Can the social Web be policed?

In "Cyber-bullying cases put heat on Google, Facebook," Reuters points to increasing signs around the world that people want to hold social-media companies responsible for their users' behavior. "The Internet was built on freedom of expression. Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused. And major Internet companies like Google and Facebook are finding themselves caught between those ideals," it reports. Back before social networking, when people harassed or fought merely over the phone, people didn't hold phone companies accountable for settling the disputes. In the US, the Communications Decency Act extended that "safe haven" to Internet service providers, and courts have included social-media companies in that category ever since.

Here's the view from Australia, where the Sydney Morning Herald reports some cruel defacement of tribute pages in Facebook have gotten Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to consider "appointing an online ombudsman to deal with social networking issues." [Maybe that's where we're headed: countries having ombudsmen able to decide if complaints in their countries should be "escalated" to their specially appointed contacts at social sites at home and abroad? But what about sleazy social-media operations that fly under the radar or refuse to deal?]

Certainly it's understandable that people expect more from social network sites than they do from phone companies because bullying is more public and harder to take back, but is the expectation logical? That's an honest question, not a rhetorical one (please comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum), because what does not seem to be different in this new media environment is how arguments and bad behavior get resolved: by the people involved. It may take time with complaints sent from among tens and in some cases hundreds of millions of users, but fake defaming profiles and hate groups do get deleted by reputable social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. Deleting the visible representation of bullying behavior, however, doesn't change much. Bullies can put up new fake profiles as quickly as – often more quickly than – the original ones can be taken down.

Of course we should expect companies to be responsible and take such action, but can we reasonably blame them if doing so has no effect on the underlying behavior? What court cases like the one in Italy against Google executives for an awful bullying video on YouTube that the court felt wasn't taken down fast enough (see the article in the Washington Post above) illustrate are: humanity's struggle to wrap its collective brain around a new, truly global, user-driven medium where the "content" is not just social but behavioral – and the full spectrum of human behavior at that.

If you do, please comment, but I know of no real solution to social cruelty on the social Web as yet except a concerted effort on the part of the portion of humanity that cares to adjust to this strange, sometimes scary new media environment by adjusting our thinking and behavior. That includes teaching children from the earliest age, at home and school, social literacy as well as tech and media literacy (social literacy involves citizenship, civility, ethics, and critical thinking about what they upload as much as download) – as well as modeling them for our children. Can it be that universal, multi-generational behavior modification is not just an ideal, but the only logical goal? What am I missing, here?

Student free speech to Supreme Court soon?

It was a big day for student free speech last Thursday, a day that ended with mixed results. One three-judge panel of the Third US Circuit Court decided for a student, and another panel from the same circuit decided against a student, Wired reports. Wired adds that the Supreme Court "has never squarely addressed the parameters of off-campus, online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts appear to be guided by a 1969 high court ruling saying student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” In one case the judges said that "school officials in Mercer County [Penn.] cannot reach into a family's home and police the Internet. That case also involves a MySpace parody of a principal created by a student at home," the Washington Post reported. In the other case, the judges "upheld the suspension of a Schuylkill County eighth-grader who posted sexually explicit material along with her principal's photograph on a fake MySpace page" – though the dissenting judge "said his colleagues were broadening the school's authority and improperly censoring students." The Post added that "school boards, free-speech advocates and others had been awaiting the rulings for clarity on how far schools can go to control both online speech and offsite behavior," and what they got was the opposite. [See also "Student free speech decision" and my original post on the Avery Doninger case, "Teen name-calling: Federal case" and the ensuing lower-court decision.]

'Meep,' a principal & students' free speech

It's against school rules to say "meep" at Danvers (Mass.) High School. In fact, it's also apparently against school rules or the law – not sure – for a lawyer in New York to email that indefinable word to the principal of Danvers High because, when she did, she got a reply saying her email had been forwarded to the Danvers police, that attorney blogged. This and other "meep" stories that have been flying around the fixed and mobile Web is actually a story about authority in the post-mass-media age. If it ever got to court, student calls to yell "meep" en masse at some point during the school day, for example, could possibly pass the substantial-disruption test that, if met, courts have said permits schools to discipline students who are otherwise exercising their free-speech rights (see "Court rules on student's blog post").

But could something this fun and nonsensical get to court? I mean, "meep" is the favorite (or only) word in the vocabulary of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s lab assistant on The Muppet Show, the Calgary Herald reports (but also the Roadrunner's favorite "word" - remember him?). Which fact only heightens the predicament of Danvers High's principal. School administrators really need to know how the Internet works. As GeekDad points out in his Wired blog, "the principal’s warning sounds awfully like a challenge." Exactly. Attorney Theodora Michaels explains that, on the Internet, "attempts to silence information – or even nonsense – are consistently met with a proliferation of that very information (or nonsense) beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Anyone who tries to stop people's honest criticism of their conduct – especially if they show that they're highly sensitive to criticism (Going to the police? Seriously?) – is likely to be the target of further criticism. Their overreaction becomes a source of lulz," which can have quite a snowballing effect (see UrbanDictionary.com for more). Which means that, in the post-mass-media age, authority gets dispersed – or distributed.

Students sue school for social Web-related discipline

The two Indiana girls who, during a sleepover before their sophomore year started this fall, posted some sexually suggestive photos in a MySpace profile set to private, thought of it as a joke among friends, says the ACLU, which filed the lawsuit on the girls' behalf. "The suit contends that someone copied the pictures and shared them with school officials, and they eventually were given to the principal," the Washington Post reports. "None of the photos made any reference to the school," it adds. The girls, athletes, were suspended from all "all extracurricular activities for the year" at first, but the school later "reduced the penalty to 25% of fall semester activities after the girls completed three counseling sessions and apologized to the coaches board." The school's attorney "said [the principal] was enforcing the northeast Indiana school's athletic code, which allows the principal to bar from school activities any student-athlete whose behavior in or out of school "creates a disruptive influence on the discipline, good order, moral or educational environment at Churubusco High School." Do you think the school's definition of "material disruption" (of students' ability to learn, a test that has been used in a number of cases involving student free speech and off-campus behavior in social media) is too broad? Your comments welcome, via email (anne[at]netfamilynews.org) or, better, posted in our forum at ConnectSafely.org.

'Skank blogger' story revealing in more ways than 1

The story of the "Skanks of New York" blogger illustrates how "unreliable" online anonymity can be for anyone considering hiding behind it to harass or defame others. "A Manhattan Supreme Court judge forced Google to unmask [the blogger Rosemary] Port, rejecting Port's claim that blogs 'serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting' and shouldn't be regarded as fact," the New York Daily News reports. Judge Joan Madden wrote that "the protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions," DigitalJournal.com reports. Online privacy groups are worried about the precedent his decision may set, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reports, pointing to the view of the Electronic Freedom Foundation that using a court "as your personal private investigator to out anonymous critics is a dangerous precedent to set." Port told the Daily News that "she's furious at Google for revealing her identity, so much so that she plans to file a $15 million federal lawsuit against the Web giant." That you can't "count on" anonymity is a good family discussion to have, because it doesn't always take a court order to unveil a meanie or cyberbully, especially if blogger and victim are minors and in the same community, like a school, when administrators consider the behavior disruptive. [See also "Social intelligence & youth" and "Online harassment: From one who's been there."]

Student free-speech decision

It may not be the last decision in a federal court on this case (Avery Doninger's lawyer said it may need to go to the Supreme Court). It was a mixed decision, reflecting how complicated student free-speech cases in the digital age are. In Doninger's case against Lewis S. Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., the Student Press Law Center reports, "US District Court Judge Mark Kravitz decided [Mills High School principal] Niehoff and Superintendent Paula Schwartz were entitled to qualified immunity, which protects 'public officials from lawsuits for damages, unless their actions violate clearly established rights'," the judge said in the ruling. Doninger, he said, hadn't clearly established her First Amendment right "to criticize her principal in an off-campus blog that used coarse language," the report added. Judge Kravitz cited two somewhat conflicting cases in his opinion: "Bethel School District v. Fraser, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a student's lewd and vulgar speech was not protected on-campus, and Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which recognizes First Amendment protection for student speech on-campus as long as it does not substantially disrupt school, demonstrating a confusion among courts about which standard to apply to Internet student-speech cases," according to the Student Press Law Center. According to the Associated Press, the judge did let stand Doninger's claim that her right to free speech was "chilled" when the school "prohibited students from wearing T-shirts that read 'Team Avery' to a student council election assembly. That matter can proceed to trial."

UK students suspended for defaming teacher

Nearly 30 students were suspended for joining a Facebook group that disparaged a teacher at their school, a highly rated Church of England girls school, The Telegraph reports. A teachers' union called for their expulsion. The school's head teacher "said the vast majority of parents who had been to see her about the incident were supportive and understood why she had taken firm disciplinary action. But some of the pupils who received temporary exclusions have claimed that the punishment was too harsh." The Telegraph quotes students as saying members of the group had apologized but that the school took the comments about the teacher more seriously than they were meant. The group has been deleted from Facebook, but The Telegraph reports that "disparaging comments about the teacher remain posted on another website." At the end of the article it quotes several students and a former student as saying the teacher treats students demeaningly. In the US, incidents like this don't always end with school discipline. They sometimes lead to lawsuits about students' First Amendment rights, the latest such reported last month: "Student sues principal on free-speech grounds." See also a law professor on students' free-speech rights and "Free speech and student blogging."

More and more state cyberbullying laws

At least 13 US states have passed laws requiring school districts to develop policies on cyberbullying, the Washington Post reports, and "a handful of other states" are considering the same. Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, and Washington are among those with laws already in place, and California just joined them at the turn of the year, San Francisco's KCBS radio reported. Developing cyberbullying policy is not easy for schools because of the need to balance students' protection with their free-speech rights. Such policymaking becomes a problem, civil liberties advocates say, when schools "try to control what students say outside of school," the Post reports. Where they can step in, courts have said, is when what students post off-campus disrupts the learning process at school or causes peers to avoid going to school out of fear. "John Halligan, whose son Ryan took his life in Essex Junction, Vt., after many years of bullying, some online, applauded the national movement to enact cyber-bullying laws. But, he said, laws alone cannot stop the problem," according to the Post. See also "Cyberbullying better defined," "Teaching students to help stop cyberbullying," and "Anti-cyberbullying teachable moment."

Student sues principal on free-speech grounds

Used to be, when a high school student had a beef with a teacher, she talked about it on the phone or maybe passed a note in class, no expletives deleted. Now it gets posted on MySpace or Facebook, hopefully with privacy tools turned on. But privacy apparently wasn't of interest to Katherine Evans, who was suspended for starting a Facebook group about her English teacher entitled "Ms. Sarah Phelps [her English teacher] is the worst teacher I've ever met!" [Three other students joined to defend the teacher; Evans deleted it a few days later.] Now a freshman at the University of Florida, she is suing the principal of her former high school for suspending her, the Miami Herald reports. Her lawsuit claims the principal violated her First Amendment rights, "including the free exchange of ideas and opinions in the public arena" (she's seeking removal of the suspension penalty from her academic record and no money damages beyond legal fees). Here's further coverage.

Federal judge allows students' suspension

The 10-day suspension of two eighth-graders in Pennsylvania school was in response to their creation of an imposter MySpace profile representing their principal "as a pedophile and a sex addict, among other things," ArsTechnica.com reports. In its coverage of the ruling, the Student Press Law Center reports that US District Judge James "wrote in his opinion that the arguments fell into three categories: 1) Were Snyders’ First Amendment rights violated by the school?; 2) Were the district’s policies unconstitutionally vague and overbroad?; 3) And did the school violate the Snyder’s parental rights?" He answered all three in the negative, saying the oft-used Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District was about the censoring of political speech not the "lewd and vulgar" speech in the fake profile. "Munley instead analyzed Snyder’s speech under three different student speech rulings by the US Supreme Court," according to the Student Press Law Center, in particular "Bethel School District v. Fraser, which said public schools could 'prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms in public discourse" and "Hazlewood School District v. Kuhlmeier, which said 'educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of speech so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate, pedagogical concerns.” An attorney for the ACLU said the judge "failed to recognize that a school cannot restrict a student's speech 'anywhere it is uttered' simply because it's vulgar and targets a school official."

More bloggers in hot water

Bloggers are getting more attention from lawyers, these days. They're "starting to receive legal letters when they upset someone with enough money to hire a media lawyer," the Financial Times reports, and "defamation, offensive messages, incitement, compromising intellectual property, linking to illegal websites, and inaccurate reporting can all get you into hot water, regardless of whether you are a blogger, journalist, publisher or an e-mail user." This is an opportunity for all of us - parents and young people - to learn more about their free speech rights. "Just 5% of internet users are clear on their legal rights and responsibilities when posting comment online," the FT cites a law firm's research as showing. The study found that 77% of bloggers are "uncertain or unaware of where the law stands."

Students' online free-speech rights

Law Prof. Mary-Rose Papandrea at Boston College recently looked at "all of the various justifications for limiting juvenile speech rights" - including the in loco parentis doctrine and Tinker's material disruption test - and "concludes that none of them supports granting schools broad authority to limiting student speech in the digital media." In "Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age," she advises that, instead of making punishment or the restricting of digital speech, schools' primary approach should be to "educate their students about how to use digital media responsibly." Her article will appear soon in the Florida Law Review.

Court rules on student's blog post

A federal appeals court ruled that a high school in Connecticut did not violate a student's free-speech rights by disciplining her because of a blog commented posted from her home. The reason, reports the Hartford Courant, that "her blog post 'created a foreseeable risk of substantial disruption' at the school." The student was barred from serving as a class officer and speaking at graduation. The Courant added that the court "stopped short of declaring how far schools can go in regulating offensive Internet speech made off campus." Here's my original post about the Avery Doninger case."

How dissed superintendent handled it

It looks like students and a lot of adults in Saline, Michigan, have had some healthy debate this week about online vs. offline behavior and free speech. After high school students “used harsh language to ridicule Saline Area Schools Superintendent Beverley Geltner,” the Ann Arbor News reports, the superintendent met individually with the students and their parents, then held a meeting last night of about 100 students and parents to discuss the students’ postings. Nobody was suspended, Ms. Geltner said, but she held meetings “to address the ‘limited understanding’ that parents and young people have about the dangers of Internet postings,” the News reports in a separate article. At least one student learned that what he posted in Facebook wasn’t necessarily going to be seen only by the group. Geltner reportedly was both criticized and supported for the way she handled the incident, but if something was learned about behavior and repercussions on the social Web, and maybe a little about ethics and free speech, I think she handled it as well as possible. Note what a Philadelphia dean of students Mark Franek wrote in Educational Leadership: “Behaviors in cyberspace (yes, words are deeds) are downloadable, printable, and sometimes punishable by law. Students need to hear this message, starting in upper elementary school” (archived in Franek’s blog).

Canada's reax to Web 2.0...

...are just as largely ignorant as US ones, it's a little comforting to know. The latest response in Canada, in this case to Facebook, was an announcement from the Ontario government last week "that it was banning access to the site for thousands of bureaucrats and elected officials," law professor Michael Geist writes in the Toronto Star. "While the merits of Facebook are open to debate – some love it, others hate it, and many simply do not understand what the fuss is about – there should be no debating the fact that many of these policy responses are unnecessary, knee-jerk reactions to an emerging social phenomenon that is poorly understood." Since Facebook started allowing regional, not just college, university, and high school networks of users, it has grown from 8 million users last summer to about 21 million now, according to Professor Geist, with Toronto as the service's largest regional network in the world. Canada's recent "backlash," Geist says, seems to be centered around "derogatory" comments in Facebook profiles (often called "cyberbullying") and "workplace productivity." But mindless banning has its own negative impact, he suggests: "The attempts to block Facebook or punish users for stating their opinions fails to appreciate that social network sites are simply the Internet generation's equivalent of the town hall, the school cafeteria, or the workplace water cooler – the place where people come together to exchange both ideas and idle gossip." I wish I was seeing this view in more news reports around the world.