Does Your Law Library Have a Social Media Policy? Does Your Law School Have an Honor Code Policy Covering Student-Posted Online Content?

Law library social media policies could establish clear guideline for library staff members who are posting on behalf of the organization and well as others who are using social media apps hosted on library servers. See Ellyssa Kroski's recent article, Should Your Library Have a Social Media Policy?, and this this slideshow presentation, Social Media & Blogging Policy.

Student Posting. In Online Posting of Unprofessional Content by Medical Students (Journal of the American Medical Association), researchers found that 60% of the responding medical schools (47/78) reported incidents of students posting unprofessional online content. 78 of the 130 medical schools responded to the survey for a 60% reponse rate. Commonly reported incidents included:

• Violations of patient confidentiality were reported by 13% (6/46)

• Student use of profanity (52%; 22/42)

• frankly discriminatory language (48%; 19/40)

• epiction of intoxication (39%; 17/44)

• sexually suggestive material (38%; 16/42)

Of 45 schools that reported an incident and responded to the question about disciplinary actions, 30 gave informal warning (67%) and 3 reported student dismissal (7%).

Policies that cover student-posted online content were reported at 38% (28/73) of the medical schools. Of schools without such policies, 11% (5/46) were actively developing new policies to cover online content. Medical schools reporting incidents were significantly more likely to report having such a policy (51% vs 18%), believing these issues could be effectively addressed (91% vs 63%) and having higher levels of concern. [JH]