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Guess Who Else Is Reading Those "Facebook" Entries?

By Eddie R. Cole Jr.
Black College Wire

Photo illustration by K. Cummings

Tondia Payne is one of more than 4,830 Tennessee State University students registered with facebook.com, which calls itself an Internet directory that "connects college students worldwide through social networks."

And those Tennessee State students are among 12 million college students worldwide registered to the site. Unknown to most of them, employers are using Facebook entries as a view into job applicants' characters, a trend that increasingly worries college administrators.

Dennis Gendron, vice president for technology and administrative services at Tennessee State, said the issue has become a concern at national meetings of his colleagues.

"A lot of times, students are short on their context," Gendron said, referring to students' placing personal information in their profiles. "Nobody is trying to discourage Facebook, but it's just like anything else. You give a kid a car and they drive at 80 miles per hour, but you try to tell them to drive at 60 miles per hour instead. Everything has limitations.

"Employers can get access through students and faculty to use Facebook to view kids' profiles," he said. "Monster.com," an online career management site, "is who you portray you are, but Facebook is who you really are."

Yet Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, said the chance of an employer getting access to Facebook is slim.

"Several factors would have to line up to make it possible," Hughes said in an e-mail. "First, the employer would have to be a graduate of the particular school that the interviewee is attending. Second, that particular school would be able to distribute .edu e-mail addresses to its alumni. Finally, the individual undergrad would have had to configure her privacy settings to specifically make her profile available to alumni.

"The likelihood that all three of those factors line up makes the chances of this happening low. If students don't want a potential alumnus looking at their profiles, they can just change their privacy settings so that they're not available to alumni. Simple as that."

But that does not ease administrators' fears, which go beyond job applicants. For example, after October's football game against rival Ohio State, hundreds of Penn State fans rushed the field after a 17-10 victory.

That led to a melee and resulted in two arrests, according to a Jan. 26 report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Less than a week later, Tyrone Parham, the Penn State assistant director of police, was tipped off about students posting pictures of themselves rushing the field and a Facebook discussion group titled, "I Rushed the Field after the OSU Game (And Lived!)," according to the Chronicle.

Days later, nearly 50 students were referred to the Penn State Office of Judicial Affairs.

Payne, the Tennessee State student who has been a registered Facebook member since December, said those who use Facebook are making judgments based on students' fun time.

"I don't feel that people should use [the book] to find character, because when people put crazy pictures up, they are just doing it for fun so their friends can see what they are up to," said the junior social work major from Memphis. "Just because an employer sees those pictures doesn't mean they are judging character."

Is it fair not to hire a job applicant based on his or her social life?

"Once an employer gets into the system, you don't get to ask that question," Gendron said.

Employers can learn race, religion, gender

As a result of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, employers are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Facebook can provide viewers all of that information.

Faheem Goree, a Tennessee State senior from Atlanta majoring in mass communications, isn't taking any chances.

"I won't put anything extra personal on my page because of the job I have; people might want to look me up and I wouldn't want them to see pictures of me in an unprofessional state," said Goree, who also works at Nashville's WUBT-FM.

Rodriquous Rhodes, a junior sports science major from Memphis, said he can understand an employer's reasoning.

"I wouldn't blame a company for using the Facebook to find character," said Rhodes, who identified himself as a limited user of the site. "You are putting this stuff on the Internet and you know that others will see it. Although it is your personal life, employers have to think about if the lifestyles you are living will affect your work habit[s]."

Corporate thinking

Nickie Singleton, a product specialist in the medical sales department for Siemens Medical Solutions, said she could understand why a company would use Facebook as a reference.

"It's hard to get an idea of who a person is," Singleton said. "You can get a paper picture of a person, but that's why we get to have face-to-face interviews."

She also said employers look for something unique and Facebook might be a way to distinguish between two equally qualified job applicants.

"It gives them a picture of a person outside of a resume," Singleton said. "Facebook is more candid and honest, because people lie on their resume all the time."

Inman E. Otey, director of the Tennessee State University Career Center, said students should continue to embrace new technology, but must be careful.

"Students must utilize all of these marvelous ways of informing others," Otey said. "But they must know that there are abusive people out there and be aware of where they put this personal information. There are so many people with evil intentions.

"Just be careful with what you do, [and] how you say it and you don't have to worry about it coming back to haunt you."

Employers and others should use Facebook in its context, she said.

"You do things in college that you wouldn't do when out of school," Otey said.

Ramifications go beyond not getting the job

Even in school, however, Facebook entries can lead to trouble.

At Duquesne University, a student was asked to write a paper after a group he started on Facebook was judged to be homophobic, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education report. At Northern Kentucky University, students were charged with having a keg in a dorm room after university officials saw a picture of the keg online.

Virginia Commonwealth University will be training students about Internet safety starting in October, Vice Provost Henry G. Rhone told the Chronicle.

"Online privacy is becoming a huge issue on a lot of campuses and I think we're just beginning to have our eyes opened to it," Rhone said.

For Tennessee State student Carl Erskine Davis Jr., the thought of strangers viewing his personal information on Facebook was enough for him to stop using it.

"I was on the Facebook, but I removed my profile because I just couldn't get [over] knowing people that I don't even know could look up my profile and find things out about me," said Davis, a junior mass communications major from Memphis. "It was just too random."

Eddie R. Cole, a student at Tennessee State University, is editor in chief of the Meter. Brandy N. Wilson, an arts and entertainment writer for the Meter, contributed to this report.

Posted March 12, 2006