Two Questions (Facebook came into existence my senior year in college so I never had to deal with this stuff for rush):

1. If the active's profile is private, how can anyone know whether or not the active is friends with PNMs? Wouldn't the private feature mean that no one who is not friends with the active would be able to see the active's profile and who her friends are?

2. What kind of information is given to the PNMs so that they know that so-and-so is unfriending them as a requirement for recruitment, not because so-and-so is pissed at them?

If someone's profile is private, you can still see who their friends are. Also if actives' profiles are private, but the PNM ones aren't, you can go by who's friends with the PNMs.

So in order to check on this at a school with 1200-1400 PNMs, is there someone in the Greek Life office who has to check all of those profiles to make sure none of them are friends with members?

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great way to curb the sorority-members-friending-random-PNMs trend, but I just think it would be a ton of work to check up on it to make sure everyone was on the up and up.

Oh it definitely is a huge hassle to do, but if dirty rushing via facebook is a big problem at your school, then this may be the best/only way to curb it.

You can choose to make your friends private too, I believe. It's a question of how tight the person had set the privacy settings.

Generally, I think you should only have the rules that you can actually enforce. If panhellenic facebook rules will only be enforced in cases in which for some reason dirty rushing is suspected, I think they might work. But you can't effectively screen all the greek profiles at most schools frequently enough for them to be preventative.

Similarly if a chapter is having trouble with "bad" stuff on people's profiles, the chapter should maybe vote in fines (or standards rules) for the issues that they are having. So that way, they can address the problems without committing to screening everyone all the time. You become aware of the problem, then you handle it according to your policies.

If you've warned the chapter at large repeatedly, and you still have some people who aren't with the program, I'd set up a projector at chapter and show them what the problem is by pulling up their facebook profiles right there. If they are embarrassed by seeing what they have put on their profiles for all the world to see, they should immediately see what the problem is. If they don't, then you need a clear and uniform policy to address what happens next.

It may be too late for any advice on this topic, but I thought I would shard what we do at my school. I am the media tech chair of my sorority, so this falls under my duties.

Our rules for facebook are as follows, and only pertain to the Offical recruitment period (graduation to the night of the following bid day)

1. No active member can accept and PNMs as friends on facebook
2. And pictures involving parties or alcohol must be removes, although we reccommend all picture be taken down
3. Privatize your account to ensure no inappropriate pictures are seen by PNMs
4. Remove all pictures of recruitment couselors

As the media tech chair, I periodically check peoples facebooks at random to see if they have deleted their picture or what not yet, as does our VP membership. If you dont have someone designated for the job, it may be a good idea to do so. That way you can be certain that everything is ok. I haven't done this, but another idea is to set up a new facebook account, and not accept any of your sisters as your friends, that way you can view facebook as a PNM would view facebook.

So .. if they are really determined to dirty rush, won't they just find some means other than facebook to do it? Thinking.. Yahoo, AOL, MSN all have instant messaging with fairly anonymous screennames. It's pretty tough to figure out who someone is by their Yahoo ID much of the time.