December
Cyberbullying – Speech Laws Sensitive to Content and Context?
Wired’s ‘Threat Level’ blog picked up a story yesterday from the Miami Herald on a lawsuit in Florida that is one of the latest in a small handful of court cases dealing with the emerging legal issue of ‘cyberbullying.’ The bullying, in this case, came from former high school student Katherine Evans (pictured at right) when, in November 2007, she created a group on Facebook that used her teacher’s full name paired with “is the worst teacher I’ve ever met!” She invited her friends to “express your feelings of hatred.” Only three of her classmates responded, criticizing Evans:
“Mrs. Phelps is one of the most amazing teachers I’ve ever had and there’s plenty of people who agree with me,” one student wrote. “Whatever your reasons for hating her are, they’re probably very immature.”
Evans deleted the group shortly after. Her high school responded by suspending her for three days and removing her from the AP class taught by the teacher in question. The lawsuit claims that the high school violated Evans’s right to free speech and is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Before the internet, student speech cases usually concerned student newspapers and dress codes.
As with the Megan Meier case, it looks as if the issue of cyberbullying is dodging serious consideration by being addressed poorly and out of context. In my opinion, schools do not have any business punishing students for what they do online at home any more than they can punish them for giving a younger brother a wedgie in the backyard or stealing candy from the corner store. The issue of free speech complicates it, but it seems fairly clear that it’s acceptable to voice your mind about someone else in a public forum… right?
There are consequences for speech used to mislead and defame–to deliberately damage someone’s reputation–by presenting false facts. There are not, however, any laws against voicing your opinion of someone else as Evans was doing. It may sound harsh at first, but I think there is a gap that new law should seek to fill–a law addressing defamatory opinions when wielded against a citizen in an international context when that citizen is not otherwise newsworthy. To clarify: it would be protected speech for Evans to speak her mind in her community against her teacher, but legally actionable for her to take her poor opinion into the international, mass-media sphere of the internet. Or would such a law be more than a little fascist? There is, I think, some privacy laws already in place that govern mass media’s use of personal information.
One thing I believe strongly is that teenagers should be treated as adults in issues of internet defamation because the internet, like a gun or knife, can be a very dangerous weapon when wielded against someone’s reputation. It wasn’t appropriate for the school to take action in this case for a variety of reasons, but suspension was not really an adequate redress anyway. In my opinion, a lawsuit awarding the teacher damages in proportion to the harm done to her reputation (which was small before this lawsuit made it a national issue) would have been more effective.
Ironically, Googling “Katherine Evans” produces news stories about this situation. Evans, now nineteen-years-old, has insured that her indiscretion on Facebook will be a few seconds’ search away from her future employers, friends, etc. She has become her own cyberbully.
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