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EFF filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in support of public school students’ right to speak while off school grounds or after school hours, including on social media. We argued that Supreme Court precedent makes clear that the First Amendment rarely allows schools to punish students for their off-campus social media speech—including offensive speech.
In this case, C1.G. v. Siegfried, a student and some friends visited a thrift shop on a Friday night. The student took a picture of his friends wearing wigs and hats, including one hat that looked like a foreign military hat from World War II. Intending to be funny, the student posted a picture of his friends with an offensive caption related to violence against Jews to Snapchat (and deleted it a few hours later). The school suspended and eventually expelled the student.
EFF’s brief argued in favor of the expelled student, focusing on the Supreme Court’s strong protection for student speech rights in its decision from this summer in Mahanoy v. B.L. There, the Court explained that three “features” of students’ off-campus speech diminish a school’s authority to regulate student expression. Most powerfully, “from the student speaker’s perspective, regulations of off-campus speech, when coupled with regulations of on-campus speech, include all the speech a student utters during the full 24-hour day.” Mahanoy makes clear that students’ longstanding right to speak on campus except in narrow circumstances, as recognized by the Supreme Court in its 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines, is even stronger off campus—and that includes, as the Mahanoy Court said, “unpopular e
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Read the original article: EFF to Tenth Circuit: First Amendment Protects Public School Students’ Off-Campus Social Media Speech