| Hi all, it's Sarah Frier. In 2017, a high school cheerleader, frustrated about failing to make her school's varsity team, ranted to her friends with a middle finger and a string of curse words. It was the kind of typical reaction that would go unnoticed in decades past, except this generation lives online. The cheerleader shared a video of the tirade, and one of her 250 Snapchat friends showed the post to school leaders, who suspended her from cheering for a year.
Her family sued, and the case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 Wednesday that the punishment didn't fit the crime. Even on Snapchat, and even with the potential for the post to spread beyond that circle of friends, the student has rights under the Constitution's First Amendment to say things that would be reasonable to express off of school grounds, outside of class time, the court found. It's an important case because courts (and school leaders, and workplaces, and social media companies themselves) are grappling with what it means that so much of our communication is recorded and shareable with wider audiences in an instant. I caught up with our longtime Supreme Court reporter, Greg Stohr, for his insight on the decision. While the court ruled that the school didn't have authority over this particular post, Justice Stephen Breyer said schools may have a special interest in regulating some off-campus speech. What does that mean? Schools will still be able to intervene over things like cheating, as well as bullying, harassment or threats aimed at people in the school community. The court said in 1969 that schools can regulate speech if it is disruptive or invades the rights of others. But the balance is now tipped a bit toward students and free speech when they are outside the campus environment. The court looked at whether the school would punish off-campus swearing in general, not just on social media, to see if its treatment of the student was fair. Does this mean the court thinks ephemeral messages on social media are equivalent to casual conversation? That might be going a bit too far, but only a bit. Breyer didn't seem bothered by the fact that the post went to about 250 people, a group he described as the student's "private circle of Snapchat friends." He acknowledged a risk of "transmission to the school itself" but said the nature of the audience diminished the school's interest in punishing the girl.
In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas criticized the majority for ignoring the unique features of social media, where posts "can spread rapidly to countless people" and "often will have a greater proximate tendency to harm the school environment than will an off-campus in-person conversation." The fact that the student made these comments off campus, outside of school hours, seemed to really matter. Will remote learning complicate that distinction? It seems clear that remote learning will be treated like on-campus speech. In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito mentioned remote learning as an activity that "takes place during or as part of what amounts to a temporal or special extension of the regular school program." That category of off-premises speech "falls easily within the scope of the authority that parents implicitly or explicitly provide" to the school, he said. There is a widespread debate about whether tech platforms should balance the principles of free speech against other standards of decency, such as harassment, privacy and disinformation. Would this ruling have any impact on tech companies' content moderation practices?
Probably not. As private entities, tech companies aren't subject to the First Amendment. Although I'm sure they were keeping an eye on the case, the ruling isn't likely to have any direct impact on them.
—Sarah Frier | 
◊↝µ〖OnLine!.〗 2020 Bhoot Pori Full Movie Online released 2020. story: Upcoming Movie By Soukarya GhosalBhoot Pori Full Movie Online. ▴Bhoo...
Post a Comment