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No First Amendment Protection for public school teacher’s comments on Facebook — In re O’Brien, 2013 WL 132508 (N.J. Super. App. Div. Jan 11, 2013)

We’ve seen a number of cases in which employees are fired for making comments on Facebook that they never thought would get around. (For a sampling, see my posts on Sutton v. Bailey, the BMW dealership decision, and Sumien v. Careflite.)  Put In re O’Brien in this category of cases, except add a twist: Here, the employer is a public school district.  Does the First Amendment (which applies only to government action) add a layer of protection to comments posted by a public employee on social media?  Not in this case.

Jennifer O’Brien was a first-grade schoolteacher.  O’Brien posted two statements on Facebook:

I’m not a teacher—I’m a warden for future criminals!

And the second:

They had a scared straight program in school—why couldn’t [I] bring [first] graders?

The Facebook comments were brought to the attention of the principal at O’Brien’s school (Ortiz).  Ortiz was “appalled” by the statements.  O’Brien’s Facebook comments also spread quickly throughout the school district, causing a well-publicized uproar.

The school district charged O’Brien with conduct unbecoming of a teacher.  An administrative law judge (ALJ) found support for the charge and recommended O’Brien’s removal from her tenured position, and the acting commissioner of the school district agreed.  The ALJ was particularly bothered by O’Brien’s lack of remorse in posting the comments.  A New Jersey court adopted with the reasoning of the ALJ on appeal.

Both at the administrative level and on appeal, O’Brien argued that the First Amendment protected her Facebook statements.  The court disagreed, applying the test stated in the Supreme Court’s decision in Pickering v. Board of Education that analyzes whether a public employee’s statements are protected by the First Amendment by balancing the employee’s interest, “as a citizen, in commenting on matters of public concern against the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.”

The court accepted the findings of the ALJ and Commissioner that O’Brien’s real motivation for making the statements was her dissatisfaction with her job and the conduct of some of her students, not a desire to comment on “matters of public concern.”  Even if the comments regarded a matter of public concern, O’Brien’s right to express those comments was outweighed by the school district’s interest in the efficient operation of its schools.  The court also rejected O’Brien’s arguments that there was insufficient evidence to support the charge against her, and that removal was an inappropriate penalty.

LegalTXTS Lesson: Public employers need to exercise more caution when disciplining employees for their activity on social media networks.  Unlike the private sector, public agencies are limited by the First Amendment when regulating expression of their employees.  But even public employees don’t have absolute freedom to say whatever they want.  As O’Brien reminds us, when public employees make comments of a personal nature, or their comments interfere with the delivery of government services, such expression is not protected by the First Amendment.

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Cyberbullying is a problem not just for students, but school workers as well (see my post on the R.S. v. Minnewaska Area School District No. 2149 case).  To address that problem, North Carolina recently passed a law banning students from bullying school workers online.  An expansion of North Carolina’s existing anti-bullying law, the 2012 School Violence Prevention Act is the first in the nation to make cyberbullying of school workers a crime.  The 2012 law criminally penalizes public school students who use a computer or computer network with “intent to intimidate or torment a school employee” by:

  • building a fake profile or web site
  • posting or encouraging others to post on the Internet private, personal, or sexual information about a school employee
  • posting a real or doctored image of a school employee on the Internet
  • tampering with a school employee’s online network, data, or accounts
  • using a computer system for repeated, continuing, or sustained electronic communications (including email) to a school employee

The new law also prohibits students from signing up school workers to pornographic websites or spam mailing lists, or making any statement, whether true or false, intending to provoke another person to stalk or harass a school worker.  The law went into effect on December 1.

The ACLU of North Carolina has criticized the law as overbroad, and announced plans to file a lawsuit challenging it.

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The legal boundaries for school discipline for cyberbullying continues to be unclear — R.S. v. Minnewaska Area School District No. 2149, 2012 WL 3870868 (D. Minn. Sept. 6, 2012); S.J.W. v. Lee’s Summit R-7 School District, 696 F.3d 771 (8th Cir. Oct. 17, 2012)

As much as cyberbullying is gaining media attention, clear guidance on what schools can do about it is still lacking.  In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review three free speech challenges involving social media content posted by students.  As a result, courts continue to grapple with defining the boundaries of school discipline for student online conduct, particularly when it happens off-campus.  A pair of recent cases illustrates this trend.

R.S. v. Minnewaska Area School District No. 2149: A 12-year old sixth grader (R.S.) posted on her Facebook page that she “hated” her school’s adult hall monitor.  R.S. posted the comment from her home outside of school hours.  The comment somehow found its way to the principal, who considered the comment a form of bullying.  The principal gave R.S. detention and required her to apologize to the hall monitor.  In a second incident, R.S. posted a comment on her Facebook wall stating: “I want to know who the F%$# [sic] told on me.”  For this, R.S was suspended for a day and prohibited from going on a class ski trip.  On a third occasion, school officials learned that R.S. was communicating with a male student on the Internet about sexual topics (when confronted, the male student admitted that he initiated the conversation).  The school officials called R.S. out of class to meet with them and the deputy sheriff assigned to the school.  They demanded to know her email and Facebook usernames and passwords.  Feeling pressured, R.S. complied.  The school officials then logged into her Facebook account and viewed the public and private messages she had posted on the site.  The school did not formally discipline R.S. any further.

The punishment of R.S. violated her First Amendment right to free speech

Judge Davis of the federal district court of Minnesota looked to the Tinker line of cases for guidance and concluded that the First Amendment prohibits school authorities from punishing students for out-of-school statements the statements are true threats or reasonably calculated to reach the school environment and are so egregious as to pose a serious safety risk or other substantial disruption there.  R.S.’s Facebook posts were not threatening, the court found, and while the posts might have been reasonably calculated to reach a school audience, that possibility alone did not justify her punishment.  An out-of-court statement must be more than inappropriate.  It must potentially cause a substantial disruption in the school before it can be punished.

The school violated R.S.’s Fourth Amendment right to be free of unlawful searches and seizures

Students enjoy a Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by school officials.  But did R.S. have a reasonable expectation of privacy as to the information posted on her Facebook account that only her Facebook friends could see?  The court said yes.  There is no meaningful difference between a password-protected private Facebook message and other forms of private electronic correspondence.  The court also found that the school officials had no legitimate governmental interest for reviewing her private communications.  Notably, there was no threat that R.S.’s private posts would cause a disruption in the classroom.

R.S. had a viable claim against the school for invasion of privacy

Again, the court focused on R.S.’s expectation of privacy.  The court analogized private Facebook messages to email messages, to which there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.  The court summarily rejected the schools’ argument that R.S. used Facebook in violation of the site’s terms of use because she was a minor.  The court failed to see how a violation of a website’s terms of use could destroy an expectation of privacy.  Also unpersuasive was the school’s argument that R.S. compromised her privacy interest by allowing her mother and one other person view her Facebook account.  It would be unreasonable, the court explained, to conclude that a person gives up all expectation of privacy as to the contents of his or her password-protected email account just by showing an email to another individual.

S.J.W. v. Lee’s Summit R-7 School District: Twin brothers (the “Wilsons”) who were high school juniors created a website called NorthPress.  Part of NorthPress was a blog intended to discuss, satirize, and “vent” about events at the Wilsons’ school.  Because the site was hosted on a Dutch domain, the site would not show up in the results of a Google search by a user in the U.S., but anyone knowing the site’s URL could access it.  The Wilsons added posts to the NorthPress blog containing a variety of offensive and racist comments as well as sexually explicit and degrading comments about particular female classmates whom they identified by name.  The racist posts discussed fights at the school and mocked black students.  A third student added another racist post.

The Wilsons initially told only several of their friends about NorthPress and claimed they intended only their friends to know about it, but word about the site quickly spread to the study body at their school.  The school initially suspended the Wilsons for ten days, and after the matter went through further proceedings at the school district level, the Wilsons were suspended for 180 days but allowed to enroll in another school for the duration of their suspensions.  The Wilsons filed a lawsuit for a preliminary injunction to lift the suspensions.  The district court granted the preliminary injunction, but on appeal, the Eighth Circuit reversed.

Reviewing cases that analyze the applicability of Tinker to off-campus student speech, the Eighth Circuit ruled that the blog posts in question targeted the school, could reasonably be expected to reach the school or impact the environment, and caused considerable disturbance and disruption.  As a result, the Wilsons were unlikely to succeed on the merits, and so they were not entitled to an injunction.

LegalTXTS Lesson:  Cyberbullying is a serious issue, but schools should be careful not to overreact.  The reality is that much of the online material students post and share these days has a good chance of offending someone or being considered inappropriate by adults.  That doesn’t give schools the authority to police online content however they like.  Off-campus speech is punishable when it threatens to endanger danger to another student or cause substantial disruption in the school environment, but not merely because some would find it “inappropriate.”

How this rule is applied, however, depends on the sensitivity of the court.  The courts in R.S. and S.J.W. could have gone either way.  The court in R.S. could have concluded that the sexual conversations between two very young students presented a risk of substantial disruption in the classroom.  On the other hand, the court in S.J.W. could have held that the blog was never targeted at the school community, and therefore, its contents did not justify meting out school discipline.  Perhaps we’ll get more consistency in court rulings after Supreme Court decides to weigh in on the constitutional limits to combating cyberbullying.

 

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Court quashes subpoena to discover identity of anonymous bloggers after ruling that the bloggers’ statements are not defamatory — Somerset Development, LLC v. “Cleaner Lakewood”, 2012 WL 4370271 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. Sept. 26, 2012)

This case shows how difficult it is to sue for statements made anonymously on the Internet.  The plaintiff (Zucker) is the developer of a real estate project in the New Jersey township of Lakewood.  Zucker learned through discussions with members of the Lakewood community that certain individuals anonymously posted statements on a blog hosted by Google’s Blogspot service.  Zucker sued the blog operator and the anonymous individuals who posted on the blog.  Zucker subpoenaed Google for information that would lead to the identification of the anonymous individuals.

The trial court quashed the subpoena, finding that the anonymous statements were not defamatory.  The Appellate Division upheld the quash order.  The court noted that Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act provides immunity to website operators who republish comments of others or block certain offensive materials.  As for the anonymous posters, the court noted that there is a general, but not absolute, right under the First Amendment to speak anonymously.  To balance the First Amendment right to speak anonymously against an individual’s right to protect its proprietary interests and reputation, the Appellate Division had set up a four-part test in Dendrite International, Inc. v. John Doe No. 3, 775 A.2d 756 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2001):

1.  The plaintiff must “undertake efforts to notify the anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena or application for an order of disclosure, and withhold action to afford the fictitiously-named defendants a reasonable opportunity to file and serve opposition to the application.”  Zucker satisfied this requirement by posting the subpoena on the blog under each offending post.

2.  The plaintiff must “identify and set forth the exact statements purportedly made by each anonymous poster that plaintiff alleges constitutes actionable speech.”  Zucker satisfied this requirement by highlighting the specific comments he alleged were defamatory in connection with posting the subpoena on the blog.

3.  The court must determine whether the plaintiff has established a prima facie cause of action against the anonymous defendants.   This is where Zucker’s effort to discover the identity of the anonymous poster gets stop cold.  One of the elements of a defamation claim is that the statements at issue must have “defamatory meaning.”  The anonymous posters had made statements like Zucker “short changed the taxpayers with millions”, “paved the way for the senior vote by stealing 6 million in tax dollars”, and “is behind all the anti hh propaganda going around[.]”  Other commenters called him a “rip off artist” and “under the table crook.”  As much as such comments were strongly-worded, the court ruled that expressions of opinion on matters of public concern and “rhetorical hyperbole” are not actionable.

4.  The plaintiff should file a request for discovery with the court, along with a statement justifying the specific discovery requested and identifying a limited number of persons or entities who are likely to produce identifying information about the anonymous defendant.  The court did not get to this prong of the test because Zucker could not meet the third prong.

The challenge presented by the Dendrite test, or at least in the way it was applied here, is that it pre-judges the merits of a case even before the plaintiff has a chance to serve the complaint on the anonymous defendant.  Take the court’s ruling on defamatory meaning, for example.  Yes, the question of whether a statement is capable of defamatory meaning is a matter of law for the court to decide.  But courts usually rule on the issue in deciding a motion to dismiss or motion for summary judgment.  Here, the court ruled that the plaintiff is a public figure (thus triggering the heavy “actual malice” requirement) and that the statements in question were not defamatory as a matter of law before the complaint was even served.  Under the Dendrite test, the plaintiff would have to successfully litigate those issues just to get the information they need to serve the complaint.  That seems a tad bit backwards.

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It’s time for updates to my post on the Hawaii case concerning censorship of user comments on the Honolulu Police Department’s Facebook fan page.  First, I’ve obtained a full copy of the complaint including the exhibits, which fleshes out the facts of the case.  According to the first two exhibits to the complaint, one of the plaintiffs (Christopher Baker) posted comments alleging that the HPD of violating the constitution and due process and criticizing the HPD and other government agencies for corruption and mismanagement.  In a separate comment thread, the HPD told another user: “comments depicting unlawful activity is a violation of the posting guidelines.  Your comment has been deleted.”  Baker responded with comments criticizing the HPD for “internet censorship” and exercising “internet nazi powers.”  An exchange between the HPD and Baker followed, and at some point the HPD told Baker: “@Christopher, you’ve had a history of using defamatory terms in your comments.  The posting guidelines are clear.  Dissenting opinions are appropriate but the use of defamatory comments such as ‘internet nazi powers’ are not.  Your comments have been deleted.”  Baker’s co-plaintiff (Derek Scammon) responded to the HPD’s deletion comment with his own: “So I take it that HPD doesn’t care much about allowing freedom of speech?  All the one-sided comments referring to posters who have been deleted seem a little forboding.  Does asking about deleted posts violate the posting guidelines?  I’d hate to get my post deleted for talking about posts that got deleted.”  Scammon separately engaged the HPD in a conversation on the HPD Page regarding the need for Honolulu residents to be allowed to carry concealed weapons.

Second, I’ve gotten copies of the motions for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that were filed at the same time as the complaint.   The TRO motion was deemed moot at an August 22 status conference (the reason for this is unknown).  It is apparent, however, that the HPD is no longer banning certain users from commenting on the HPD Page.  Yesterday, the court held a status conference in which it deemed the preliminary injunction motion moot based on the HPD’s reversal of position and the agreement of the parties (the details of the agreement are not clear).  Another status conference is set for October 4.  We’ll follow the case and keep you posted.