Supreme Court Won’t Hear Digital Free Speech Cases [VIDEO] ~ Pare News

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Should schools be allowed to censor students who create fake social media profiles that defame other classmates or authority figures?

It’s a tricky legal question, and one that still awaits final clarification after the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a series of cases addressing the issue.

In lower courts, prosecutors in the cases said that the students’ pages were harmful and disruptive, thus meriting suspensions from school officials. Defendants argued that since the students created the sites outside of school, the suspensions violated their free speech rights.

As students increasingly interact, socialize and expressive themselves online, how or how not to police digital behavior has become more and more complicated for schools. Principles and teachers have struggled in recent years to deal with cyberbullying and other problems unique to the digital era.

But lawyers on both sides of the issue expressed disappointment this week in the decision by the United States’ highest court not to set a more comprehensive set of guidelines.

“We’ve missed an opportunity to really clarify for school districts what their responsibility and authority is,” Francisco Negron, general counsel for the National School Boards Association, told the Associated Press. “This is one of those cases where the law is simply lagging behind the times.”

It will now be at least a year before the Supreme Court will address the issue, if it ever does.

In the West Virginia case that the Supreme Court declined to hear, a high school girl created a web page in which she said another student had herpes and was a “slut.” A state appeals court later upheld the girl’s five-day suspension.

In each of the Pennsylvania cases, however, students used home computers to create fake social profiles of principles in which they depicted the administrators as pedophiles or drug users. The students were suspended in both instances, but won suits against the principals and school districts for violating their First Amendment rights.

What do you think? Should schools be able to punish students for creating malicious social media profiles from home? Let us know in the comments.

More About: cyberbullying, First Amendment, free speech, Social Media