As students continue to express themselves on social media by taunting their classmates, venting about teachers, and sometimes offering cries for help, educators are struggling with where their authority should end. Some schools have begun to actively monitor social media sites with the aid of technology. There is software available which can comb through the millions of social media postings searching for key words and phrases in an effort to police what is being said. Such policing has raised some first amendment concerns however.
There are few limits to the first amendment, but one of those limits is that a person cannot, under the protection of free speech, threaten to hurt others or urge a third party to do so. But when school officials begin to reprimand students for posting offensive tweets or photos they have little authority over those posts unless there are direct threats made. For example in 2011 an Indiana court ruled that school officials had violated the constitution by disciplining students who had posted what the school deemed to be inappropriate pictures of themselves from a slumber party... the court said the school had no authority to do so, and they had violated the students right to free speech.
Imagine if the framers of the constitution had a Twitter handle or a Facebook page... I can only imagine the twitter beef these rebels and revolutionaries would have started...
Thoughts?