More and more students who use Facebook continue to push the envelope of acceptable free speech, according to panelists who discussed the popular social networking Web site at a Wednesday session.

“I have never encountered such conflicts of interest pitting freedom of expression ... with such ethical issues as taste, obscenity, privacy, bias and harassment,” moderator Michael Bugeja said as he introduced “Facing the Facebook: Administrative Issues Involving Social Networks.”

Bugeja is director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University of Science and Technology.

Facebook is an online directory that allows people to connect based on social networks. Users can post photos and express their interests in music, movies and social activities. They can also write comments on other users’ profiles and create “groups” that express similar interests or views. Anyone with a valid e-mail address from certain high schools, colleges and companies can create a profile.

The site was launched in February 2004 and reaches more than 8 million people, according to its Web site.

Members of the panel, which was sponsored by the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, identified the most pressing issues, using examples that have plagued their campuses.

Some students created a Facebook group that expressed dislike of a teaching assistant, said panelist Joel Kaplan, associate dean for professional graduate studies at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Another panelist, Shirley Staples Carter, director of the University of South Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, said athletes at her school recently posted inappropriate photos without realizing the impact.

“Although it’s the athletes themselves who are posting objectionable photos and material on social networks like Facebook, that can cause problems for both coaches and administrators,” she said.

Panelist Clifford G. Christians said that in this technological world students have little knowledge about moral issues and it’s hopeless to try to set them straight on Facebook etiquette. Christians is director of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Institute of Communications Research.

“Ethics across the curriculum,” he suggested, is the way to approach the problems these online social networks create.

Leonard Witt, chair of the Department of Communication at Kennesaw State University, told the panel that it sounded like “Facebook is some sort of big monster.”

Witt said schools have seen a lot of positives come out of the site. New organizations have been created on campus, and students have begun networking with each other before classes begin.
Kaplan agreed, but Bugeja said the point of the seminar was to brainstorm ideas for how to deal with the increasingly troublesome issues surrounding social networks.

“How are you dealing with this?” he asked the audience. The room was silent.