A Los Angeles school district has decided to monitor its students' social media activity, focusing on Facebook and Twitter. In response to cyber bullying incidents that resulted in two suicides, the Glendale Unified School District has hired Geo Listening, a firm that keeps track of social media accounts, according to the New York Daily News.

The school district began the program this year, and school officials say the monitoring program has "been working very well," according to the New York Daily News. However, some groups of students and civil rights advocates are at odds with the move, citing it as an unnecessary intrusion on students' privacy.

One student named Young Cho says it's simply not right. Cho told the Los Angeles Times, "We all know social media is not a private place, not really a safe place; it's students' expression of their own thoughts and feelings to their friends. For the school to intrude in that area - I understand they can do it, but I don't think it's right."

However, Glendale officials are determined to implement the program, spending as much as $40,500 for the project. Geo Listening is contracted to track posts created by over 14,000 middle and high school students on Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts with "public" privacy settings.

The Glendale district made the decisive move with the goal of discouraging cyber bullying and other teenage problems, including substance and alcohol abuse. Two deaths resulting from suicide prompted by online bullying pushed officials to move forward with the program.   

The intrusion of Geo Listening appears to be limited, as the company reportedly does not possess a master list of students' names and their accounts, but instead utilizes "deductive reasoning" to connect public accounts to their respective owners, as explained by Geo Listening founder Chris Frydrych to CNN. Accounts that are set to private cannot by accessed by the firm, and only students aged 13 years old and older are being monitored; parental consent is otherwise required. The firm says that it uses particular keywords to track posts on social media sites and turns over the information to school officials, who are then left to decide whether to act on the information given to them, according to New York Daily News.

So far, school officials say no record of disciplinary action against any student has been reported as of this time.