According to foreign media reports,The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday local time that an official from a public school in Pennsylvania had suspended a high school cheerleader as a cheerleader for making vulgar off-campus remarks on Snapchat, which violated the “First Amendment.” Empower her.This landmark case will affect the way students use social media.
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In Mahanoy v. BL, the court ruled by an 8 to 1 result that the student’s posts on Snapchat should be protected by the “First Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution.
Frank LoMonte, director of the University of Florida’s Breszner Center for Freedom of Information, said: “This is of course a cautionary ruling. The school cannot assume that they have the same power over online speech as they did during school. Obviously, the vast majority of judges are right to the school. A check of unrestricted punishment power is skeptical. This power follows students all the time.”
The case originated from the Pennsylvania high school cheerleader Brandi Levy, who shared a message full of obscene content on Snapchat after he was not selected for the school team in 2017. At the time, Levy was a freshman and a member of the cheerleader team of the junior high school in the Mahanoy area. On Saturday, she posted this Snapchat message at a convenience store in Mahanoi City.
“Go to his school, go to his softball, go to his cheers, go to everything about him,” Levy wrote in a message posted on Snapchat, which also included a picture of her and a classmate pointing her middle finger. . Levy shared the news with about 250 friends on this app. After a student took a screenshot and shared it with her mother, school officials learned about Levy. Levy was suspended from the school for one year for violating the team’s “expletive language and inappropriate posture” regulations and posting “any negative information about cheerleaders, cheerleaders or coaches” online.
With the support of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Levy sued the school district through her parents, and she was allowed to return to the cheerleading team. However, the school district appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The court also sided with the student and said that the suspension of her by the school violated the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The U.S. Supreme Court pointed out in its ruling on Wednesday that its purpose is not to discuss what “off-campus” speech is and when such speech must be submitted to the school’s special needs in order to prevent campus bullying activities from being substantively disrupted or when bullying occurs. Intervene to make a broad First Amendment rule.
LoMonte said: “This may be a catastrophic wrong decision for the students.” The Supreme Court “had the opportunity to say that social media is a game changer that needs to rewrite the rules of the First Amendment, but they rejected it.”
The court pointed out that one of the factors limiting the school’s authority in this matter was that Levy used her personal mobile phone to communicate her remarks to the audience in her personal circle of friends on Snapchat. In addition, Levy did not specify the school or specific person in her social media posts. The Supreme Court stated that there was no evidence that her Snapchat information seriously disrupted the school.
Judge Clarence Thomas stated in his only objection that most people did not consider whether schools often have greater power over social media speech. He wrote that because off-campus speeches shared on social media can quickly reach “countless” people, “it tends to damage the campus environment more easily than face-to-face conversations off campus.”
This case of concern stems from a historic ruling by the Supreme Court in 1969, which stated that students will not lose the rights granted by the First Amendment when they enter school property. However, the case of Tinker v. Des Moines found that if a student’s school speech causes significant interference to the school, then educators can suppress the student’s speech.
It is reported that Levy’s case is concerned with whether the Tinker ruling applies to off-campus speeches. The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled earlier that the precedent established during the Vietnam War more than half a century ago does not apply to off-campus speeches.
Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion, said that although the court agreed that the school district had wrongly punished Levy for her Snapchat post, it disagreed with the reasons provided by the Court of Appeal.
Breyer wrote: “We don’t think that when schools monitor off-campus speech, the school’s extra permission to monitor student speech will disappear. In some off-campus situations, the college’s regulatory interests are still very important.”
The Pennsylvania School District asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. School officials said in a briefing that the popularity of smartphones, social media, and the rise of distance learning during the new crown pneumonia pandemic have blurred the line between on- and off-campus speech. Schools have long regulated off-campus speech, and the decision of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals will weaken their ability to deal with harassment, abuse, and other destructive speech that occurs outside the school.
ACLU lawyer David Cole told the Supreme Court judge in April this year that to extend Tinker’s decision to include off-campus speeches would “require students to actually assume the school’s right to speak no matter where they go.” Cole also said that this will also affect family education. He told the judges: “For young people, being able to express their feelings to friends without worrying about school censorship may be the most important freedom.”
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