A Freedom Of Speech Argument Over Instagram Likes – Vocativ

Four high school students who were disciplined over their interaction with racist Instagram images have filed a federal lawsuit, accusing the school of violating their right to freedom of speech for punishing them with suspensions and shame parades.

The students, who are juniors at Albany High School in Albany, California, were suspended from school inMarch after they were caught interacting withracist Instagram images of their classmates.According to the Mercury News, the images were of the schools girls basketball team nearly all of whom are people of color with nooses drawn on their necks or comparisons made to photos of apes. Another student, who was not named in the court documents and is facing expulsion, posted them on his private Instagram account. In total, more than a dozen students were disciplined for the Instagram posts according to a local news station. Now, four of them are suing the school district for allegedly violating their First, Fourth and 14th Amendment rights.

The complaint says that the students simply liked the images or commented on them. The lawsuit doesnt go into much detail on what the comments were, describing them as a sarcastic remark and responsive to comments previously made on two images. The complaint statesthat the Instagram activity happened through their personal accounts, which are not related to the school, and took placehappened off-campus.

When administrators found out about the images in March, theypromptly suspended the students who interacted with them. One plaintiff, who also posted a picture to his Snapchat account, according to the complaint, was later recommended for expulsion, and has not returned to the school. Although theother three students were allowed to come back, the lawsuit claims the three students were forced to march through the school while other students yelled at them as an atonement measure. They then were coerced to attend a restorative justice session that ended in violence, according to the complaint.

Much of the argument in the lawsuithinges on whether thestudents can be disciplined by their school for actions that took place off-campus. Generally, this is difficult to prove unlessthe school can prove that a students off-campus actions caused a substantial disruption to learning environment. But this could be more difficult to prove, especially sincetheInstagram account was private and wasnt discovered by the administration until months after the images were posted.

Parents of some of the students who were targeted by the images, however, disagree. Quoted in various media reports, parents said that the suspended students bullied the students whose photos were posted on Instagram, and that freedom of speech should not extend to what they called hate crimes. There is a California law allowing public schools to discipline students for cyberbullying, even when it takes place off-campus. For the law to be enforced, the school district would still have to prove that interacting with a photo not posting the photo itself fits its definition of cyberbullying.

The students are asking for damages, the ability to make up the work missed when they were suspended and that the suspensions are removed from their permanent records.

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A Freedom Of Speech Argument Over Instagram Likes - Vocativ