Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Calif. School Suspends 20 Who Saw Web Site

This is from last week, but this is a troubling development in terms of freedom of speech and thought by internet users. In Costa Mesa, California, 20 studnets who visited a website that contained an alleged hateful posting were suspended for two days.
Twenty middle-schoolers were suspended for two days after viewing a boy's posting on the MySpace.com Web site that contained an alleged threat, school officials said.

Police are investigating the boy's comments about his classmate as a possible hate crime, and the district is trying to expel the boy from TeWinkle Middle School.

According to three parents of the suspended students, the invitation to join the boy's MySpace group gave no indication of the alleged threat. They said the MySpace social group name's was "I hate (girl's name)" and included an expletive and an anti-Semitic reference.
So let us analyze this action by the school for a few minutes.

Twenty kids who went to a website, just visited a website that contained a threat against another student. Some parents are rightfully concerned that the school is interfering with students' out of school activities. This school has suspended students, not for actually MAKING a threat, but for READING a threat.

Assuming the miscreant who actually wrote the offending post is found to have made a threat--which it is not clear to me that he did, this is what the AP quoted:
"Who here in the (group name) wants to take a shotgun and blast her in the head over a thousand times?"
The post also carried an expletive and an anti-semitic epitaph. Rational people can disagree as to whether these constitute a threat--they certainly do NOT constitute a hate crime--which is just a stupid category anyway.

What is clearly not a violation is reading this threat. Let us assume that this student stood in the middle of the local shopping mall and made the same comments in the presence of these 20 students. Would we suspend them because they heard the threat? No, such an action is ridiculous on its face, yet that is exactly what the school has done to students reading text in the privacy of their own home.

To me this is just another example of the nanny state run wild.

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