It's important to remember that rights are meaningless if they are not exercised and defended, and that often means uncomfortable placement of walls. Not every case will be as media-friendly as a 12 year old girl posting to Facebook that someone was mean to her. The Miranda decision that established the right to be told your rights when under arrest -- the right to remain silent and so forth -- well, Ernesto Miranda was found guilty of kidnapping and rape in the second trial. Not a great person.
I think he's trying to say that defending our rights will sometimes mean defending bad people. Not every case will be in defense of an innocent 12-year-old, sometimes you have to stick up for rapists too.
Maybe 12 year olds aren't THAT innocent, but come on. What about privacy? And as an adult, how would you feel if the boss of your boss asks for your facebook's password so they can have an eye on your boss and co-workers?
okay, if you're looking at this from a teacher's perspective and actually finding some sort of justification for what the school did, imagine that it was the administrators asking for your login and password, because you worked for the school. if it's not justified for you, it's not justified for the student.
I hope she wins. I cannot stand the things that our government are getting away with these days. It was founded with the ideal of complete personal freedom, and now it seems as though everyone is starting to go "woah woah okay okay yeah that was fun for a while but now you're all fucked."
Agreed. The school district really doesn't have a clue how serious a moral and ethical violation it is to have access to a minor's facebook account. Not only the gross violation of right to privacy, but the fact that if the girl is updating it by her phone, she could well be geotagging her location, meaning an adult has access to this girls location/where she's going.
When parents freak out over sex offenders being allowed to live in their neighbour hood near their children (when the majority of sex offenders committed offences against adults, meaning the kids should be worried about mommy getting raped, not mommy worrying about her kids), do you really want to be known as the pervert in the school board tracking all the prepubescent girls.
I think that if the founders simply wanted to say "complete personal freedom" then it would have been simpler to write that. The classic "you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater" example. You can't just say anything that you want.
The real problem is that everyone thinks that if we all just use common sense, and be nice to each other, it'll be ok, but that doesn't get us very far. If some kid slanders someone else, for example, how should it be dealt with? You don't have complete freedom to say anything you want about someone else.
...I guess the short of it is that if you don't want the school to handle the problem, be very specific about how the problems should be dealt with, otherwise when my personal freedom and yours clash, we're going to have a mess. Don't just wave the flag and cry "freedom!"
[Update]
I got down voted immediately. Thought I might. :-) Was it the wave the flag and cry freedom part, or do people think they have complete personal freedom? Yeah, I'm trying to stick a few simple-minded people in the eye. Anyway, people really need to think beyond the simple "I don't like it when this happens..." If you can't provide the answers to a problem, someone else will do it for you.
If a kid slanders somebody else, the somebody else can sue for redress in the courts (or, I don't know, talk to his/her parents. It is not the governments job to monitor its subjects "just in case". That is absurd, and thinking like that is why 12 year old girls are getting interrogated and why certain departments think it is OK to fondle citizens, young and old (yes, this case, it's "allegedly", but this is not the only case.)
K-12 education is such a mess. My kids go to quite good public school, and even there, it is a joke the control they think have. Anybody know if it is a violation of the 1st Ammendment to prohibit kids from dying their hair (serious question)? As a kid who had blue hair, that prohibition drives me nuts!
I don't think that in this case they wanted to look at her account without reason. It seems like she said something someone didn't like. That someone probably printed her page and went to their parents and they went to the school?
Now, I'm not saying what is right or wrong here. I'm simply asking what people think should be done. How do people want it to be handled.
Also, shouldn't Facebook be deleting her account? She's only 12, and you need to legally be 13.
The school never has a right to ask for those passwords. If what she wrote is public, they can see it. If what she wrote isn't public, it shouldn't matter. Email is private, period. If it takes a court order to get access "in the real world", a school official shouldn't be demanding it.
If she said something about somebody else in a public way (yes, your "friends" probably count as public), the person being spoken about has multiple options:
1. Suck it up. People say mean things; get over it. (Side note: my guess is this whole case boils down to "contempt of cop", that horrible crime of not showing a person who has authority over you enough respect). Students don't check free speech at the gates and especially don't at home.
2. Contact FaceBook about a violation of its terms. FB could delete said post. I think FB's 13 year old policy is stupid (yes, the underlying law is also stupid, but FB takes the stupidity to new heights), but it is their policy. The principal could have just gotten the account nuked.
3. For a public posting, involve the parents. It is, you know, their job to raise their kid. If a parent decides they value freedom of speech over respect of authority, well, see #1 above or #4 below.
4. If the comment is truly libelous (and, remember, to prove libel you have to show harm was done[1]), you always have redress in the courts. But, again, the inequality in the relationship means the principal doesn't have to bother with that.
We want adults who question their leaders, yet our schools (including, sadly, many colleges. Just look at what happened at Berkeley) do everything they can to crush any leadership questioning. Is it any surprise most adults don't care about what their leaders do? They have been trained from a very early age that they have no control over "the man". Why would that change after college?
> The classic "you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater" example.
That classic example is very often misunderstood to describe a limitation on free speech. It doesn't. The government can not forbid you from shouting fire in a crowded theatre - but free speech does not come with indemnity: You are responsible for the consequences of your actions, including your speech. If other people in good faith reacts to your (in bad faith) shouting and get hurt, you are liable. If the theatre owner looses revenue from your shouting, you are liable. But you have every right to shout it.
I completely agree with you. It feels as if many establishments disregard these rights and try to reversely enforce their own laws. It's a common occurrence in schools due to the false notion that thrives in that environment of hierarchy always being right.
So this sort of happened to me last year while in my senior year of high school.
A friend and I started a Facebook group called "Sleeping students of GHS" and we had people send in pictures to an email address I created and we'd upload them to the group page. Which was quite interesting because we couldn't be held responsible for actually taking the pictures.
Well the group went viral in a matter of a few days, first a hundred, then a few hundred, then 2-3k. And in a relatively small southern town, around 13k people, that's a pretty big deal.
It was crazy. I felt like Julian Assange for a couple weeks. Nervously posting things and worried about the school big dogs hunting me down. (of course this wasn't anything like WL, but the same idea.) Parents were starting to be like, "Wait, why are these students sleeping? What are the teachers doing about this?" and this in turn caused a big uproar in the school. Schools hate bad publicity. The next day I get called into the office and a couple assistant principals and a police officer were like, "Do you have permission from all these students parents to upload these pictures?" and I said, "No. I didn't think you needed it." They in turn told me that the school was liable for a law suit, yada yada, and that I need to delete it.
They had me login to my account in front of them and delete it. THIS WAS MY BIGGEST MISTAKE. Damn it. I was furious with myself afterwards. Lesson learned I suppose. It didn't take long for an outsider to the school to approach me and make another joint account. That way if it's outside the school they can't do anything.
At this point local news agencies were calling me and emailing me asking to interview. It was on the front page of newspapers. I learned that it is indeed not illegal to take pictures of minors in a public place and the school was just BS'ing me to get me to delete it. I was a little scared in that office. I was in contact with the ACLU and a digital rights lawyer in San Francisco, just in case they issued any kind of punishment toward me.
It went on for a couple more weeks, we even had tshirts made, and then bam, Facebook shuts it down. No notice, no warning, just bam. We get an email saying "Your page was against our ToS, sorry" and that was that. It all ended in a haze. To this day I wonder why Facebook shut it down. I tried contacting them but to no avail.
Also, at the same school I mentioned before, later in the year they started cracking down on Facebook. Teachers were getting reprimanded for being friends with students. Students were getting suspended and banned from the prom because they posted a rant about a teacher or worker at the school. It was ridiculous.
Yes, there definitely is an argument against it. And I'm sure they are wanting to help teachers avoid getting too close to their students, which would allow for inappropriate behavior. But I there's always a case against something. The fact that teachers were actually getting punished for it is on another level.
From my perspective it was quite useful. I myself sucked at remembering tests (because I was on here too much) and she knew it, she would just say "hey, don't forget our test tomorrow :)" and that helped me. She didn't have to do that but it was a nice gesture and it helped me remember.
When social media is new, people use it in curious ways that aren't best suited. The teacher/student friending was probably an attempt to relate to the student, or get in contact with them for homework/etc. As my mom is a teacher, I've seen some pretty interesting build-your-own-class-website websites, and Facebook could have just been another attempt at that sort of website, for the teachers.
Just out of curiosity, what do people think schools, parents, etc should do about minors and Facebook? Bullying, "naughty" pics of themselves, and just simple over the top kid drama. Facebook is public. It's not your diary. You are sharing it with your hundred "closests" friends. Rush Limbaugh calls someone a slut on the radio and people are outraged. I can imagine that kids are quite rough with each other on a daily basis.
Schools - Do nothing. It doesn't have anything to do with them. They need no more participation in it than they need participation in what happens after school between two kids on a playground. The school's role is education, not policing the activities of children off school grounds. At most, they should educate children (reasonably) about the dangers of stuff online. No, I don't mean scaring them about predators, but informing them that (unfortunately) people, jobs and police can and will use what you say online against you. As you say, this isn't their diary.
Parents - They should parent. In the modern times that means educating children about the internet and expected behavior online. Teach your kids about privacy settings. If needed, regulate access to digital devices. I'm sure (most) 13 year olds aren't buying their own cell phones, computers and internet access.
Kids are rough on each other, but they've always been rough on each other. The only difference now is that its a larger audience and more to interact with.
Kids need to know that they can simply 'opt out' if they want to and stuff gets too socially complex. They don't need to have a Facebook profile that's 100% public to every other kid in school. They could have a very locked and and private profile, or no profile at all.
I believe Facebook has features in place to let users target groups of users when posting. Perhaps School and Parents' role is to guide/teach children in our digital mess.
School has no business checking people's private things though. Parents may have some rights but I'd also say children have an expectation for privacy.
Schools act in loco parentis. They courts have generally held that educational institutions can violate what would otherwise be the rights of their students if such actions are necessary to fulfill the educational mission of the school.
In Loco Parentis has never really made sense to me. Not when I was younger, and not now. As everyone knows, different people will act differently as parents. Were I a parent, I don't want someone else making decisions that I should be making or acting in my place unless I specifically know and trust their system of values.
Not every parent is going to watch their kid. What should a parent do when their kid shows them something "offensive" from someone else? Where is the line drawn for bullying? To me it seems like one big mess for Facebook and parents. When kids get foul with each other, what do the parents do?
Bullying is a hard problem to solve, with and without Facebook. Parents always have little control, whether it's happening on Facebook or somewhere else.
Facebook has to provide its users (i.e. kids and their parents) with working tools that can prevent bullying. 'Report Abuse' links that work, for example. It should not be necessary for schools to have complete access to their students' accounts.
Students shouldn't be allowed to post on facebook from school. Beyond that, the schools should keep out of it. What students do when they aren't at school is not the school's concern.
These are certainly the first days of social networking, the law and social conventions still have a lot of catching up to do.
On a different note, I find it quite ironic that Facebook forbids children under 13 from opening accounts, while encouraging behavior ("I like this!") most suitable for their age spectrum.
This happened to a page that my former classmates made too. It was made up of pictures of people in the community that they think weren't helping. It didn't get much popularity though. But it got shut down by facebook too. They later on found out that several people reported them using the "report/block" button. These people are relatives of the people that they posted funny topics about. They couldn't do anything about it.
On a related note, maybe the people who deserve to be reported are the likes of Justin Bieber. See
Bieber tweets a phone number, except the last digit. Real people driven mad
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690118
I hope to see the day when every headline [subject] sues [government entity] over [grievance] parses to something other than [subject] sues taxpayers over [grievance]
I have never seen a web site that makes you prove your age to sign up. My daughter's friends all have Facebook sites. I refuse to let her. Their parents, on the other hand, allow it.
How is it the parents doing this, I didn't see it written anywhere in the article that they're lawyers.
The 12 year old is the plaintiff, not the parents. The lawyer may have thought she had a good enough case to hold billing, and may have even held disbursements (although more likely the parents agreed to pay for disbursements for the case).
First of all, I don't think that's the point. Not at all. Next, kids should not be prevented to file law suits if deemed necessary (ex. sexual harassment, child abuse). And finally, according to the article, it was the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota that filed the case.
