1 The risks and potential negative impact of social media

For many students, social media can be a positive space to connect to peers and explore the world of HE, and act as a space to express your views and learn about the views of others. However, it is unlikely that everyone will experience social media as an entirely positive experience all of the time.

One of the biggest risks about meeting people online is that it is possible that people are not who they say they are. Listen to Cath Brown from The Open University describe one such instance.

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Cath Brown

There was someone who had the profile picture of a young chap in around his twenties who was appearing on a number of student groups and doing something superficially that sounded nice, trying to arrange face-to-face meet-ups so that people wouldn't be so isolated.

But then a couple of people noticed that the people he was targeting these messages about were predominantly younger female students and it didn't really seem to be something that was wanting a wider audience. It got changed from a general invite to once someone showed interest going to their private messages and as you can probably imagine all sorts of alarm bells started ringing.

This was actually found out to be a general pattern of behaviour by this individual through the kind of networking of group admins within the university and that enabled people to realise it was a pattern of behaviour and fortunately to report it to the university and to remove this individual from groups before any harm was done. But it quite scared me what could have happened if we hadn't actually... be made aware of this pattern of behaviour.

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Video 1 Impersonation risk

This is quite an extreme example of someone targeting young people. But it serves as a cautionary tale as sometimes the people we meet, even if they are studying at the same institution as us may have ulterior motive for reaching out.

The negative impacts of social media may vary, from extremely unpleasant bullying to mild irritation at the distraction from repeated notifications. Students sometimes also reveal things that make us worry, here Mel Green talks about this issue and what students might do about revelations that make them worry.

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Mel Green

This student got in contact with me to share that a student, another student within this Facebook group had shared some information about her mental health that had my student very worried. She seemed to be in a sort of depressive episode, was very anxious. And my student, even though she knew that this student wasn't in my tutor group, she contacted me to let me know that she was very worried about that student.

And I in turn contacted that student's tutor who then signposted them and worked with them to find resources and third party organisations that might have supported her. So that student who reported that, I was doing a fantastic job of showing, you know, caring and also the right sort of conduct that we expect as a university, when you are on social media.

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Video 2 Safety on Facebook

In this section we will look at some of the common risks and irritations which are particularly important for those in Higher Education, beginning with the risk of bullying.