There shouldn't be a ban on a facebook or myspace page. It is up to that holder to moderate the content on that page. If you don't want the materials seen by the outside world, dont post it.

To be honest, I think if you want to look professional you should either not have a profile, or make it more resume-like than "party with friends"

I don't think there is a time when people should "not be allowed to have a Facebook page," I just think people have to not be idiots about what they put online for the world to see. It's (apparently) easy to forget that nothing is hidden if it is on the World Wide Web, and lots of people (read Miley Cyrus, small-town mayors, young teachers, your little sister) seem to be a little unclear on the concept.

I have had myspace and Facebook accounts for years, mostly to keep an eye on my high-school-aged sister's pages and make sure she isn't revealing too much, and I've never felt the need to post pictures of myself in my underwear, or out at the club with my girlfriends. (Of course by most 20-something standards, I'm kind of an old fogey)

Now i think that is being oversensitive. What a teacher does on their own time is their business. The sexad is a bit much, but pictures of her drinking? Big deal. If it doesn't affect her job, then who cares.

Since I am a working professional in the computer industry, I use facebook's strictest privacy settings and only put up pictures that i think reflect me quite well (traveling, etc).

You can adjust your settings so no one can search for you or find your pictures or see anything more than your name, etc.

As a way for me to keep in touch with my friends without worrying about outdated email addresses, I don't think you shouldn't have one -- just be aware, like everything else on the internet, that it is public.

People should just be a little more aware of their impact. If you are in a profession where your public persona matters, then either have an anonymous profile that only your friends will recognize, or limit your privacy settings so only your friends can see your profile - and not people in groups.

Although I voted for the first choice, I really think anyone who wants a facebook/mysace page should be able to have one, but they should be responsible about it too. Especially if they have a public job like being a Teacher. Make sure it's not accessible to the public if it's going to be raunchy. Most of these social networking sites have the options to make sure your page is restricted and these people should be smart enough to make sure it is. It's their jobs on the line anyways.

I think everyone should be allowed to have a FB page.. it's an easy and fun way to keep in touch with friends & acquaintances. I think the real problem is that people don't know how to responsibly control the CONTENT of their pages.

I think whether someone is in a public job or not, they should be allowed to have a Myspace/Facebook page. They are entitled to have a life outside of their work and be able to put it on their pages without consequence.

I think that anyone who wants to have a page should have one, but if you put racy pictures and/or content and your job is as a teacher, then if parents get mad, you should be ready to face the consequences that arise.

ladychaos said it right!

I don't have a problem with anyone having one but some content just shouldn't be on there.

Anyone should be allowed to have a Facebook or MySpace page. Sure there are creepy people on there but it's for "social networking."

Here's another example. I used to work with a teacher who put on his myspace page things about specific students: how he didn't like them, called them names, etc, etc. He used their first names but not their last. He didn't realize that his students were reading his page and there was a LOT of drama over this. Yes, it was stupid on his part. I would NEVER put anything up there about a student.

Also, I think it's important to not become "friends" with your students. Many of my students have asked to be my friend on Facebook and I always ignore the request. I don't have anything up there that is incriminating in any way but I don't want them to know anything personal about me.

As far as my MySpace goes the only thing people can see if they aren't my friend (and I am strict on who I add as a friend) is my main picture, display name (which is not my real name, that's also why I don't have a facebook), status and simple things like that, my name isn't even registered with my account and the email I use to sign on is completely different from the one I give out to anyone, so if someone tries to search for me, good luck (unless you know someone that has me on their friend list and still even then you cant find out much about me, and I'm smart I don't post things that people would look down on in any setting, I mean my mom has seen my page and has nothing to gripe about. If you're smart about it, it will cause no problems.

a teacher can always make their facebook profile private.. and i dont know if its just here but teachers arent allowed to add or accept friends if theyre students. who cares if there are pictures of them drinking? theyre of age and its theyre free time. im sure teachers have seen students at bars anyway. maybe the 'retard' comment and the sexual stuff is too much, but nobody should really have those, not just teachers or political people.

hmm my post was flagged? sorry if i swore or something i didnt realize?

Age is irrelevant. Stupid, however, is always a factor.

You should never do anything on the internet that you wouldn't want your family / friends / coworkers to see.

mini_pixie: What's wrong with old fogies?

While I agree that discretion is the better part of valor, I am bothered by the presumption that a person's personal life somehow reflects on their professional life. If I drink myself silly every weekend (or worse), that doesn't mean I'm a bad employee. If I have a crass sense of humor that I share with my friends, that doesn't mean I use that same humor in the workplace.

It bothers me that HR personnel go around googling employees and can use that information against potential and current employees. It happens, so I guard against it accordingly, but it seems wholly unreasonable to me, akin to calling an employee's friends, posing as a friend, and asking them to gossip.

Just because information is public does not, IMO, make it relevant, much less appropriate, for employers' use.

I had a coworker whos 12 year old was on myspace (warned her about its dangers, age limit etc) and she says "her teachers are on there" so i looked, and there was Teach, with innapropriate comments, pictures, on her profile. I think they just want to be blind that thier students will respect them less for having one. Because I certainly couldnt take a teacher seriously who has glittery butterflies, pictures of her half naked, and talking like she is 13

as long as you can keep the page 'scandal free' and avoid any possible damage to yourself or your job, then i dont think there is a problem with having a myspace/facebook page.

why are students and parents going out of their way to look up these teachers? don't they have better things to do, like raise their kids?

my cousin is becoming a teacher and said that they're not allowed to have a myspace or facebook account. pretty crazy, i think.

I'm a teacher with (private) Facebook and Myspace pages, and I just take my name off so no one can search for me. Since I'm an elementary teacher, I'm not so worried about my students looking me up. If I was a middle or high school teacher then I would most likely take my page down. Or make it completely impossible for any of them to know it's me.

I know of a teacher who teaches high school drama who not only has a public myspace, but made a page for his drama department. So all the students are friends with the department page and him. He can contact them outside of school, and this completely creeps me out. That's a line that definitely should not be crossed.

Like others have said, there's nothing wrong with teachers, etc., having pages, as long as they are responsible for the content. My Facebook page is accessible by my boss, but I would never ever put anything up there that he couldn't see -- and if anyone else made any inappropriate comments or tagged photos, I'd just take them down.

Anyone who has a MySpace or Facebook page should make it their responsibility to keep their page appropriate. If someone posts something stupid and it gets into the hands of the "public" then it is their own fault. I am a teacher and have both a MySpace and Facebook page, but I wouldn't post anything that I wouldn't want my students to see. What you do outside of your work life is and should be private, but it's not private once you post it online, no matter how "secure" you think the privacy settings are.

Many people use these sites to keep in touch with friends and family, so I think anyone should be allowed to have one. Having a MySpace or Facebook page does not automatically mean that you have embarrassing or questionable content on them. I wouldn't be the least bit ashamed if my boss found my online profiles.

I feel that Facebook has gone downhill from where it started. It used to be a network of Ivy Leaguers, who just wanted to network after graduating. Then it became an open network to every college student, which was still fine. When it became a game site and high school kids were allowed to access it, I started looking for other sites. I joined to have one website where I could keep up with alums. Now I use LinkedIn and my alum site instead of Facebook. And considering how hard it is to get yourself removed completely from Facebook, I now regret having a profile in the same pool as idiots who post their entire private lives on there.

I was so interested when you posted this! I noticed a few months ago friends who have now taken jobs as teachers including items on their profiles that I found to be odd and slightly disturbing. One girl who works as an aid to a special needs student made many jokes in photo captions and in her profile taking about how "retarded" she looked, or her friends looked, etc. While she was not necessarily referring to her special student as "retarded," I think it was in horrible taste. Another girl included pictures of her students. I wondered whether the parents of her students knew she was posting these pictures and whether they approved of these photos being shared.
While I still understand that these girls may want to keep Facebook profiles, I think they should realize that with their new jobs comes more responsibilities and maybe they should not use Facebook to share photos or comments with friends.

easy solution: just don't be a seedy public official/teacher/etc. have a facebook, and don't have anything suspect to hide.

this is a bit off topic, but I know a lot of young teachers my age and many of them do drugs. The school systems really need to do rougher backround checks.

I only just set up a myspace account recently because I had to get in touch with one of my friends and his regular email is so full of spam he gave up on checking it ever. So I had to message him via myspace. Otherwise I wouldn't even touch myspace with a ten-foot-pole.

As it is, I'm so not telling myspace my real name or my real birthday. I make up a bunch of fake names and fake birth dates for online accounts. And put up a barely identifiable picture of myself that only people who actually know me in real life can tell who it is. Makes it that much harder for someone to steal my identity, y'know?

I agree - it doesn't hurt to HAVE a page ... but if you'd be embarrassed by ANYONE AT ALL seeing it ... then don't post it. Common sense, folks - it's a dying skill.

I'm with Tdamji.

And maybe people should respect privacy (esp when the profiles are private) instead of forbidding access to Facebook.
I have profiles on both websites, and they have pictures of me with my friends, me partying, me drinking and me making silly faces. I have posted jokes and stories I would never tell at work, simply because there are things you say to your friends and family, and not to your coworkers/boss.

It's becoming pretty fashionable here to have employers checking your Fbk profile before hiring you, and that's completely ridiculous. From the moment I am professional when at work and do my job well, what I do or say on my free time is not my employer/coworkers should know.
If you don't break into someone's house to check their picture albums and read their diary, there's no reason why you should have the right to comment on what they post on their profile when it's private.

not *something* my employer (forgot a word)

I believe that a job is only a small aspect of a person and therefore everyone should be entitled to a Facebook or myspace page. If they hold a job such as a teacher, they should be careful about the pictures they're tagged in or the privacy settings they have on, as with any other person.
In addition to this, I really think that any parent who is looking for their child's teacher on facebook is really really really pathetic- they are the kind of parents who are harming their children by being in their child's face too much.

Several of my son's (he's 16) teachers have myspace pages, as do I. I don't think most of them accept students as friends though. I don't understand how some people don't "get" that this stuff can be available to anyone that wants to look at it. Common sense would be helpful here..

I think it's okay to have a profile as long as you are responsible about its content. You wouldn't want your co-workers, students, or subordinates loosing respect for you over what you did last weekend. Profiles are to stay in touch with friends, your private life, however, should stay private - and the internet is anything but.

I was a teacher with a Facebook. I never accepted students as friends. Duh.

Just monitor what your page has. No scandalous photos. No incriminating info.

it should be "under a certain age"
technology is very firmly apart of our lives but kids (lets say that arent in highchool yet? which is like 12 and under)shouldnt be exposed to it yet. let them have a fulfilling childhood.

they're good for networking and keeping in touch, but like you said, if you have a job where anyone is going to look you up, you should restrict the content for your own good. I remember when I started college I had some racy photos up..about a year later they were gone when I had a boyfriend. different circumstances, but I definitely think after a certain age, certain content on FB or myspace is just pathetic.

I agree that anyone should be able to have a Facebook/MySpace/TeamSugar (or whatever) page on a social networking site if they want, and that those who do opt to have them need to be careful about what they put out there.

I do think, however, that parents do have a right to check out their kids' teachers, and, really, probably should. How often do we hear about teachers who molest or have sex with students? Just this week there was a female teacher who was arrested for the third time in two weeks for having sex with an under-aged student. Just as with Debra LaFave and Mary Kay Letourneu (sp?), this was happening outside of school, and the parents apparently didn't know a thing about it.

And it's not just female teachers abusing male students, but also male teachers with female students, female teachers with female students, male teachers with male students, and probably just about any other grouping a person can think of. Now, granted, a teacher who is also a sexual predator isn't likely to have a "guess what, I like to have sex with kids" graphic on their Facebook, but I'll bet they have some stuff up there that would be rather inappropriate.

Another issue with teachers (and other professionals who work with vulnerable populations) posting inappropriate material to a website is that teachers are supposed to set a good example for the kids they're teaching, and pictures of wild carousing or broadcasting your sexual predilections isn't going to help accomplish that.

The problem I have with the idea that a person should be able to put up whatever they want on their Facebook, etc. is that in choosing what to post (and in what it shows you doing) is that it's an indication of what kind of judgment you have, and whether or not you have good judgment is ENTIRELY relevant to a job - *any* kind of job. And it's not just pictures of getting stone-faced drunk or announcing your sexual predilections that could be troublesome, but anything that might indicate if you're irresponsible or have ethics some might find questionable (such as griping about the high bounce fees at your bank or how you got a dress for a party, hid the tags on it and then took it back the next day for a full refund) could indicate that you may not have the level of professionalism or integrity they're wanting to have in their company. It may not seem fair, but sometimes life just isn't.

One last thing (well, for this post, anyway), BalooB said:

In addition to this, I really think that any parent who is looking for their child's teacher on facebook is really really really pathetic- they are the kind of parents who are harming their children by being in their child's face too much.

IMO, I think the opposite is true far more often. Parents today don't really pay enough attention to their kids, if anything. Kids under 14 aren't supposed to be able to sign up for MySpace, but there are thousands of them on there, and how many of their parents know about it or understand the potential dangers there (like getting chatted up by pedophiles?) It's the same with most other social networking sites.

We've also seen that, in most of the school shooting cases, the parents had no idea that their kids were even troubled, much less building an arsenal in the family garage, not to mention that there are so many parents who expect others - the government, the schools, the community - to "protect" their children from whatever might be out there, rather than taking the time and making the effort to protect their kids themselves or teach their kids how to protect themselves.

We have parents who want the schools to teach sex ed (but only according to their values, whether that means teaching abstinence or teaching birth control,) some even want religion taught in schools - or at least to make sure nothing that counters their religion is taught (and that's not limited just to conservative Christians, though we hear about them the most.) Many want the government to ban games, movies, music or even foods that might not be "good" for kids rather than establishing what is or isn't acceptable for their child and then paying attention to make sure those limits are respected.

I honestly think that if parents spent MORE time with their children and paying attention to what their kids do, who they hang out with, what they watch and listen to for entertainment and so forth, it would truly resolve a lot of the problems we see with kids today. A parents job is to care for, guide and TEACH their children - and it's hard to do that if you're just not paying attention.

i don't think there should be an age limit for facebook, but i think if you're gonna post something you should think about who's gonna see it first

I think parents should monitor what their kids are doing on facebook and everyone, no matter who they are, should be cautious about what they publish on the internet of all places.

I'm a middle school teacher with a private Myspace and private Facebook page.... My students have been determined since September to find me on both!! It really just has to do with censoring though---while my pages are private, I really don't have anything to hide.

i think whoever wants to have a myspace or facebook should be able to, no matter what their profession. it's their choice to post whatever they want and if there should be consequences, they will have to pay for them.

There should be no restrictions on these pages. However, be prepared to accept the consequences. I deleted mine when I started my job search. Now all I have is LinkedIn.

I don't think someone's job should stop them from MySpace or Facebook. They are after all, networking websites. I think people need to take a different approach to it. Between stalkers and the person you just had an interview with going on MySpace to search for you ... ya gotta watch your back! I have two seperate pages. One is very professional and can be searched by my name and my "professional" e-mail. The other is my personal page. The e-mail address is my personal one (that only friends and family know) and the name isn't real. That way I can rock the page however I want and bossman isn't the wiser!

As soon as I was applying for jobs, I cleaned up my Facebook page (even though there was hardly anything on it and nothing scandalous) and I told my friends what I was doing so they wouldn't post anything questionable my page.

Facebook is a great way for me to keep in touch with friends and family members I know I otherwise wouldn't be able to, so I wouldn't tell anybody they shouldn't use it. But using privacy setting and common sense is completely necessary.

I wouldn't hire a nanny or babysitter that had a myspace page, but I would consider hiring one that had a facebook page. I think it speaks of the type of person he or she is. I don't want someone wrapped up in internet culture in any way, though.

bengalspice- actually, facebook was started for college students at harvard to keep up with each other while in school, not after they graduated (seeing that the founder didn't even graduate).

I think people are stupid, and if you have a job there is a certain level of responsibility/accountability involved with having anything on the internet.. However, I am in my 20's and had facebook throughout college, just b/c I am now in the real world, doesn't mean I am going to just get rid of it, that's just stupid. Our culture is driven by these kinds of things. I think teachers like the examples given are just morons and it's really not about their facebook or myspace.. They shouldn't set the tone for everyone else.. They also shouldn't add their kids to their profiles.. I think facebook really isn't in the same group as myspace. Myspace is shady, and it's like for everyone who is in their late 20's early 30's who never jumped on the facebook bandwaggon and like to give people glitter graphics that say happy monday.. ugh. either way, when you're 40 and wanting to be your kids friend, and their friends friend, then yeah, move on.. but if you had it in college and use it to keep up w/ people just be smart about what you put on it, and use the privacy restrictions.

and "mandyjobo" good luck finding a babysitter who is not wrapped up in the internet culture.. ha.

Word to the wise in our age and times: When you put something on the internet think of it like a tattoo. Permanent and on display for everyone to see; you can try to hide it, you can try to erase it, but traces and shadows are still there. So just think before you hit post. Think hard.

It's called "discretion," people. If you wouldn't want it broadcast on the evening news or read at your eulogy, keep a lid on it.