What’s okay on Face­book and what’s not? As one Florida col­lege sopho­more found out, com­plain­ing on Face­book about a teacher can get you sus­pended from school (this occurred when she was in high school). The stu­dent has now won the right to sue to cover her legal costs and try to expunge the sus­pen­sion from her record.

When I started col­lege, Face­book was still rel­a­tively new and users had to have a uni­ver­sity e-mail address to even open an account. Now any­one can open an account and Face­book cur­rently reports that it has over 400 mil­lion users world­wide. Face­book is one of those amaz­ing feats of tech­nol­ogy that does great things—but also opens up the pos­si­bil­ity for sit­u­a­tions like the one in Florida. So what are we to do? Based on expe­ri­ences that my friends, class­mates and I have had, here are some key things to keep in mind when it comes to Face­book in col­lege (or any­time, for that matter):

No mat­ter how great that party was, make sure that any Face­book photo doc­u­men­ta­tion remains PG.
I used the “untag” option lib­er­ally when it came to pho­tos involv­ing alco­hol, even if it was a totally inno­cent bot­tle of beer—especially before I turned 21. I also learned not to be afraid to ask a friend to delete a photo alto­gether if I wasn’t com­fort­able with it. Pho­tos on Face­book have a way of turn­ing up else­where (for exam­ple, many year­book staffs are turn­ing to Face­book for extra pho­tos) so I truly believe that there is no such thing as a silly or overly cau­tious photo de-tag or removal.

Upset with a professor/classmate/club/internship/life? Write a jour­nal entry, not a sta­tus update.
I am amazed at how much peo­ple feel com­fort­able shar­ing with the world via sta­tus updates. A class­mate of mine was actu­ally known for her emo­tional, stressed-out sta­tus updates that some­times iden­ti­fied groups of peo­ple as the cause of her prob­lems (i.e. Depart­ment X, lab part­ners, etc) and still didn’t get the mes­sage even after this led to actual con­fronta­tions with some annoyed stu­dents in real life. If you wouldn’t say it in per­son, please don’t say it on Face­book! Yes, the prob­a­bil­ity of an out­pour­ing of online sup­port in regard to a crummy grade or dif­fi­cult class­mate is tempt­ing, but it’s not worth get­ting into the mess that Katharine Evans got into in Florida when her vent­ing actu­ally got back to the school. Going pub­lic with pri­vate thoughts and opin­ions is a game-changer and it’s really, really not worth the instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion of post­ing these sen­ti­ments online.

Explore the var­i­ous pri­vacy and secu­rity set­tings.
These set­tings span a much wider range of options than I first real­ized, so it’s worth check­ing out. For one thing, net­works vary dra­mat­i­cally in size, which may deter­mine whether or not you really want every­one in a given net­work to see your pro­file or just those on your friend list. Beyond that, I set my account so that only a hand­ful of friends can see pho­tos tagged of me (which helps solve the first issue I dis­cussed) and not every­one can access my con­tact information.

That’s how I face the Face­book issue (couldn’t resist)—what sug­ges­tions do you have for smart and sound Face­book use? Should Katharine Evans have been sus­pended? Why or why not? And while we're on the topic, fol­low Bet­ter­Grads on Face­book!