‘Think before you tweet’ should become the new adage among Facebook and Twitter users, as we live in a world where people rarely censor themselves and profanity is encountered on a daily basis.
Of course, we are protected by the First Amendment, but can posting opinions online lead to situations not safeguarded by the Constitution?
A few weeks ago, singer Courtney Love posted a series of inflammatory tweets containing profanity directed at a fashion designer. After the designer filed a lawsuit, Love discovered that the First Amendment might not protect her outburst.
First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said the same rules that apply to the traditional media apply to these Web sites.
‘What is likely to shift is what language is considered acceptable and whether it is deemed harmful,’ New York Times reporter Laura Holson paraphrased Floyd as saying in an Oct. 7 article. ‘In the 1950s, it was libelous to call someone a Communist; today it is not.’
Many others have found themselves in the same predicament as Love, including novelist Alice Hoffman, who insulted a Boston Globe book reviewer and Perez Hilton, a blogger who had a quarrel with Demi Moore over explicit pictures of Moore’s daughter.
Situations such as these could happen to people no different from you or me. One student and Facebook user who asked to comment on the issue remarked, ‘It’s my page. I’m going to put whatever I want on it, and if you don’t like it, don’t read it.’
But what if it leads to a lawsuit?
Butler University has filed a libel suit against an anonymous blogger for posting online defamatory comments about two high-level administrators. University officials said that they have always encouraged students to indulge in their academic freedoms, but that harassment is not acceptable.
When registering for a Facebook or Twitter account, most people blindly agree to statements of rights and responsibilities without reading them. The line between defamation and freedom of speech is blurred, which leads users to dispute over what is tolerable.
‘It’s the same reason why schoolyard fights don’t start out with, ‘I have a real problem with the way you said something, so let’s discuss it,” Josh Bernoff, author of the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, said in Holson’s article. ‘You get right to the punch in the nose. Twitter doesn’t allow room for reflection. It gets people to the barest emotion.’
So the question remains – 20 years from now, when social media Web sites have lost their trend value, will people look back and think, ‘How could I have been so stupid’?
Katie Edwards is an English sophomore and may be reached at [email protected]
