As it sometimes happens, a banal incident or unsympathetic person leads to an important Supreme Court decision upholding free speech rights. Today the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that a high school student was punished wrongly for using the f-word on Snatchat to protest her failure to make the varsity cheer leading team. (NBC News, June 23, 2021, by Pete Williams)
Writing the majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said the court was not establishing that the school had no authority over off-campus speech, but that the school had to show that there was substantial disruption of learning activities in line with the 1969 landmark Supreme Court decision Tinker v. Des Moines. Breyer, though, wrote that a school could regulate some online activities including bullying, threats, violations of rules, and breaches of school security devices. (The Washington Post, June 23, 2021, by Robert Barnes)
But the ruling strengthens the position of students making offensive comments online so long as they are not threats or “concretely harmful.” Breyer also noted that the cheerleader sent the message to a closed circle of friends and students and did not target any individual students. (The Verge, June 23, 2021, by Adi Robertson)