Student Free Speech

-pagus: July 24, 2002

A high school student has recently been threatened with expulsion, criminal charges and civil charges for hosting a website where students could anonymously rate their teachers, administrators, librarians, counselors, and student officers, as well as rating their school's performance as a whole. The school and the local police attempted to convince the student to turn over identifying information about posters of allegedly defamatory and threatening messages and to disable the website. At issue is the protection of the anonymity of posters on a website forum as well as webmaster protection for hosting a free speech website.

EFF, the ACLU of Northern California, and San Francisco's Farella, Braun & Martel are representing the high school student who ran the site.

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a student is prevented from turning over this information without a subpoena, and that under the Communications Decency Act (Section 230), he cannot be held civilly liable for the allegedly defamatory messages of others.

However, the right to speak and post anonymously online is being threatened by companies and individuals who have begun using civil subpoenas to demand that the speaker's Internet service provider reveal his or her identity. Unlike criminal warrants, civil subpoenas do not require showing of probable cause, or any other court review. This isn't just being used on students either. This legal maneuver to violate a person's right's to free speech is being used on adults too. Many of these types of cases currently involve people who anonymously posted comments on chatrooms for publicly traded companies and have subsequently been targeted by employers or other parties who want their identities revealed.

One wonders if parents would be so supportive of this kind of violation of their kid's rights to privacy, if they understood that it might be applied to them next.