online speech

Student Speech Online: Can/Should Schools Punish It?

By |2020-01-06T00:06:57-05:00June 16th, 2011|Blog|

On Monday, June 13th 2011, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that two students who both created fake MySpace profiles parodying their school principals had been unfairly disciplined by their respective school districts. In both cases, the Court found that the schools had not shown that the students’ actions were sufficiently disruptive of school activities to justify disciplinary [...]

Voluntary Surveilance, Crowdsourced Censors

By |2020-01-03T13:40:20-05:00April 1st, 2011|Blog|

On Wednesday we featured an RSAnimate video about mutual knowledge as an essential element of dissent, as demonstrated by Wikileaks. Today we feature an RSAnimate on how authoritarian regimes can leverage dissent on the Internet for their own end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU The speaker, Evgeny Morozov, notes a few phenomena of interest. First, in China, how blogs critical of local governance are [...]

Moot Court Competition Examines Real Student Cyber-Speech Issues

By |2020-01-03T13:39:57-05:00February 22nd, 2011|Blog|

David Hudson of the First Amendment Center is connecting the dots between the hypothetical case presented in the 2011 First Amendment Moot Court Competition (in which the College Of William and Mary Law School emerged victorious -- Go Tribe!) and the questions of freedom and accountability surrounding online speech facing administrators and communities around the country: Many questions remain in [...]

Juicy Campus shuts down

By |2020-01-05T23:15:41-05:00February 5th, 2009|Blog|

JuicyCampus CEO Matt Ivester says it’s because of global economic downturn and not enough revenue. Seems likely. It also seems likely that the mounting debate on colleges whether or not to ban JuicyCampus from the college networks, and attorney general investigations into consumer fraud may have tipped the balance, so that a 2009 filled with litigation and banning on colleges didn’t [...]

Do Democrats really want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine?

By |2020-01-02T15:58:37-05:00January 17th, 2009|Blog|

There’s been much buzz in the conservative blogosphere, talk radio and newspapers about a predicted return of the Fairness Doctrine. A group of Republican Senators have pulled together a bill that “would prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, which would suppress free speech by requiring the government to monitor political views and decide what constitutes [...]

The reason for the season: year end analyses

By |2020-01-02T15:58:05-05:00December 29th, 2008|Blog|

FIRE analyzes two big online speech cases in colleges. Looking at the MSU student found guilty of spamming for sending out emails to professors, and the blocking of JuicyCampus at TSU, the article looks at the legal and social implications of these decisions and how they could shape expression on campus. Gene Policinski looks at the state of the First [...]

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