A state Senate committee on Wednesday voted down a bill that would allow employers responsible for the care of minors to require access to their employees' social media accounts.
House Bill 1087, sponsored by Rep. Nate Bell, R-Mena, failed on a roll call vote after voting twice by voice.
Sam Torn, owner of Camp Ozark in Montgomery County, spoke in favor of the bill and said performing social media background checks on potential employees would help catch any red flags other pre-employment checks would not.
The camp hires about 650 college students in the summer, Torn said, and this would allow them to require these young adults to become their friend on Facebook to check for child predator warning signs that the students could exhibit on social media.
"Without the ability to conduct a social media background check, we have no way of recognizing potential harmful behavior such as hate speech, drug abuse and too much and too close contact with minors," Torn said.
To address concerns, the bill has been amended to say "an entity responsible for the care and supervision of minors, including schools, daycares, summer camps, and other similar programs" would be exempt from the current law, which prohibits employers from requiring employees to add them as a contact on any social media site.
The bill also states that this exemption would only apply to adult employees and employers could still not request a username and password or require the employee to change their privacy settings on a social network.
Will Castleberry with Facebook spoke against the bill, saying that the social networking site admires wanting to protect children from predators but that they have concerns about privacy rights being violated.
"We should be able to choose what groups we belong to and speak to and should be able to keep those associations private and not give them up to our employer," Castleberry said.
Maria Spencer with connectsafely.org, a nonprofit organization that educates users of connected technology about safety, privacy and security, echoed Castleberry's concerns.
"We believe that employers already have the right to view [employees'] public posts," Spencer said. "This will result in inappropriate contact between adult employers and young adult employees."
Both Castleberry and Spencer said that social media wouldn't be the best place to find child predator behavior, but Angela Shaw, Camp Ozark Associate Director in charge of child safety, disagreed.
"In this world that we live in today, the thing that keeps me up at night is the fact that people have access to our kids through online predatory behavior," Shaw said. "There are definite red flags that result in grooming children today [by predators] and that's what we've been trained in and that's what we look at."
The House previously passed the legislation 91-1.
See Thursday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full coverage.