from Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Facebook_hate_groups Meddaugh & Kay, (2009). Facebook Hate Groups. Retrieved from Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Facebook_hate_groups Brooks, C. (2012, May 17). 7 Unexpected Ways Facebook is Good for You. Retrieved from Business News Daily. http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2534-facebookbenefits.html Hancock, J. (2011). Facing the Facebook Mirror Can Boost Self-Esteem. Retrieved from Science Daily. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110301202827.html Morris, C. (2009, November 30). The 10 Most Annoying Things About Facebook. Retrieved from Switched. http://www.switched.com/2009/11/30/the-10-mostannoying-things-about-facebook/ Choudoury, S. (2010, August). 4 Disadvantages of using Facebook. Retrieved from SocialMedia. http://socialmedia.knoji.com/4-disadvantages-of-using-facebook/ Sengupta, S. (2011, November 30). F.T.C. Settles Privacy Issue at Facebook. Retrieved from Nytimes. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agrees-to-ftcsettlement-on-privacy.html?_r=1 Wubayou, (2011, January 5). Facebook Tips to Avoid Unwanted Friend Requests. http://tools.devshed.com/c/a/How-To/Facebook-Tips-to-Avoid-UnwantedFriend-Requests/ Sachoff, M. (2011, December 11). Survey Finds Facebook Most Popular Communication Tool. Retrieved from WebProNews. http://www.webpronews.com/survey-findsfacebook-most-popular-communication-tool-2009-12 Books:

Griffin, E. (2012). A First Look To Communication Theory (Eighth Edition). New York, NY.: McGraw-Hill Companies. ARP Outline I. Introduction

Even though the advances of Facebook are opening up to whole new possibilities for education, Facebook should be banned because it is distracting, unnecessary and unsafe. II. Facebook as the most popular social networking site and its history III. Reoccurring criticisms of Facebook versus benefits of Facebook IV. Disadvantages of Facebook A. B. C. D. Annoying Games and Application Requests Distracting Newsfeed Unsafe Contents Privacy Issues

V. Advantages of Facebook A1. Entertainment and Music A2. Useless application Requests B1. Reconnecting with Old Friends B2. Unwanted Friend Requests C1. Advertising C2. Misuse of Facebook Profile D1. Medium of Communication D2. Obstruction of Privacy VI. Solution Facebook should be banned in schools during class hours but it should be free during dismissals and in the weekends.