Sharing Images of Your Learners on Social Media? Why?

It’s been really interesting to see over the last couple of years, more and more primary schools moving across to Instagram as their primary public social media platform. More and more photographs and videos of young children are therefore being shared by teachers. However, how much thought has been given by your school to what happens to that image of a child that has been uploaded? LLMs have basically been trained on every image that has ever been uploaded onto the web. Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, will train its AI on your uploaded images and video. Therefore, the images of your children are being used to train AI products that can generate the AI child sexual abuse materials (videos and images) that are referred to in this Guardian article (Internet Watch Foundation reports huge rise in AI child sexual abuse material). Do you think it might be time to stop and think, “Why are we uploading these images of our children in the first place?"

Also, the DCF mentions pupils being aware of their digital footprint. Are you happy as a school with uploading photos and video and thereby adding to a young child’s ’digital footprint’? At PS3 learners are encouraged to 

think critically about information shared online, e.g. the impact of sharing images and videos, metadata of images and videos. 

Is your school "thinking critically" when sharing these images and videos?

Lastly, it’s still quite unbelievable that almost weekly I see primary schools posting images of children holding certificates that clearly show their full names on them.

We are encouraged to develop our learners into “ethical and informed” citizens, but are we as schools behaving in ethical and informed ways ourselves? I keep coming back to a question in the Science and Technology AoLE, which I shall amend slightly, 

Just because we can 'upload and share', does that mean we should?

What are your thoughts on how your school shares images via social media channels or via your website?

Australian eSafety Commissioner Advice - Sharing school imagery in the age of AI: risks, deepfakes, and how to protect students and staff https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/sharing-school-imagery-in-the-age-of-ai-risks-deepfakes-and-how-to-protect-students-and-staff

New Zealand news report - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/education/1411307/why-schools-are-ditching-facebook-photos-of-students