Think Before You Tweet
One measure of how twisted our world has become is that many people identify civility as censorship. A recent and interesting example involved a high school senior and the governor of Kansas.
You may have seen an account of the incident. Emma Sullivan, 18, was on a school field trip to the state capital. While there she and her classmates attended a speech by Gov. Sam Brownback.
Sullivan jumped on Twitter after the event: "Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot." (Which she did not, in fact, actually do.) The governor's communication director monitors Twitter for mentions of her boss -- a totally logical activity in 2011-- and spotted the impertinent Tweet. And contacted Sullivan's school.
The initial report, by Sullivan, was that her mean old principal demanded she write the governor an apology. She refused and her older sister went to the media with the contretemps. Free speech advocates rushed to her defense.
(Upon further review, as they say in the NFL, it appears that the principal suggested she write the apology but did not demand it.)
I find several interesting elements in this incident. The first is that, unlike many free speech arguments, this one really does relate to the First Amendment.
Far too many people who want to spout off in private locations or forums claim they have First Amendment protection. They do not. The First Amendment only guarantees that the government will not restrict free speech. Private owners of a hall, media outlet or online forum can demand that you only talk in Pig Latin, should they so choose and the First Amendment, like the honey badger, don't care.
But public schools are an arm of the government, and judges have ruled that students have a (somewhat limited) First Amendment right to freedom from censorship by schools. Was that what was going on here? Doesn't appear so.
A student attends a public event as part of a school outing and takes the opportunity to insult the Governor in a way that is as public as anything on the Internet. She didn't simply snark off to her friends on the bus ride back. She didn't make a rude joke in the school cafeteria the next day. She spouted off in a way that was easily visible to anybody in the world who has access to a web browser. Including the Governor's media hounds.
Many folks have argued that the governor's peeps should have ignored the Tweet. I disagree. If properly handled, this was an opportunity to teach a student and her classmates the difference between "can" and "should."
Like the real power of the First Amendment, this is a distinction too often ignored or misunderstood. Notoriously, the fall of the Soviet Union was the signal for an enormous increase in open, explicit anti-Semitism. (Far as I can tell, the attitude of the Soviet government had been that nobody but the government was allowed to openly discriminate against Jews.)
The only defense against freedom leading to evil is a cultural bias against that evil. Elders have the task of instilling that bias in youth, who admittedly tend to ignore a lot of it. Which ain't all bad. I'm all in favor of respect for properly exercised authority but that respect can tip toward an irrational reverence.
In this case, the principal was totally correct to point out to Sullivan that her extremely public and crude Tweet brought the reputation of her school into disrepute. Her free speech had consequences to people other than her.
Based on her quotes, Sullivan took no particular lesson in civility from the episode. Just as she was not the only one affected by the Tweet, however, she was not the only person affected by the aftermath.
In checking for followups about this story, I spotted an account of a demonstration by about 50 students in favor of the principal. I can only hope that some of them learned that the constitutionally guaranteed right to be a public idiot doesn't require that we all take to the Internet to exercise that right.
