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Free Speech Limits
Friday, 2005 October 28 - 8:57 am
Bloggers of America, this is important.

In New Jersey, students at a Roman Catholic school were ordered by their principal to take down their blogs. School officials say it's a matter of safety, as they are trying to protect their kids from sexual predators.

I think at some point, the courts are going to have to tackle an important issue: can a private school restrict the rights to free speech and press for its students, even when the students are not on school grounds or using school equipment? Melissa encountered some of this* earlier. And of course, there's a related question: can a corporation restrict those same rights for its employees, when those employees are not actually at work? That's the classic I-got-fired-for-blogging situation.

On the one hand, you might say these are private entities, and they have the right to set up contracts with their students/employees in whatever way they see fit. If people don't like it, they can leave, right?

On the other hand, schools and employers have dominion over their students/employees. It's not a trivial thing to go find a new job or a new school. It's arguable that these kinds of restrictions are an undue burden on free speech rights.

As blogging continues to grow, and "Web 2.0" continues to develop, we're going to see this come up more and more often. All the kids who are LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster users today will be the corporate workers of tomorrow, and they will chafe at the restrictions that corporations will try to impose. It might be five or ten years before this case reaches the Supreme Court, but I think it will, eventually. And maybe then bloggers will wake up to why a conservative business-friendly court is harmful to us... I can already tell you, guys like Scalia would tell the bloggers to screw off and find a different job or school.

*Don't go to suburbanbliss.net. Someone else bought the domain and Melissa no longer writes there.
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Posted by Ken in: commentary

Comments

Comment #1 from Crouching Hamster (Guest)
2005 Oct 29 - 3:04 am : #
Umm... Alright. How many vodka tonics have you had?

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