Social Media, Free Speech, and New Anti-Harassment Laws

Free Speech is costly, but worth the expense.  We should never underestimate its value.  It’s the one thing a free nation cannot afford to lose.

Our new social-media matrix is testing the limits and boundaries of free speech.  Email, texting, IM, Skype, You Tube, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, streaming video, smart phones, iPads, and so-on, provide us with quick and immediate ways to stay in touch, communicate, have a say, get the word out, make a statement, express ourselves; which also can get us into a whole lot of trouble.

Most adults have long learned that if one speaks first and only thinks afterwards, one will often regret what one has said.  However, young, energetic, excited, and in-the-moment youth tend to do exactly that—do first and only afterwards consider the consequences.  When mom or dad asks with intense frustration, “Why did you do that, what were you thinking?!”  The most honest answer a teen could probably give in response is something like this:  “I don’t know why I did it.  I wasn’t thinking at all.  I just did it.  I did it because I felt like it; it just felt right at the time.”

Now add the new power that social-media gives to our youth today: the power to ‘harass’ fellow classmates, or even teachers for that matter, by posting fake photos, assigning anonymous Facebook pages with slurring and insinuating falsehoods and slanderous innuendoes, leading to malicious gossip.  WORD POWER!  By now we have all heard stories of vicious, biting, mean-spirited and slanderous Facebook postings about a person, which directly or indirectly led to that same person taking his or her own life.

Suddenly, Local and State Legislators are feverishly writing new social-media harassment laws to reign in such behavior and pronounce immediate and severe harsh consequences to these social-media hooligans.  In some States students will now be accountable if their online speech are the cause of physical or emotional harm, or causes a fellow student to fear such harm.  They will be punishable if their online messages or comments create a hostile environment for a fellow student in the school.  The intent is good.  Sounds fair and just, but can these laws go too far and suppress our basic and fundamental first amendment right of free speech?

This new communication dynamic forces us to address both the cost and the value of Free Speech: What it is, and what it is not; and, when the line has been crossed between the two, what are the proper and just consequences for having done so.  We can only hope that there is balance, justice and fair play, on both sides of the equation.

For example: Should schools have the ability to “take action” against an offending student, if their communication was done off school grounds?  If a student is caught “defaming” a teacher online, “just for fun, a mere teen-age prank,” how severe should legal or criminal punishment be, if any?  What if the content of a particular posting about an individual is true but personal, and obviously made public with malicious intent?  Should the person who put it “out there” be censored for saying something that is in fact true, regardless of intent?  What is the nature of speaking the truth in such a context?

As is always the case, Legislatures, and others in authority positions, tend to overstep or fall short.  Many times, school authorities either underreact, “Boys will be boys, they were just fooling around, no harm done”; or they overreact, “We have a zero tolerance policy in this school, and you will be punished by the full extent of the law for this violation, period!”  It seems that it is very difficult to find a balanced mature response between these two kinds of knee-jerk reactions.

School bullying, especially by means of the new powerful social-media channels, needs to be nipped in the bud.  But legislative laws must not overreach.  The First Amendment right of Free Speech must be maintained, though it may be costly to do so.  We must move forward with careful and deliberate intentionality in both protecting one another, especially our youth, from vicious and malicious cyber-media bullying, but we must also be just as protective of our right to free speech, for it is the lifeblood of a truly free society.