Using Facebook

Social media sites, like Facebook, provide great opportunities to its users to socially connect with other students and to establish networks that are far reaching and limitless. However, like all great things, Facebook does have its foibles. The following is a list that you need to think carefully about when using online social networking sites.

1. Do take advantage of the opportunities presented by Facebook. The ability to connect and interact with people who share your interests is a unique and important experience.
2. Don’t get comfortable behind perceived anonymity. What you put on Facebook and how you conduct yourself online is public information. Just take a look at some of the horror stories told by Facebook users who have been turned down for prospective jobs or hauled in front of a judiciary committee because of inappropriate or illegal activity posted on their Facebook or other social media site.
3. Do realize that you can be sued for making inaccurate or slanderous remarks about someone on Facebook. As stated previously, the information you are posting on these forums is open to the public.
4. Do think before you post something about yourself that can be misconstrued by people reading it. Remember that people will have an immediate impression of you based on what they read on your site. Is what you have on your site describing the real you? Would you want a prospective employer, faculty member or even someone you have a secret crush on to have a negative impression of you based on an impulsive picture or posting you put into Facebook? Think carefully about identity theft and news stories concerning cyber-stalking.
5. Do make sure you realize how incredibly difficult it is to remove a posting made public, and later captured by search engines and other emerging online technology. Will my posting live with me for life? Possibly.
6. Do change your default passwords for online course registration, Baruch e-mail, and campus computer login as soon as you get them! Default passwords are sometimes based on personal information, like birthdays, that are also shared in online communities like Facebook. By sharing your personal information in online communities you may be giving others access to your personal records. In fact, give some thought as to whether you want to share personal information like your birth date with all of your Facebook “friends”.

Finally, we wish to remind you that Facebook – and other sites like it – are tools. Their primary purpose is to provide a forum for social discourse. As such, their use should not be abused. Baruch College does not tolerate the use of these forums to hurt, abuse, attack or cast slurs upon other members of the Baruch community. As a Baruch student it is expected that you adhere to the standards of student conduct set forth in the College Handbook. Respect for fellow students is paramount in helping to establish a strong and just community where conflict may be resolved in an open and accepting venue. Facebook and other social networking sites, even with all of their uses, cannot offer this.

Some ideas for this document were based on “Thoughts on Facebook”, a publication issued by the Cornell University Office of Information Technologies.