To Look or Not To Look? Facebook use & ethics in social work. Student Connect webinar 31.

Summary

Highlights

• Interactive session with case studies encourages participants to reflect on their gut reactions and ethical beliefs 🤔.
• Differing ethical standpoints, such as Kantian ethics versus Utilitarianism, guide social workers in decision-making 🧠.
• The legality of reviewing Facebook profiles without consent is unclear and agency advice is crucial 🔍.
• Explores how digital connectivity is making privacy boundaries more complex in child protection cases 🛡️.
• An engaging discussion on how exposure to social media impacts professional behavior and practice 🌐.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding the ethical framework is crucial in deciding whether to look at Facebook profiles 🧐.
• The ease of accessing information also brings responsibility and moral dilemmas for social workers 🌐.
• There is no one-size-fits-all answer; legal and ethical considerations can vary greatly by context ⚖️.
• Digital presence and social media usage are integral in modern social work but require careful balance ⚖️.
• Encourages critical thinking and reflection on personal views around privacy and ethics in social work 🤔.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Welcome and Introduction The chapter introduces the hosts, Colton and Die, who welcome the audience and ask them to share their location and social media usage. The focus of the talk will be on social media.
• 01:30 - 07:00: Setting the Context: Social Media in Everyday Life The chapter introduces the context of social media usage in everyday life, highlighting the global connectivity it offers with mentions of participants from Pakistan, Manchester, and Gibraltar. The interactive nature of social media is emphasized as people are encouraged to make themselves comfortable and to share their locations, symbolizing the broader theme of connection and community in a digital space.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Research Background and Methodology The chapter 'Research Background and Methodology' seems to involve diverse participants discussing social media influence and usage across different geographical regions including Gibraltar, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe. The participants are likely using a digital platform to share experiences and inputs on social media tools they have engaged with or are aware of.
• 09:00 - 10:30: Findings from the Research The chapter begins with a conversation between individuals about the start of a session, which seems to have attracted an international audience early on. There is a notable mention of Diana, who the audience has missed, but she has returned for this session.
• 10:30 - 24:30: Exploration of Ethical Dilemmas and Case Studies The chapter opens with a warm acknowledgment of the contributors and organizers, including Diana, Siobhan, and Omar, and expresses gratitude towards the Social Connect Team for their support. The speaker admits to still acclimating to presenting, indicating a sense of humility and ongoing development in public speaking. The chapter sets the tone for a discussion on ethical dilemmas and case studies, but doesn't immediately delve into specific ethical issues, instead focusing on formalities and appreciation for the event.
• 24:30 - 33:00: Concluding Remarks and Q&A The speaker expresses a preference for face-to-face interactions as it helps them gauge audience engagement. However, they acknowledge the advantage of virtual sessions, such as avoiding the logistical issue of finding a large venue. The speaker aims to keep the audience engaged during the session, apologizing in advance for any potential technical difficulties.

To Look or Not To Look? Facebook use & ethics in social work. Student Connect webinar 31. Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello and welcome everybody good evening wherever you are and my name is colton and i will be welcoming you all this evening along with die and we would like you to tell us where in the world you're from and because we are doing a talk on social media we'd like to know what social media you use or have used and if you don't use social media what social media
• 00:30 - 01:00 do you know of in the chat people arriving now welcome everybody and just make yourself what you know comfortable we can't see you you can see us so let's see where you're all from and your social media use hi saeed syed here from pakistan see loads of people from manchester tonight lots from manchester tonight got gibraltar there as well good evening from gibraltar third year
• 01:00 - 01:30 student in gibraltar loads of people now on the apprenticeship turning up so those i've just joined just and just put into the chat what sort of social media that you're using or that you have used or that you've heard of so we've got saudi arabia there we are traveling field yeah zimbabwe have just seen as well
• 01:30 - 02:00 we are about three minutes in now shivan do you want to start or um do you think so i think we've got is it around oh yeah 300 almost now yeah yeah yeah i think so i can see lots of uh people from um i think we've we've gone international quite early on again tonight so um oh people are saying hi diana um because they've missed you last couple of weeks diana's back tonight
• 02:00 - 02:30 so um it's great to have diana back with us tonight yeah can i just say thank you to siobhan to diana and also to omar as well um who stud studied at the university of birmingham i just want to say thank you to the uh social connect team as well for making me feel so welcome and and the opportunity to actually um present to you today i mean i have to admit i i am just getting used to doing these
• 02:30 - 03:00 types of sessions because i do tend to prefer face to face because you do get a opportunity to see if your audience are falling asleep or if they're actually listening to you or not but i hope to keep you all awake for the next hour or so anyway and the advantage obviously of doing this is that we don't have to try to find a room for 600 odd people on a cold wednesday night in birmingham now i hope that the presentation goes well but if there are any hiccups along the way i hope that you do forgive me but
• 03:00 - 03:30 i'm sure it'll be it'll all go well can i just say that i want to thank you for taking the time to attend and i hope that you find the session interesting i am conscious that i probably won't be able to address all of the issues that you that may have encouraged you to attend the session but i do hope that what we do explore does enable you to go out and look for um answers to any wider points that you want to explore based on the content
• 03:30 - 04:00 of this session i hope you find the session enjoyable and even if it doesn't answer all of your questions i hope that you'll leave feeling a little bit more aware of some of the broader issues that can impact on children and ethical debates about using social media sites in safeguarding children and to begin with what i want to say is that this presentation is based on our research and i think that it's always critically important that when you conduct
• 04:00 - 04:30 research that it goes out of journals and universities and out into practice so i hope that by doing this presentation that we're delivering some messages that make a difference to practice and help to improve the lives of the people that we work with now i have put in my notes i hope you have a pen and paper ready although you know you can use your phone you can use a computer to take notes towards the end of the presentation what i'm going to do is i'm going to introduce three case studies to you and i've tried
• 04:30 - 05:00 to develop them in a way so that basically they pose questions to you that were triggered from our research and what i want you to do is i want you to take notes and actually respond to the team about how you would respond to the scenarios that i'm going to present to you in terms of the presentation what we're going to do is we're going to look at the question to look or not look and what we're doing is we're exploring the ethical challenges of facebook use in child protection with
• 05:00 - 05:30 children and families and the focus of the presentation is for me to introduce you to some findings about facebook use that resulted from a two-year esrc funded research project that basically looked at well what enables effective relationship based practice uh in child protection with in social work but what i want to do as part of the presentation is look at broader human behaviors what makes us do the things that we do sometimes we
• 05:30 - 06:00 think about these things sometimes they just happen automatically and it's about that element of reflection you know we always talk about reflection at university and in practice but we do have to look at those elements of reflection that makes us think about well why did i do that why did i think that so to explore that and to set the context what i want to do first is i want to illustrate how digital connectivity is basically becoming part and part part and parcel of the fabric of our everyday
• 06:00 - 06:30 lives then what i want to do is i want to explore what our research found about facebook use in social work with children and families then we'll go on to the case studies that i talked about to consider some of the ethical dilemmas posed in using facebook in social work i mean i focus on facebook but obviously when i use the term facebook i am talking about broader social media as well when we end the presentation or indeed as we're going along in the presentation
• 06:30 - 07:00 i want you to consider can you have a simple response to a question of looking or not looking at facebook posts or actually is the question much more complex than that is the answer and the response much more complex than that there are some considerations that i want you to take into account the presentation is focused on social work but the principles discussed actually apply to all professions so if there are members of the audience from teaching from health for any other discipline basically the
• 07:00 - 07:30 principles will apply in the same manner i use the term service user to basically um represent somebody who uses the social work services now if for example your service recipient is a student patient client or some other term definitely do use that uh term interchange service user for that term and in presenting the research and i think that this is a very very important point our aim is not to criticize
• 07:30 - 08:00 social workers social media behaviors but to try to understand them and this is the purpose of sharing research it's about learning from each other and to develop practice that is better as time goes on and social media use in social work is actually an emerging field something that we need to stop think and debate about and this is a complex area and i make no bones about this that you may leave with more questions than answers
• 08:00 - 08:30 i don't apologize about that i hope it really stimulates thought and discussion that leaves you going out looking for more answers and so the aim is to encourage you to leave asking questions and to to enable you to find specific context within which you can answer those questions so the session structure is is that i'm going to do a presentation and then i'm going to introduce you to the case studies and the aim of the case study is to encourage you to start thinking also for us to have a bit of a debate i
• 08:30 - 09:00 put the little graphic of that individual there because basically with the pandemic i couldn't go out and record case studies so i've used a bit of software and an animation so when you see this person talking to you please don't be surprised okay i've tried to do the best that i can so what we're going to do is we're going to look at facebook lessons from research and the presentation is is basically based on our paper and this paper is freely available via
• 09:00 - 09:30 the journal of technology and human services and i'll leave the link with siobhan's team so that people can get direct access to the paper and the paper's title is the use of facebook in social work practice for children and families exploring complexity in an emerging practice and the authors are myself liz bedo professor harry ferguson and eileen joy and so what i'm going to do is at the second stage i'm going to introduce
• 09:30 - 10:00 you to the research to show you how our research was conducted and then i'm going to lead you on to a discussion based around some case studies to actually demonstrate some of the things that came out in our research in practice but before we do that i do think it's important for us to consider well why are we talking about social media and what is it about social media that we need to understand in relation to setting the context
• 10:00 - 10:30 for the reason why we conducted our research in the first place and this is important because we've got to look at some of the reasons why people actually put material online if people didn't put material online then basically as social workers i don't think that this would be an issue that we would need to discuss and so i want to provide a little bit of context so let's have a look at this a new norm about eight years ago ten to eight years ago social media use
• 10:30 - 11:00 really rocketed and the bbc for example talked about how we're living a facebook live we're using apps like facebook whatsapp twitter youtube to basically broadcast informations about information about our lives and if we look at the office for national statistics based on data around the great britain for households and individuals looking at 2020 here are some of the main points in
• 11:00 - 11:30 january to february 2020 96 percent of households in great britain had internet access and that's up from 93 in 2019 and in 2006 when uh the ons first started keeping these figures internet access was at 57 and so that has grown at a massive rate and when you think that it's 96 now that's easily going to move up into the 99 area within a few years and i'll come back to why that's
• 11:30 - 12:00 important shortly internet connections in households with one adult aged 65 or over have increased by seven percentage points since 2019 but these households still had the lowest proportion of internet connections so how old you are has some bearing on the internet connectivity that you have and in january to february 2020 76 of adults in great britain used internet banking increasing from 30 in 2007 so more of the stuff we're doing
• 12:00 - 12:30 is online and this one i found really fascinating of those adults who have a smartphone for private use 17 did not have security on their smartphone and a 30 and a further 32 percent didn't know whether they had security and if you think of all the private data that we hold on our phones i found that actually quite astonishing and the final one basically talks about how the internet is starting to
• 12:30 - 13:00 integrate into other aspects of our lives as well and so the point of showing you this is that internet access has increased the age range that you base uh in terms of access also has a factor to players as well and that the internet based activities that we engage in have grown and grown and grown and they will continue to grow you know we do things now without actually stopping to think about it
• 13:00 - 13:30 post up a video post up a photo check out bank uh statements and so on and all of this actually has a profound impact upon our behaviors and if we look specifically at facebook use and this is looking at data from 2018 to 2020 and i've drawn this from data that was published on the 5th of january 2021 so so this is relatively up-to-date data as of december 2020 there were 51 million facebook users in the united kingdom
• 13:30 - 14:00 that's over 6 million more than the number of facebook users a year prior in december 2019. so we've got easy access to the internet more of us having access to the internet than not and a lot of us are actually using social media like facebook so it is a new norm in fact it's unusual if you're not using these facilities so why is this important it's about the changing nature of communication
• 14:00 - 14:30 now it might surprise you to know that i actually remember what life was like before the internet and social media i know i know i probably don't look that old but i am yeah and so in the pre-social media era staying in touch basically involved we used to have these things called telephones that were tethered by a wire to your house so if somebody was going to phone you you'd have to make a time to be at home to pick the phone up surprising isn't it yeah because you couldn't take your phone with you so time played a factor distance played
• 14:30 - 15:00 a factor when members of my family moved abroad it was very rare that i'd be able to catch up with them because phone calls were expensive and it would be months on end before we found out about what was going on with them they may post some photos to us in an envelope and so distance mattered as well and also there was privacy if i wrote a letter and i sent that letter put some pictures in it only went to the recipient unless they decided to photocopy it and stick
• 15:00 - 15:30 it on their neighborhood but even then only a few people would have access to that information and confidentiality anything that went on within the home generally stayed in the home so even if you were undertaking social work visits unless you stood out the window and looked through the window whatever went on in the home was only what um the people in the home wanted to tell you so time distance privacy and confidentiality all had an impact
• 15:30 - 16:00 all of that has changed because with social media the major impact the primary focus of social media is to create networks that enable you to share information and that has an impact that has a profound impact and so now in the way that i described before time and distance don't matter if you post something up now instantly within your network it is available straight away whether you're in new zealand whether you're in australia whether you're in
• 16:00 - 16:30 birmingham whether you're in wolverhampton whether you're in canada wherever time and distance are now no longer a factor and what i what i always find fascinating is that mobile phones and smartphones are by far the most popular devices to go uh to access the internet and when you look at these graphics you see that the the younger age group are actually represented in the higher categories in terms of um mobile phone use so if you want to at
• 16:30 - 17:00 any time you can whip out your phone take a picture create a video and post it online and immediately it's shared and how many times do you actually stop and think should i share that should that be shared or shouldn't it and so all of those factors play a part once you post onto facebook for example people have access to that information the information is shareable there's not really much confidentiality because anybody can screenshot something and send it to somebody else
• 17:00 - 17:30 and there's also a digital record as well so even if you try to delete things there are caches and so on and people can still access that information so now from a situation in which you had a degree of privacy the moment you start accessing the easily available internet and the free social media tools that you have at your disposal all of your information is out there that level of privacy just disappears and that has an impact and the impact is
• 17:30 - 18:00 is that the capacity to broadcast details of your family and children's lives has never been greater it's simple you can just do it and there are um there are there is information that has been shared for example um debbie grieves for example has um produced helped produce the respectful sharing document debbie was on here not too long ago a few weeks ago and she's
• 18:00 - 18:30 produced a booklet based on her work around what are the rights and implications of sharing for children and parents and this is a systematic review where she demonstrates some really good do's and don'ts and the thing that really struck me was that what was this statement the average parent posts over 200 photos of their children every year but the majority don't check privacy settings regularly
• 18:30 - 19:00 i mean that's fascinating i mean i i do really find that fascinating so i go back to my question the capacity to broadcast details of your family and children's lives has never been greater but should you as a professional look as a social worker for example if you know the information is out there should you look well what we've got to do is we've got to look at personal and professional boundaries and when you're a social worker as a
• 19:00 - 19:30 professional i'm going to teach you a new word now okay write this one down you've got to be a phenomenalist okay i thought if nothing else you learn a new word today so what's a phenomenalist a phenomenalist is a tightrope walker it's good isn't it yeah it's a tyrovulka and when you're a professional when you're looking at personal and professional boundaries you are walking a very tight rope type situation where where's where is
• 19:30 - 20:00 the the blurring of the lines where are the clear lines between what should be personal and what should be professional and if in england if we look at the professional standards one of the clear professional standards well all of them are clear but i've pulled out three that i think are relevant to the presentation today one of the things that social work england asks us to do is to establish and maintain the trust and confidence of people as social workers and another one is that as social
• 20:00 - 20:30 workers we will maintain professional relationships with people and ensure that they understand the role of a social worker in their lives so this helps to kind of create those um boundaries within which we must act and when he talks about technology it says that we will not use technology social media or other forms of electronic communication unlawfully and ethically or in a way that brings the profession into disrepute but what does unlawfully unethically
• 20:30 - 21:00 and disrepute actually mean in the context of social media because these things need to be explored and they're not as simple as they first see the british association of social workers social media policy actually encourages social workers and social work students to use social media but to do so responsibilities to do so responsibly because we can't shut ourselves off this is as i've shown to you before the internet is there social media is there and the ability to share is that we've got to be part and parcel of that
• 21:00 - 21:30 environment but we've got to do that in a way that's ethical and in a way that's responsible now over the last few years there has been a discussion about what are the knowledge and skills and behaviors and boundaries that social workers need to learn about and writers such as amanda taylor who's actually a good friend of mine actually talk about bridging the knowledge gap between social work and what she refers to as digitalization
• 21:30 - 22:00 and when you go back to say for example 2012 there was already discussion about digital communications and how they're beginning to plan and keep increasing role in the lives of social workers but there was already an awareness that along with the opportunities to share best practice and reach service users professionals need to be aware of the pitfalls and those pitfalls have actually increased because if we go back to 2012 the use of the internet and social media
• 22:00 - 22:30 was nowhere near as high as as it is now and even back in 2013 questions were being asked can social workers tell if a child is actually at risk online and what are the skills that they need to do to develop uh caring in that in that situation but there are pluses as well community care online twitter indeed you know the social work um connect team here we're all using
• 22:30 - 23:00 different facilities to to connect with each other to develop practice so there are pluses as well and for example we've used facebook at the university of birmingham to connect canadian students australian students and our students to talk about developing professional networks for social workers internationally and also the use of twitter has been very powerful as well when there was a documentary about baby peter connolly academics such as harry ferguson and
• 23:00 - 23:30 other uh practitioners were actually able to engage with journalists such as alison pearson and so on to try to put across the perspective from social workers so this there's a powerful voice that can come out for the profession when we work together but there are also issues there are pitfalls for example with behaviors and boundaries social workers have been struck off as in this example where a child care worker was deregistered because they befriended a
• 23:30 - 24:00 mother of a service user on facebook and so it's about having clarity what are the things that you should do and you shouldn't do here a social worker in essex actually posted on her facebook page that having three children removed from their homes was a career high for her and when it came to the disciplinary panel she said oh i didn't realize that my settings were public but it wasn't the fact that they were public it's whether she should have put this
• 24:00 - 24:30 post up at all and it's these elements that actually need to be explored in much more detail so to summarize so far just to set the context basically a major lesson to takeaways is that there is a huge blurring of lines between what is private and public life the capacity to broadcast what goes on in our households has never been greater trottier for example actually starts to
• 24:30 - 25:00 raise concerns about this and says social media make large sections of social life visible and investigative agencies are taking advantage of that visibility surveillance studies need to focus on how this visibility is being used by these agencies because we've got to think well when is it right and when is it wrong to actually do this and this is why we pose the question but should we look should we look
• 25:00 - 25:30 is it morally and ethically right to ignore possible sources of facebook data that could help you protect children from home should we look so let's have a look let's explore that in a little bit more detail i hope that set the context because we need to understand the environment in which we work so that we know why these questions are important and what i want to do is i want to go into a little bit of depth about some of the messages from our research
• 25:30 - 26:00 and to do that i want to give you a little bit of background data to to the research that we conducted because you need to know where the information came from and whether you should actually trust it and then you know to do that you need to understand what we did and why we did it and how we did it so the research background was that basically our title was organization staff support and the dynamics and quality of social work practice the qualitative longitudinal study of child protection
• 26:00 - 26:30 work and we were funded by the esrc between 2016 to 2018 and the methodology that we used was based around the following research questions our question one of our research questions was how do social workers begin develop and sustain relationships with children and families over time or not so how how does this work or how doesn't it the second question was what is the influence of organizational
• 26:30 - 27:00 cultures office designs and forms of staff support and supervision on social workers and their relationships with service users so we looked at not only what social workers do face to face with each other but also what goes on around them in terms of their organization and their culture that either aids or hinders their ability to develop sustaining relationships with children and families and we used an ethnographic research approach and so what we did was we had teams at two
• 27:00 - 27:30 social work offices that were 200 miles apart in england and as i've mentioned it's 15 months of field work that under that we undertook and what we did was we followed social workers around we followed them in their offices in supervision we followed them in their cars we followed them into service users homes with appropriate permissions we observed what was going on we followed them into hospitals into courtrooms and so literally we were the shadow of the social worker and what we were doing was we were
• 27:30 - 28:00 observing and analyzing a range of intimate behaviors what was the atmosphere like what was the eye contact like was there space to sit in the house were we welcomed in what did we do what did the social worker do from the car to the front door from the front door to the living room what was the emotional elements that were going on what was the impact and how did that have an effect on their relationships with the service users and the children and it's the first study ever of long-term social work practice based on
• 28:00 - 28:30 observations of practice and organizational work and culture so it was really in depth and long term and in terms of the research design just very quickly there was 15 months of field work at two sites and we looked at different office designs one was a big open plan uh hot desking office with about 60 staff and another was a small office um was an office that had small teams um of about five to twelve staff and they had their own desks and so can you see the difference in the organizational culture
• 28:30 - 29:00 open plan and small and then the observations in the offices included supervision as well and we also interviewed social workers with their managers as well and we observed practice with service users and service user interviews were taken at three points in the year with appropriate permissions and what we did was we aimed to study 12 months of practice in about 15 cases at each site so you can imagine there was a huge amount of data generated we spent 402 days in the field conducted
• 29:00 - 29:30 146 home visits and 271 practice encounters and if you want to have access to our research articles they are available free of charge at this website it's https colon slash swcpp.weebly.com okay i'll just leave that there for a couple of seconds so that you got access to that and all
• 29:30 - 30:00 the articles that we've published so far are freely available for you to look at okay serendipity a happy chance basically the use of social media was not an intended focus of our study but what happened was as we were observing social workers it started to emerge during the field work we started to to see it happening and so while there's been existing research that's used surveys interviews and focus groups with
• 30:00 - 30:30 social workers to kind of demonstrate that social media platforms are being used as part of child protection work the fact that we conducted a long-term ethnographic approach meant that we were able to actually see and witness what was going on and we were able to record what was going on and then actually talk to social workers afterwards and their managers and just simply observe over a long period the different elements that were influencing the use of things such as facebook and so
• 30:30 - 31:00 that's the background to the research and at this stage i have to be honest i've kind of gone through that a little faster than i thought i would have done and so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to bring you to the research itself and the three elements that really jumped out from our research when we conducted the analysis of of the data that we gathered what we found was that facebook use took multiple multiple
• 31:00 - 31:30 forms some social workers actively searched for uh service users facebook pages they actually actively went there and looked for them some others opposed any such uses and and felt that it wasn't appropriate but then what we found and something that was wasn't in the research that we explored prior to this was that there was a third group that were unwillingly drawn into acting on facebook information so they had no choice
• 31:30 - 32:00 because they were given the facebook information by other members of the families they were working with or indeed their managers and in that situation can you see how whether to look or not look suddenly becomes a little bit more complex let's explore that a little bit more and these are some discussion case studies what i want to do is i want us to have an exploration of this and i want to set the context is it
• 32:00 - 32:30 morally and ethically right to ignore possible sources of facebook data that could help you protect children from risk of harm and what i want to do is i want to explore the influence of behavior by the lens of three different approaches there's monitoring surveillance and being drawn in and i want you to make a note of these three different lens monitoring surveillance and being drawn in now
• 32:30 - 33:00 i want to try something and i hope you do this with us i don't know uh how it's going to work because i've never done it on this platform before but let's give it a go and see what happens what i want you to do i'm going to introduce three case studies to you and what i want you to do is i want you to take notes whilst listening to what's actually being said to you and what we'll do is we'll try to do a little bit of a discussion as we go along and as a team we did try to figure out uh how we were going
• 33:00 - 33:30 to work this out so then what i'll do is um after we get feedback i'll actually go into looking at the points you should have considered when you responded and those are based on our research so let's try this one out first we're going to look at monitoring and i'm going to set the context for you so i want you to imagine that you've had a new colleague start with you and they come to you and they ask you
• 33:30 - 34:00 from it for some advice and what i'm going to do is i'm going to play this video twice they're not very long they're less than a minute and a half long so get something to write down your thoughts with and i'll introduce the video to you so i want you to imagine you've a new colleague start with you and they come to you and they ask for some advice how would you advise them okay are you ready
• 34:00 - 34:30 hi i wonder if i can have some advice in my old workplace we used to use facebook to monitor the families that we worked with you know to see what the parents were up to and to make sure that the children were safe my old manager always used to insist we should use all the information available to us from any source that's going to make sure we can carry out comprehensive assessments of families and said that when we go out on our initial visits we
• 34:30 - 35:00 should always let the families know that we may monitor their online profiles because i'm new here can you tell me should i continue with this practice or stop it and what arguments could i use to justify the approach that i take so what you're asked what you're being asked to do is this is a colleague so they say to you because i'm new here can you tell me should i continue with this practice or
• 35:00 - 35:30 stop it and what argue what arguments could you use to justify the approach that they take how would you advise him and i want you to monitor something right now what's your gut reaction yes he should or no he shouldn't make a note of your gut reaction what's what's the thing that's come straight out yes or no and what are the reasons for that and what we're going to do is i'm going to play it again then after the second time i played take a couple of minutes to gather your
• 35:30 - 36:00 thoughts and record your thoughts and then i'm going to take it back to the team and before we move on to the next case study we're going to have a bit of a discussion about what people have said and what they thought okay so let's run this again monitoring imagine you had a new colleague start with you and they come to you to ask for some advice how would you advise them hi i wonder if i can have some advice in my old workplace we used to use
• 36:00 - 36:30 facebook to monitor the families that we worked with you know to see what the parents were up to and to make sure that the children were safe my old manager always used to insist we should use all the information available to us from any source that's going to make sure we can carry out comprehensive assessments of families and said that when we go out on our initial visits we should always let the families know that we may monitor their online profiles
• 36:30 - 37:00 because i'm new here can you tell me should i continue with this practice or stop it and what arguments could i use to justify the approach that i take and so again because i'm new here can you tell me should i continue with this practice or stop it what arguments could i use to justify the approach i take how would you advise them so it's nine it's 7 40 now if i say about a minute
• 37:00 - 37:30 a minute and a bit just to record your thoughts she want can i pass over to you and then we can move on to the next one absolutely i think cool tumor was um okay to tell us her thoughts on this one but actually i can't see your camera uncle tumor do you want to just pop your camera on and tell us thank you tell us what your thoughts were just listening and we've only just listened to this at the same time as everybody else haven't we so but what what are your thoughts now having listened to that having listened to that i agree with
• 37:30 - 38:00 some of the comments that have been mentioned in the chat and i do agree that everybody's got a lot a right to a private and family life um so i would probably advise to not go snooping on purpose however if somebody's brought um evidence to your attention and they can provide you just that bit of evidence then that is something that you could consider sorry culture i'm going to stop you there because you're kind of moving into the other ones let's just stick with what's being
• 38:00 - 38:30 asked here let's let's not kind of move into the other area let's stick with what we're being asked here so should he continue with this practice or should he stop it um i think it needs to stop because he is violent they would be violating their rights to a family and private life um but what about what about the safety of the child you would take all of that into consideration um and there's only but then what's your answer i'd still
• 38:30 - 39:00 be my gut says no um because you would have to go i know you've got to consider all the information available to you but that is i don't know i think that for me that's taking looking too far into everything um if there's significant harm there should be enough evidence without having to go onto social media okay so does does anybody in the chat
• 39:00 - 39:30 disagree um i think kelly can tell us about i think we were going to go to kelly to see summarize a little bit of the chat perhaps but i was thinking i don't know if i'm allowed to comment at all but i don't know my thoughts were slightly different i think i'm very conflicted i'm thinking um you know when kulchuma was saying there no i think it should stop i was kind of like oh i don't know if that's a bit too clear caught
• 39:30 - 40:00 i don't know as i wonder whether because i've been a social worker for so long i'm i'm much less clear caught about lots of things so i don't know as i've actually got an answer because on the one hand i think this is violating somebody's right to privacy on the other hand i think but they've put that out there into social media and i think what's maybe at the back of my mind is but what if something happened to a child
• 40:00 - 40:30 and then what if it was in the newspapers that it's all over facebook and the social worker never looked that would be a concern to me so i'm just not really sure i think i feel more conflicted with it i think than than culture but what i'm interested in is that neither of you have actually mentioned the fact that what he says is is that when i go out on my first visit that i'll actually tell the family that we may look at their social media profiles
• 40:30 - 41:00 um that's a real yeah absolutely maybe what we're doing is trying to jump straight in before we're really listening to what he's asking us you know maybe it's sort of it's such a big we're just thinking no no or yes yes or we're jumping in too quickly perhaps and this is what i mean about emotions yeah it's interesting that bang somebody you know you come up with a decision but actually if you listen carefully to what he says is that in my previous job i did you know we did
• 41:00 - 41:30 tell service users that one of the sources of information we may use are their social media sites and yet you know it's like as if that bit was completely missed out altogether and and this is what i mean about gut reactions and behaviors is is that this is quite a um it's a powerful subject it causes people to have strong views and when you have strong views you're more likely to jump to a position without actually
• 41:30 - 42:00 stepping back a little bit and thinking hold on have i heard everything but does that make a difference does it make a difference if somebody tells somebody that they you know if a social worker tells a family that they're going to be viewing their um social media pages let's let's move on to the next one that was fascinating thank you i think yeah and we've got different members of the team wanting to jump in on different ones and i think also as well just what's going on in the chat is really interesting there's so many different
• 42:00 - 42:30 things happening in the chat and it may be that people say oh actually you know can we have the chat sent out to us as a resource afterwards because there are so many perspectives in the chat i think you're really prompting people to think you know so that's so yes let's it's exciting to hear the next one now let's move on to the next one so this one was monitoring okay so make a note monitoring so this one is surveillance so i want you to imagine
• 42:30 - 43:00 that you are a new manager and one of your social workers tells you the following in supervision how would you respond and again i'll do it twice because i think sometimes the words need to be heard a couple of times okay so imagine you're a new manager and one of your social workers tells you the following is supervision how would you respond i found facebook really helpful in my work i mean it's really useful to see if members of families i'm
• 43:00 - 43:30 working with are still in contact with each other when they aren't supposed to be as of all i don't tell them that i look at their facebook posts for example there was a mother that i worked with where she told me she'd broken up with the dad of their little girl so he's supposed to be her ex-partner now and wasn't supposed to have any contact with their little girl at all but i checked facebook and saw a recent picture of him at the mom's house he was sat with a joint in his hand and the girl on his knee when i asked mum about this
• 43:30 - 44:00 incident i didn't tell her i'd seen the picture on facebook some of the team thought that it was a bit intrusive that i'd used facebook but i think it's okay to get this information i mean the mom has no privacy settings and her pages are on public display so anyone can see what's happening you see i've got a massive caseload and it's really an easy way of keeping an eye on families i know some team members have concerns i
• 44:00 - 44:30 want your permission to carry on with this way of working because don't you think it's morally and ethically right to use whatever sources we have to see if children are at risk so that we can intervene to keep them safe so i know some team members have concerns i want your permission to carry on with this way of working because don't you think it's morally an ethically right to use whatever sources
• 44:30 - 45:00 we have to see if children are at risk so that we can intervene to keep them safe well how would you respond to this question and again monitor your gut reaction what's your gut reaction right now yes you should carry on or no you shouldn't and make a note of that but then take a step back and think well okay that's my gut reaction but if i think about it a little bit more would i change my opinion would i change my response and it's okay if you don't
• 45:00 - 45:30 but the fact that you've taken a moment just to stop and think about it it's sometimes all you need to do so again i'm going to play it again for you imagine you're a new social you're a new manager sorry and one of your social workers tells you the following in supervision how would you respond i found facebook really helpful in my work i mean it's really useful to see if members of families i'm working with are still in contact with each other
• 45:30 - 46:00 when they aren't supposed to be as of all i don't tell them that i look at their facebook posts for example there was a mother that i worked with where she told me she'd broken up with the dad of their little girl so he's supposed to be her ex-partner now and wasn't supposed to have any contact with their little girl at all but i checked facebook and saw a recent picture of him at the mom's house he was sat with a joint in his hand and the girl on his knee when i asked mom about this incident i didn't tell her i'd seen the
• 46:00 - 46:30 picture on facebook some of the team thought that it was a bit intrusive that i'd used facebook but i think it's okay to get this information i mean the mom has no privacy settings and her pages are on public display so anyone can see what's happening you see i've got a massive caseload and it's really an easy way of keeping an eye on families i know some team members have concerns i want your permission
• 46:30 - 47:00 to carry on with this way of working because don't you think it's morally and ethically right to use whatever sources we have to see if children are at risk so that we can intervene to keep them safe okay guys so how would you respond to that so i think david was going to take this one i think um what what were your thoughts david you've been promoted to team manager i've saw people saying in the chat
• 47:00 - 47:30 that's important all right second year straight to team manager um i think there's a there's a few things to consider here like obviously we don't have any clear cut answers and taking a step back like you say sorry to interrupt i i am sorry to interrupt but what was your gut reaction would you allow them to carry on or not and then then then please explain as it's hard because i've been reading the chat too but my gut reaction is no i wouldn't i love them i think for first first reason as social
• 47:30 - 48:00 workers we're supposed to try and maintain connections and physically see um services as we can when as and when we can and make sure they're physically okay just because you see a picture of them on social media doesn't mean they're actually safe um and if you start to think along the lines of oh i've checked on them on social media i've seen they're alive they must be okay that kind of thing um so that that aside the other reason i would say no is the whole argument that's going on in the chat is
• 48:00 - 48:30 a massive invasion of privacy so even if you've not got privacy settings on as a parent do you have the education to know what privacy settings are do you have the education to know what can be done if a social worker looks into your life do you have the education to know that a social worker can see your life um and like as far as your as far as you're aware if you don't have the education that social worker only knows what's happening when you tell them what's happening so in a way this is a bit of a bold statement but it could be a form of entrapment
• 48:30 - 49:00 um so that's my gut reaction on it i wouldn't allow it i would tell them gently that they need to keep an eye on their caseload because obviously like i've not in practice but i know we're all over loaded um but they need to work better to make sure that happens um so what about what about the fact that they've seen some somebody in the home who's not meant to be there and then also then do you reveal
• 49:00 - 49:30 your source of information if it's actually a source of information that protects the child i'm playing devil's advocate by the way as you can probably no this is a good thing to consider like when as soon as the video said about the man with the daughter the kid on the knee and stuff i was like if they shouldn't be there they shouldn't be there if that's like a legal agreement then you need to see i think you need to seek guidance further up even higher up maybe or you as the manager need to go higher up again
• 49:30 - 50:00 and try and figure out where that goes because there's the moral obligation to keep that child safe and if there's a legal agreement to keep that other person away from the child in order to keep the child safe then you need to find a way to act on it but with regards to revealing how you've been surveilling how you've been playing big brother that could really fall back on the entire um social work world really um and it could cause risk to the child inadvertently so okay sorry that's not a clear answer
• 50:00 - 50:30 but it's interesting because you've justified one your kind of moral perspective and then what you've tried to do is you've tried to balance your moral moral perspective with a practical kind of understanding of the situation and but then when you throw in the fact that actually this act even though morally you might not agree with it results in the well-being the potential well-being of a child yeah and safeguarding from harm then
• 50:30 - 51:00 that kind of plays into that argument as well by the way i am not advocating one position or the other i'm just playing devil's advocate because my job is to generate thinking so please don't anybody think that i'm telling you to do one thing or the other we'll explore some of this in a little bit more detail when i move towards the conclusion stage okay okay fascinating thank you for that david i'm going to move this on to the next one sorry shawn did you want to say something i wanted to say one thing that i thought was really fascinating because i was trying to listen more to the wording this time because you picked me
• 51:00 - 51:30 up i had not got the word in right last time but i was looking listening and he said i want your permission to carry on with this so he was almost coming to the manager asking the manager's permission to do something so why would you ask for that permission and or it almost feels like he felt it was wrong what he just wants someone else to say yes you carry on so and that that was just something that i noticed i don't know that wording of give me your permission to do this
• 51:30 - 52:00 felt a bit uncomfortable and so can you see the complexity emerging yeah and and this is through using narrative you know things that people can potentially ask you and this is what i think brings the research to life and so the last one i'm going to go to is the drawn in one and so again imagine you're a manager and one of your social workers comes to tell you the following how would you advise him to proceed okay so you're the manager
• 52:00 - 52:30 how would you advise him to proceed you know that i'm not on facebook and i don't know how to use it even if i could i wouldn't go looking for online information about the families i'm working with because i think it's an invasion of their privacy you know that i've always thought that it's important to develop good working relationships with families to encourage positive changes and that to do that we have to be open honest and have respect for their privacy
• 52:30 - 53:00 but recently you know the new case that i've taken on well i've had different family members sending me screenshots from facebook showing me things like adults who aren't supposed to have contact with the children being in their house i am concerned about what i've been sent but i'm cautious because i don't think you can always guarantee that anything that's put on facebook is factual i need some advice can you tell me should i act on the information i've
• 53:00 - 53:30 been sent or ignore it should i ask somebody from the team to look to see if the facebook posts are real and if i have to act on this information i want to tell the family that the information has come from their facebook posts what do you think would be the pros and cons of me doing this so here i need some advice should i act on the information i've been sent or ignore it ask someone from the team to
• 53:30 - 54:00 look if the facebook posts are real and if i have to act on this information i want to tell the family that the information has come from their facebook posts what do you think will be the pros and cons of me doing this how would you advise him to respond so again i hope it's helpful to do this twice because i think sometimes you miss it the first time so imagine you're a manager and this is the last one by the way and one of your social workers comes to you and tells you the following how
• 54:00 - 54:30 would you advise him to proceed you know that i'm not on facebook and i don't know how to use it even if i could i wouldn't go looking for online information about the families i'm working with because i think it's an invasion of their privacy you know that i've always thought that it's important to develop good working relationships with families to encourage positive changes and that to do that we have to be open honest and have respect for their privacy
• 54:30 - 55:00 but recently you know the new case that i've taken on well i've had different family members sending me screenshots from facebook showing me things like adults who aren't supposed to have contact with the children being in their house i am concerned about what i've been said but i'm cautious because i don't think you can always guarantee that anything that's put on facebook is factual i need some advice can you tell me
• 55:00 - 55:30 should i act on the information i've been sent or ignoring should i ask somebody from the team to look to see if the facebook posts are real and if i have to act on this information i want to tell the family that the information has come from their facebook posts what do you think will be the pros and cons of me doing this so again if i pass it over shawn yeah absolutely thank you i think kelly's gonna go with this one
• 55:30 - 56:00 yep um i think my my gut reaction is that i would discuss it with the family before i decided to do anything i would um if if they'd been emailed or printed off or whatever i would do my best to remove all identified information of who sent it and i would discuss it with the family and say this is what
• 56:00 - 56:30 i've been given what's happening and give them a chance to to kind of tell me oh it's not real or oh well it was just the one saw oh well i didn't know you'd be looking and give them the chance to explain to me what the pictures are showing because i think there's there might be something deeper going on um i think it says a lot maybe about the family dynamics about why why are people giving you this what what's their agenda and are you gonna jump straight on what they think is happening or are you
• 56:30 - 57:00 the social worker and are you going to weigh the evidence up if it is evidence so i think i would discuss it with the family because it's about trust so you would act on the information yeah and then would you ask anybody in the team to check to see if their facebook posts are real or not no no no i don't think that's my place i think i would act on it but my way of acting on it would be to
• 57:00 - 57:30 show the family and say can you tell me about this and you know without saying i think it's real it's not or i'm gonna do this because you've done that i think that would be my way of acting on it but then and again i'm playing devil's advocate here would there potentially be a con sight to that in that a source of information suddenly disappears because the family are aware that you know their life can be looked at via facebook um
• 57:30 - 58:00 yeah i think i think that would that would be a con um and that person has every right to alter their privacy settings or not to post it and but you have still got what you've you've still got what somebody's shown you are you've still got a printout of what they've given you so you've only got what you've got but it's like saying i've looked through somebody's windows and if they shut the curtains i'll ask them to open them again i can't really that's a good analogy okay guys i'm going to move this on because
• 58:00 - 58:30 i've got about another five minutes uh before we we finish and i think it's important that everybody's here stays for the next bit because it's critically important that you get the feedback in the next bit can i just say thank you to everybody for taking part in the discussion and trust me we can go on for hours about each one of these and but obviously we haven't got ours but i do if you're tempted to leave please don't leave for at least the next five or six minutes until i go through the points
• 58:30 - 59:00 that you need to consider when responding and so the first thing i asked you was about do you remember we talked about behaviors about what encourages behaviors and one of the things that encourages our behaviors is our ethical standpoint and so what our research demonstrated that it's not as easy to answer this question is look or don't look it's actually very complex and it's influenced by many many factors and so if a situation like this arises
• 59:00 - 59:30 here are some of the areas that our research demonstrated that you should discuss in any of these type of situations the first is your understanding of what your ethical standpoint is now if you take a primarily county and ethical standpoint you will say don't look culture this is you probably is is that actions should carry the principle of respect for persons therefore any action that results in a social
• 59:30 - 60:00 worker deceiving or acting covertly to access a family's social media information to undertake child protection work is just considered morally wrong and it's important to know that that's your ethical standpoint because unless you have the permission of the family in terms of monitoring you would say no to that situation but be aware that you still need to to roll back a little bit and think about well is this the right one here and seven if you don't mind me saying i
• 60:00 - 60:30 think that yours might be utilitarian in this situation um just in this situation and again it's just being aware of of your automatic ethical response and that the moral worth of the rightness or wrongness of an action lies in its consequences the right action is that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people if a good consequence is produced such as protecting a child from harm then the principle of justice is
• 60:30 - 61:00 achieved and so if you're taking an uh utilitarian stance then you don't i'm not saying usual by the way but you know just ethically people may say well actually if the ends justify the means if we end up protecting a child then it's okay to look and so can you see the two different stances and it was interesting because each one of you when we played the the case studies to you the video case studies everybody in the audience would
• 61:00 - 61:30 have had an immediate reaction and those who were more kantian would probably say no those who are more utilitarian would probably say yes but it's important to know that that's your initial gut reaction in terms of accessibility we've seen that basically social media does make large sections of our social life visible and as investigative agencies we can potentially take advantage of that visibility but then boyd also argues that there's a performative
• 61:30 - 62:00 aspect to posts as well that kind of tend to exaggerate or misrepresent the truth and so you have to question the reliability of online findings as well and columns and torrible i mean kelly talked about looking through somebody's window i mean they argue well what's the difference between a practitioner sitting outside somebody's house and following them around physically compared to following them online you know ethically and legally and morally is that right the difference between following
• 62:00 - 62:30 somebody around physically compared to online is that the internet gives you the ease convenience in is invisibility and in and inexpensive nature of the activity it's just much easier to do it's much easier to look at people's past posts and to quickly check up on what somebody's doing and so accessibility plays a part as well and one thing that we found was about being drawn in if you took a strong county and ethical position and you wanted to respect the service users
• 62:30 - 63:00 rights to privacy and you wanted to develop good relations to do this to do this you want to be open and honest in your interactions even when working under difficult circumstances and what happened was that with the people who were drawn in the social workers who were drawn in they tended not to use social media so they weren't proficient in its use but even then they were still unwillingly drawn in and what they tended to do was tended to act on the information
• 63:00 - 63:30 because um there's a tendency to be risk averse and siobhan raised the issue earlier on that well what if it's in the newspapers that suddenly you know that this evidence was out there uh online and social workers didn't look and so that is being risk averse and so all of that plays an element into it as well and then there's a lack of clarity around the law because nobody asked is it legal to look you know is it actually legal for us to
• 63:30 - 64:00 look at online posts well under the english under english legislation the regulation of investigatory powers act reaper appears to bar professionals from using social media in an investigatory capacity under this act viewing social networking sites by members of the state such as social workers in an investigatory capacity once is not classed as surveillance and does not require reproauthorization however repeatedly viewing social networking sites of service users
• 64:00 - 64:30 without their consent for example to check on their relationships falls under the definition of surveillance and would appear to require prior consent of the person posting online or reaper authorization and so what are what our research has demonstrated and this is why i was at pains to say during our discussion around the case study that i'm not telling you to do one thing or the other what i am telling you to do is that check with your legal agency sorry check with your agency for legal
• 64:30 - 65:00 advice because this is a contested area because if you read our research paper you'll see that actually even barristers are kind of not clear about what constitutes surveillance and also in any child protection setting check to see if there's a multi-agency joint protocol to make sure that actually you're not putting evidence at risk or the ability to present evidence at court so these are two things i would definitely
• 65:00 - 65:30 recommend you to do when it comes to this is check for legal advice from your agency and also check to see if multi-agency joint protocols exist for looking at any evidence that's presented to you and anxiety is also a major fact influence in looking as well so i mean david mentioned a couple of these things as well not this one but you know it is austerity in the last 10 12 years there's been a lack of investment in social work
• 65:30 - 66:00 and this leads to higher caseloads that lead to higher levels of anxiety and what we found in the research was that some service users did not want social work involvement and were uncooperative and secretive and social workers use of facebook was an attempt to find out more about what was going on in their lives and so this was part of a strategy to cope with anxiety and risk and for workers and organizations to defend themselves against the unbearable feelings of uncertainty about the safety of a child and that the
• 66:00 - 66:30 culture of social work and child protection that produces these anxieties isn't going to change unless the emotional complexity of the work and the risks and dangers it deals with day in and day out is acknowledged and adequate resources and meaningful emotional support and supervision is provided for staff so you know structurally there needs to be a change because anxiety can influence you to behave in particular ways but above anything else i want to point out that when we were undertaking the research we didn't know
• 66:30 - 67:00 about reaper as researchers so we don't know whether some of the social workers actually had permission under the act to view social workers pages and we weren't able to go back to find out because uh we only became aware of reaper after the the research finished that's why i always say that it's incredibly important to check uh the legal standing and so that's the end of the presentation so this presentation was based on uh our
• 67:00 - 67:30 paper it's freely downloadable but what i'd like you to do in terms of next steps i hope you found the presentation helpful i i want you to make a list of the questions that this presentation has raised for you and your agency what are those questions that you've been thinking about as the presentations been going on make a plan with deadlines to have those questions answered because it's critically important and then read our research please and
• 67:30 - 68:00 see if it can help with the above process in terms of addressing those questions and developing a plan and if you want let me know how you get on because i'd be interested to know how if at all this presentation has got you thinking and got you acting on the research findings and so this was to look or not look exploring the ethical challenges of facebook use in child protection with children and families and the areas that we recovered were exploration of human behaviors i attempted to illustrate how digital
• 68:00 - 68:30 connectivity is becoming part and parcel of the fabric of our everyday lives i try to explain to you what our research found about facebook use and social work with children and families we looked at and considered some of the ethical dilemmas posed in using facebook and social work and also we got you to consider well is there a simple response to the question of looking or not looking at facebook posts or is it more complex than that and that's me and so if you do want to get in touch uh my twitter handle is um 65
• 68:30 - 69:00 there's my email address and thank you for taking the time to listen and the upcoming sessions are wednesday the 17th of feb love in social work practice wednesday the 24th february deafblind awareness wednesday the 3rd of march the 3rd shuffler method of communication social work and wednesday the 10th of march celebrating social work and again thank you i appreciate all those people who have taken the time to attend and thank
• 69:00 - 69:30 you siobhan and the team for letting me present as well thank you so much i mean i tell you what i've found fascinating um and i'm sure you'll enjoy reading this later on is when you started off the chat everybody's responses in the chat were yes or no yes or no and now you're getting almost an essay as a response you know you've really made people start to think and to really be able to um i suppose explain their thinking which i think is brilliant you know it's really funny to
• 69:30 - 70:00 watch going from yes or no to these like almost essays that have been coming out so um i know we wanted to um go back i think i just wanted to say to diana and i think diana might have wanted to say something about the chat as well but i wanted to just say to diana to thank you so much for the recommendation for tonight's session uh you told us all it'd be brilliant and it was brilliant so what did you want to share anything diana oh yeah so i just wanted to say that when i first um did this lecture with um
• 70:00 - 70:30 it was absolutely incredible but i think watching it back a second time there were so many things that i learned and i think looking through um the chat box and seeing people's different perspectives and where they were coming from or you know the laws for england are completely different for the laws in scotland and you have people discussing okay wait is this going to be illegal in scotland or ireland and i think it's just interesting and i think another point was how the
• 70:30 - 71:00 interlink between other professions what are other professions doing in terms of social media and how does that impact our profession i think that's interesting people were talking about like mental health services the police health etc i just think it was it was very interesting and yeah people are saying that they're going to do more research i'm going to do more research brilliant let's start with our article because i think that's a good place to
• 71:00 - 71:30 start uh because there's a good number of references in there that you may want to explore further that's great thanks so much and you