ICT Advice: How to get adverse material removed from websites

Written by ICT Strategy Group

Pupils, former pupils and parents are able to publish, true or not, material about your school or staff that is defamatory. It is very difficult for the school to have this material removed from a website. What can you to to avoid or manage such a problem?

What you need to know:
- Schools face a new problem: it is has never been easier to publish information and schools have no control over what is published.
- Videos, pictures, articles and comments can be published on the internet instantaneously.  There is little effective regulation or restriction on what can be published.
- Schools cannot prevent the publication of material. Anyone with a grudge or an axe to grind can reach a world-wide audience immediately.
- Some schools have experienced problems of pupils and former pupils posting defamatory information about the school, its staff and pupils; video clips of lessons; or of pupils behaving badly.
- Those who create these sites or forums have administrative control of the sites and, in most cases, there is little that the school can do to ‘edit’ what is posted on the site.

Some of the key sites used by pupils
- www.youtube.com. This is a very popular site for posting video material. On the one hand it is a great teaching resource; but it is possible to post videos of lessons, pranks, and pupils behaving badly.
- Social networking sites including Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. Pupils can post pictures and videos on their own areas. Pupils and former pupils have set up ‘groups’ for most of the schools in the country.
- Rate your Teacher (www.rateyourteacher.com) – this is a site where pupils can write comments about their teachers and give them a rating.
- Unofficial websites purporting to be the school’s official website.
- There have been instances when parents or pupils have purchased domain names (website names) which are very similar to the official school site name (eg. …..school.co.uk rather than ……school.org.uk).

What you might do next
Monitor key sites regularly by logging onto each site and using the site search facility (tag) putting in the name of your school.
Purchase all of the domain names relating to your school ( ….school.org.uk, ….school.org; ….school.com; …school.co.uk; ….school.sch.county.uk etc.)
In most cases, for instance when there is another organisation of the same or similar name, the school will often have a right to own the domain names.
Some schools have trademarked™ their school names and logos.

Practical advice on getting material removed from websbsites
1. Contact the website administrators, (eg. of YouTube or Facebook)
- Schools have enjoyed varying degrees of success in getting material removed by administrators.
- Administrators are usually supportive if there is a child protection issue.
- They often take the stance that if the material does not break their publication rules (ie. that the person posting the material has the right to do so and that it is not pornographic etc), there is a freedom of publication and that schools do not have any right to regulate the material just because they don’t like the content
- Schools do not have the right to regulate material just because they don’t like it
- Rateyourteacher.com is generally very unsympathetic
- Administrators are responsive if there is an issue of libel. So the material has to be defamatory and untrue. Opinion (as opposed to what is purported to be objective material) is more difficult to deal with as any opinion “honestly held” is not regarded as libel unless it contains untrue facts.

2. Contact the person who posted the material or who administers the forum.
- This is the easiest and the most effective way of getting material removed from a site.
- Some schools have encouraged “on board” pupils in the school to persuade other pupils that they should remove material (“pride in the school”, “reflects badly on us all” etc). Pupils usually know who posted the material on the website.

3. Contact the parents of the person who posted the material, or who administers the forum.
- Where the publisher is a pupil, some schools have found that the most effective technique is to write to their parents.
- In one case where a video of a very drunk pupil in boarding house had been posted on YouTube, the headteacher wrote to the parents explaining the long-term danger to the reputation of the pupil.

Useful Phrases:
- I am very concerned that this particular footage is extremely unflattering for <your child> and could have serious repercussions in the future.
- Some employers are beginning to use social networking sites to vet potential employees: http://www.collegejournal.com/columnists/thejungle/20041018-jungle.html; http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us/11recruit.html?

The legal route
- Is the content defamatory of you, your school, or another member of staff?
- Are the damaging facts untrue?
- If the content is damaging and untrue, you may contact all of the websites who are publishing the content and ask them to remove it pending libel action. You may also contact internet service providers such as BT Internet, Tiscali, AOL etc. ISPs are not generally considered liable as long as they act to take down potentially libellous material when notified.

Related posts:

• The Appropriate Relationship between staff and pupils in cyberspace
• ICT Advice: Wi-Fi
• School league tables, websites and independent schools guides: How do I decide which school is best for my child?
• Some Interesting Questions to ask your ICT Manager!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 3:48 pm by ICT Strategy Group and is filed under Briefings from ISC's ICT Strategy Group. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.