Freedom of speech has nothing to do with It
Recently there was a flurry of excitement at my university about a front-page article in the student newspaper written by a student who interviewed three close friends and proceeded to generalize the results of her inquiry to make demeaning comments about a large proportion of the student body. I won’t even discuss the comments about faculty that were included in this farcical near-satire of college journalism.
Journalistic responsibility in the age of the Internet telephone game
As I saw it, the quotations in the article either (1) made the student speakers and the writer look like immature fools or (2) revealed that they really are immature fools. In either case, their inane self-immolations were immediately available online for the world to read. You’ll forgive me for choosing not to provide a link here.
The upshot was a wave of anger among some students (I don’t know what proportion or how many), some of whom told me in my classes that they felt that their university and they themselves were being cast in a false light. An anonymous leaflet went up on bulletin boards in our building telling students not to give interviews to writers for the school newspaper.
Discussions of whether the article should have been published generated ritual cries of “Freedom of speech!” by supporters of publication of the students’ self-demolishing comments. However, in U.S. law, First Amendment rights refer to government interference in speech. There are no constraints on limitations of content by the owners of publications.
Back in the early 1990s, I was the WizOp of the Security Forum on the value-added network (VAN) CompuServe. The forum was established under contract with the VAN by my employer, the National Computer Security Association, for whom I served as director of education from 1991 through 1999. I established and posted rules in the forum including restrictions on content, language (no vulgarity), and style (no ad hominem attacks, no slurs). The SysOps (over a dozen, each with assigned responsibility for specific sections) tracked postings, moved off-topic postings into more appropriate sections (for example from the PC security section into the LAN security section) and removed those that violated the standards of professionalism; we sent a polite explanation to the member concerned suggesting how the posting could (usually easily) be changed to conform to our rules. If someone repeatedly violated our standards, we’d ban them from the forum.
Every now and then we would get a furious response from someone who claimed that we were violating his (rarely her) First Amendment rights.
My response was pretty simple: you have no First Amendment rights in our private forum. If we had decided – insanely – to restrict all postings to prevent the use of the letter “e,” we surely wouldn’t have had many postings, but we wouldn’t have been violating any laws (other than those of common sense). The NCSA was not part of any form of government and was not supported by funding from any government agency; therefore, our regulation of our forum was not constrained by the First Amendment guarantee of speech free from government controls.
In my next column, I’ll look at the growing problem of junk postings to blogs.
