Pro Tip: Learn how to identify some common false positives with confidence

Occasionally, you can come across false positives among flagged alerts. This can occasionally be caused by students researching or writing about violent topics like World War 2, or a variety of other topics. In such cases, you can dismiss the case (See Dismissing cases). If this activity is a document (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides) or a Gmail activity, you can prevent that item from being flagged in the future if it is edited (See Muting Documents).

Here’s some examples of false positive flagged activity:

• A student searching for “how to build a bomb”, but after looking at other activity that took place before and after, we see searches like “how to build a bomb minecraft” and “how to craft tnt minecraft”.

• A student searching for “suicide hotline” but after looking at other activity, the student was actually researching suicide statistics for their Health class.

There are also situations where a student’s language may seem innocuous but in actuality is serious. Students may use phrases such as “kms” or “unalive myself” to mean “kill myself” among other slang terms that change and shift often. If you aren’t sure what a student means, try searching the web for terms they use to make sure you understand why an alert was sent.