Suspensions over MySpace lead to free-speech protests
Zach Fuller, 18, held up a sign recently in front of Etiwanda High School proclaiming "We don't need no thought control."
He was protesting the school's decision to suspend five of his friends for profane online postings made off campus.
The suspensions raised new free-speech concerns for a generation of social-networking addicts.
Although some contend that online speech is a dangerous platform for young people, others say that today's postings are no more threatening than other technological innovations such as the telephone.
As students continue to post their grumblings online, and as that speech borders on the threatening and hateful, the role schools play remains murky. Although the First Amendment has always presented its fair share of gray areas, school officials are finding, with the prevalence of social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com, that they are entering a new frontier.
"We're looking at a new field," said Gene Policinski, executive director of the Nashville, Tenn.-based First Amendment Center. "In the past, there wasn't the means of doing something so widespread. If you posted or wrote something in school, that was clearly a school issue. Now, new technology is posing new questions."
According to the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools, many Web sites, including MySpace, have been deemed inappropriate and are banned from most school districts. Students are also required to sign an agreement of Internet etiquette every year, vowing to refrain from posting or visiting sites that include profanity or pornography.
In the case of Etiwanda High School in Rancho Cucamonga, the five students suspended last month had posted profanity-laden comments about a teacher on MySpace from their home computers. Vulgar language and photos of the teacher accompanied other pictures of Nazi images. A student not involved in the postings brought it to the school's attention, and the five were quickly suspended for creating an "unharmonious school atmosphere."
Judy Post, assistant superintendent of Chaffey Joint Union High School District, said schools will choose to get involved in off-campus MySpace activities if they cause a disruption on campus.
"We don't have a district policy regarding MySpace. With something off campus, we really can't make a policy," Post said. "We deal with it when it arises just like a fight that happens off campus that comes on campus."
After the school handed out the suspension notices, Fuller began circulating a petition declaring the school's actions unconstitutional. The senior did not say how many students signed the petition but said some didn't know about the incident.
"When they found out, a lot of people who signed it said they had similar pages about their teachers, too, and they were going to take it down," said Fuller.
Networking sites in recent years have created a new platform for students to air their discontent. Students say sites such as MySpace are rife with teacher parodies and school gossip.
Fuller's father, Edward, who supported his son's protest, said he applauded the school for being vigilant but said suspending students was "over the top."
"Students used to complain all the time about parents and teachers in their diaries," said Edward Fuller. "Now your diary is online."
According to a study conducted in 2004 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 87 percent of youths ages 12 to 17 go online. Among them, 38 percent read blogs and 19 percent have created a blog, far outpacing blogging
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activity by adults who go online.
Students are increasingly being held accountable for their postings, experts say, because they all too often mistake cyberspace as a safe refuge to vent.
"The Internet is about as private as a bus stop," said Policinski. "People tend to forget that."
Not only do blogs act as a diary left open to the world, they can serve as evidence of libel. Peter Scheer, executive director of the San Rafael-based California First Amendment Coalition, said students may not realize that free speech does not protect them from defamation.
"If a student is defaming somebody who happens to be a teacher, and the teacher could go to court, then I suppose dealing with the issue administratively in the context of school discipline might be justified and preferable," said Scheer. "On the other hand, without going to court, there's a risk that the schools, acting as a referee, will engage in censorship."
At Etiwanda High, the students who were suspended said they had no intention for the malicious page to be seen outside their circle of friends. Some parents who were angered at the school thought the student who brought the page to the school's attention should have been the one punished.
"It does, frankly, unnerve me a little bit that students, or anybody, write things on the Internet for thousands to see that they would not feel comfortable saying," said Scheer.
Scheer said it is imprudent to put verbal speech and cyberspeech in the same category. Cursing the school principal to a group of friends, he said, is different from posting those same words online.
"The difference is not in the speech, it's in how loud the megaphone is," said Scheer. "When you're writing in your diary, the megaphone is turned off. When you're telling it to one friend, it's a soft volume. On the Internet, it's at the absolute maximum volume."
Membership to such sites as MySpace, Friendster and Facebook is growing at a dizzying rate, making the "megaphone" louder than ever. MySpace boasts more than 70 million members, and that number swells by 5 million every month, according to the site's numbers.
In 2002, when MySpace was launched, two students at Townsend Junior High in Chino Hills were suspended for posting gossip on a blog that included the school's name. One of the students, Randy Carroll, now 17, said the blog was written off campus and contained no profanity.
"They were overstepping their boundaries by miles," said Ann Carroll, Randy's mother. "They didn't have a right to do that, stepping into parental shoes."
The school eventually cleared the students' records, citing state and federal free-speech laws.
Etiwanda students, however, were not spared.
Post would not comment on the specifics of the suspensions at Etiwanda but she speculated that it was not the first time the district got involved in off-campus Internet behavior.
If teens continue their online habits without concrete school policies, it is likely that the Etiwanda incident will not be the last.