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The Twitter Frontier
In the past year or so, Twitter has been an medium for some rather interesting legal fodder. There are two instances in particular that come to mind; the tweeted threats to Scott Walker’s life around the time of the Wisconsin recall election and Spike Lee tweeting the alleged address of George Zimmerman.
In the case of the Scott Walker tweets (which is what I’m going to concentrate on today), an already charged political atmosphere was sent into overdrive when the losers of said election turned into armchair wannabe assassins tweeting such statements as “Scott walker will die within the next week ive already payed for the hit” (original spelling and grammar left intact for your viewing displeasure). There were tons more of these threats (language, racism, and awful grammar warning!) and they came on the heels of more detailed and credible threats to Gov. Walker.
Now, according to Mr. Chow over at blogs.findlaw.com, the law, in general, forbids threatening to injure another person. I think these tweets qualify. They clearly state the various authors’ intent to shoot Gov. Walker in the head, track down his son at school, and even rape his wife. Imagine for a moment that these kinds of threats were written in letters to Gov. Walker’s home or office. They would be poured over for fingerprints and other forensics in order to track these people down. But Twitter has opened up a whole new medium of expression that allows for very little time to self-censor before the words are published for all to see. Twitter also allows for people to create online identities that are not connected to a real world identity (unlike Facebook generally). This recipe allows for big talk and little to no consequences and results in people shooting off at the “mouth” and threatening sports stars, political figures, and even schools. Keeping in mind we live in a world that recently experienced the shooting of Gabby Giffords, threats are taken seriously, especially those made towards politicians.
This all begs the question of how to address such threats. Well Twitter has policies set up on abusive behavior as well as Guidelines for Law Enforcement. When you weed through all of this, however, you see that Twitter will keep all private information about its users…well….private unless compelled by a subpoena or court order (and even then Twitter puts up a fight). This makes the job of tracking down threatening tweeters extremely difficult if not impossible for law enforcement. And even if the Madison police had gotten the locations of all those tweeters, do you think they had the time or manpower to track them down? I imagine some of them were in Wisconsin but I bet quite a few of them weren’t and that raises a whole host of other issues.
So what we have on our hands is essentially the wild west but this time you’re lobbing pot shots into the O.K. Corral from the comfort of your mom’s basement. It seems that only in the most extreme of cases are people arrested for harrassing behavior and even then it is unclear if speech on Twitter is like picking up a phone and calling someone or more akin to standing on a street corner speaking your mind to whoever will listen. (not my analogy)
To my knowledge, no one was ever caught or even contacted regarding the Walker threats via Twitter so it would appear the law is lagging behind the world of technology (again) but I’m very interested to see how these kinds of threats are treated five or ten years down the road. My guess is that Twitter will be forced to be a little bit more accommodating to law enforcement but I hope it doesn’t take a case of violence that was previewed on Twitter first to change things.
You Gonna Eat That?
For our readers from across the pond, you may already be familiar with this story. Recently a nine-year-old Scottish girl was forced by her school to stop posting less-than-flattering pictures of the school’s cafeteria food on her blog. You can read the whole story here and here.
Martha Payne, hard at work!
Now the school has since reversed its position on the matter but nine-year-old Martha Payne is no longer snapping pictures or posting on her blog. She is able to as a matter of policy according to the school, but that does not change the fact that she has opted not to continue for the time being. One can only assume she reached this decision because of all the hassle the school put her through. If you really think about it, all she was doing was taking pictures of what a bunch of kids were being served at lunch (most of the meals looked better than the “food” I was served when I was in grade school). If simple transparency such as this is problematic for a school, then that school has much larger fish to fry. But what is really scary is how quickly and soundly an institution which is supposed to be all about education and sharing information, can put the kibosh on free speech. Judging by the time stamps on the posts, Martha was not even making these posts while at school but the school still felt that it had the authority to quell the speech anyway. This brings the chilling factor to a new level; a school limiting the freedom of speech of its students while the students are outside of school grounds.
Now this happened in the UK and they have a different version of freedom of speech in Great Britain but this kind of thing could easily make its way over here. Currently, freedom of speech both on and off school grounds in the US is being limited by schools under the guise of anti-bullying (story via Forbes.com). This subject garnered even more notoriety when a Rutgers student committed suicide after an incident of alleged bullying involving a web-cam (The Story of Tyler Clementi). Legislation that has allowed for the curtailing of expression by schools has come under some fire lately but seems to have been embraced by many of the statehouses across the United States in one form or another (all but Montana actually). Federal legislation was even introduced but it quickly stalled.
These two concepts may seem rather disconnected but they really aren’t, both stories center around the issue of freedom of expression versus freedom from harassment. On the one hand, we have an interest in protecting students and faculty from harassment but we also have a duty to uphold the First Amendment rights of those same folks. Schools are a place where students are supposed to learn to be civic-minded members of society but they are also a place where they need to be safe as well. This leads to a precarious balancing act which these two stories exemplify quite nicely (I think). In the blogger case, we have a student who is simply posting pictures of cafeteria food, she is doing nothing to put anyone in danger, she is not harassing anyone (unless the headmaster getting phone calls from outraged parents for serving their lil angels crappy food qualifies). On the other side of the fence (barely), we have a student actively bullying another with potentially disastrous consequences (the only consequence for Martha’s blog? Better food @ school). So this begs the question “where do we draw the line?” We sure don’t want to go as far as the Scottish school and actively cut off creative talent but we also don’t want kids tossing themselves off bridges because of some online slur against them. I don’t pretend to have an answer to this question but it is one we need to constantly ask ourselves and discuss or otherwise we will be at the point where we punish little Marthas before we know what hit us. So let’s heed a tale from across the pond and watch carefully where we step.
The best understanding of toeing this line that I have seen came out of the First Amendment Center earlier this year and can be found here.
James Skyles
