While I'm never in support of people making explicit posts on their social media accounts, I'm also not in support of schools having to monitor what their students or staff members post on those accounts. I feel it's a breach of privacy. However, people should know what is decent and appropriate to publish. If they feel like posting explicit content, they should do so with an anonymous account or with an account that the school does not know belongs to them.
In this era, where earning a living is possible through social media, monitoring what people post and placing restrictions on it is not an ideal thing to do. It should only become a serious issue when the social media activities of a staff member or student have directly caused harm to the individual or the school.
For example, I've worked under many bosses who are pastors, and all of them see my social media posts. Although I don't make explicit posts, my posts are sometimes controversial, realistic, and contradictory to what most of them believe to be true. A typical example is when I make posts about how churches, including the one both they and I belong to, focus more on receiving from the masses, even when those people are at their lowest, while giving little or nothing back whenever those same people are in need. This kind of post is usually a slap in the face to them, but I haven't done anything wrong because I'm simply being realistic and truthful. I'm the type of person who hates seeing someone being punished simply for speaking the truth. So, I always speak the truth through my social media posts, and none of them has been able to confront me. If they ever do, then I would see that as them crawling into my private life.
However, if we take a closer look at it, what students post can sometimes be used to check on how they're doing, especially those experiencing depression or suffering from bullying. The problem is that if such a policy were made into law or enforced by schools, it would appear odd and intrusive. With the privilege I have now, I oversee a number of people and check up on them regularly. Whenever I notice that something seems wrong in their lives, I quickly report it to my heads so they can look into the situation. On many occasions, I've detected signs of depression in these people's lives through their social media posts, and we handled the situation from there. These are church members in our group who are also students in the city, and I'm privileged to be one of the leaders of the group. Now, if we had made it compulsory for every one of them to submit their social media handles or give us access to their accounts, they, and even I, would have seen it as a breach of privacy.
The best thing to do is to allow people to be. If, for any reason, the school authorities need to monitor a student, a staff member, or even a group of them, they should instead obtain relevant information from people who are close to them. Even then, I don't believe that such monitoring is necessary at all except there's a serious need for it.
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