Free speech under attack – blame the Internets

Quite a story in today's Boston Globe: a girl was punished by her school for something she wrote on her blog and a federal judge ruled the school was within its rights. It seems that the ubiquity and easy accessibility of everything on the Web has changed the rules of the First Amendment:

[Judge Mark] Kravitz's ruling relied partly on the ambiguity over whether schools can regulate students' expression on the Internet. He noted in his ruling that times have changed since 1979, when a landmark student speech case set boundaries for schools regulating off-campus speech.

Now, he wrote, students can send e-mails to hundreds of classmates at a time or post entries that can be read instantly by students, teachers, and administrators.

"Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse," Kravitz wrote.

So, as the logic of the ruling goes, Avery Doninger had the right to stand outside the school's property boundaries and make her opinions known. But once she posted these criticisms on her blog, her thoughts transformed from off-campus to on-campus speech.

I can't help but wonder what the judge's ruling would have been if she had made a critical speech off school grounds but somebody videotaped it and posted it on You Tube.

This case is surely heading to the Supreme Court.