Facebook Opens to Home Schoolers
Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 19th, 2008 9:20 AMFacebook opened up their site to everyone back in 2006. For users that were 17 and under, the site required some sort of verification though for security purposes. Unfortunately there was no verification method for home schoolers. A group formed on the site that petitioned Facebook to let in home schoolers. The two groups amounted to less than 8,000 users but it was still sufficient enough to drive change.
According to Christina Holsberry of Facebook, “We’ve been working on ways to solve this—we want minors to use Facebook safely above all. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve recently come up with a way for homeschoolers to join. We’ve created a new verification system—one that doesn’t depend on being in a high school, but still provides the level of security we believe is required. So welcome, everyone, to Facebook.”
Thankfully Facebook is now opened to pretty much anybody. I’m not sure how this will contribute to the overall growth of the site but it’s great to see that Facebook is at least paying attention to all of its users. Perhaps Facebook will serve as a way to connect a group of previously disconnected homeschool students.
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June 19th, 2008 at 11:56 am
What sort of verification were homeschoolers unable to do that they can do now? Homeschoolers - and lots of them - have been on facebook for ages, and have associated themselves with area networks, no network, or sometimes the local high school. My hunch is that this won’t really make a difference - in general, homeschoolers who want to be on here have already joined, and those who aren’t probably have other reasons for not joining.
June 19th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
What sort of verification were homeschoolers unable to do that they can do now? Homeschoolers - and lots of them - have been on facebook for ages, and have associated themselves with area networks, no network, or sometimes the local high school. My hunch is that this won’t really make a difference - in general, homeschoolers who want to be on here have already joined, and those who aren’t probably have other reasons for not joining.
June 20th, 2008 at 9:09 am
@Sunny: Previously, Facebook required anyone under 18 to join and be verified on a high school network. I’ve known several homeschoolers who’ve had to recreate their accounts a few times because Facebook would delete them. For a while the only options were to either lie about your age or try to find a friend at a high school to lie about what school you were at. Some people were able to get in regional networks without being deleted, and more recently Facebook’s seemed less harsh on deactivating people, but it’s been an ongoing issue.
June 20th, 2008 at 10:09 am
@Sunny: Previously, Facebook required anyone under 18 to join and be verified on a high school network. I’ve known several homeschoolers who’ve had to recreate their accounts a few times because Facebook would delete them. For a while the only options were to either lie about your age or try to find a friend at a high school to lie about what school you were at. Some people were able to get in regional networks without being deleted, and more recently Facebook’s seemed less harsh on deactivating people, but it’s been an ongoing issue.