Not Your Parent’s Middle School Experience

There were two articles that popped up last week that fit very nicely into our “Brave New Interconnected World” theme – the idea that a world in which the Internet exists isn’t just like out mid-20th Century world with new commercial, entertainment and information retrieval opportunities, but is actually an entirely new place. I could probably write a whole series of blog posts about each of these – and I will probably revisit the ethics of the situation on some future Sunday – but for the moment, let’s consider the implications of these two events in a business context. The students who appear in these stories will be joining the workforce sometime in the next decade anyway, but even if they veer off into Academia or the arts, these same problems will be coming to your industry even sooner than that – assuming they haven’t already…

First, consider the case of two middle-school students from Georgia who were suspended and one more who has already been expelled for making Facebook postings accusing some of their teachers of being pedophiles. You can pick up the original file from the local Fox affiliate if you want to, but the essence of the case is that the students are claiming to have been exercising their First Amendment Rights to complain about their teachers, while the schools are maintaining that false accusation of a felony isn’t a protected form of speech, it’s a felony in itself. Supporting the school’s position is the official Code of Conduct (signed by every one of these students and their parents) which states that spreading malicious comments such as these is forbidden and anyone doing it can be expelled without further discussion. Even if we are willing to accept that no crime has been committed here (and I wouldn’t bet MY freedom on that), the students involved are either too careless to bother reading things before they sign them or too stupid to realize that they are in violation of those rules…

Then we have the parents in the case, who are threatening to sue the school, the school board, and anyone else in range over the alleged violation of their children’s civil rights. This no only ignores the agreements they signed with the school, but also the definition of Freedom of Speech as guaranteed under the Constitution in the first place. These suits are unlikely to succeed, but the families will probably pursue them anyway, because if they can get the school or the district to admit any responsibility or wrongdoing it will help them defend themselves when the teachers sue them for slander, libel, defamation of character, pain and suffering, infliction of emotional trauma, and anything else they can think of – cases which very well could succeed. Free expression could be seen as defense against repressive school regulations, but it isn’t a defense against making statements that you know to be false that harm another person…

From a business standpoint the implications of this case are even more chilling. Granted that very few businesses have employees who are 12 years old, but people of all ages like to complain about authority figures online, and there is no reason to believe that your employees might not make use of some ill-chosen phrase in their own social networking – and if they are commenting on your customers or even on other employees you might end up getting named in the resulting legal action. Employment contracts might help shield the company from the court cases splashing onto them, if your state allows them and if the judge in your case decides to accept them, but there’s still no way you can possibly monitor everything your employees say or do on their own time…

(To be continued…)