Court rules universities may have duty to block websites that harass students

And Universities have a special obligation, lets not forget that.

Yes. The moment we brought up the chant of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". The brain can break the same way your legs or arms can and the "just tough it out" answer is not an answer at all.

No one would suggest you should just not visit a neighborhood if people there attacked you. The proof that the web should be a special case because "muh, free speech above all" is very flimsy.

But the law is mutable and so we must appeal to deeper principles than those that the law hinges on. Otherwise, we could pass a law that restricts your access to exactly those websites that you wish to visit.

This is the fundamental problem with liberalism. It desires to marry liberty and (an anemic version of) reason, but reason properly exercised also entails knowledge of good and evil. Thus we pass legislation to punish some evils for the sake of the common good and social order, and tolerate other evils the punishment of which would cause more harm than good. But when liberty chafes under the demands of reason, it will often resort to a tendentious skepticism in order to artificially erode certainty for the sake of securing greater permissiveness.

Now it may be possible to argue that, given the way things are, and as broken as liberalism it, it is nonetheless the most prudent way to organize a (Western) society and that the best available way to deal with many social maladies is through softer means than legislation. Whatever the case, the laws themselves are to a large degree informed by culture, ethos, and circumstance and so what ought and ought not be legally restricted online is very much a core issue. It is insufficient to say on the one hand that nobody should be telling you what you can and cannot look at on the internet and on the other preface the former with the caveat that you are assuming conformity with the law because the law can be changed based on a change in understanding of what will best serve the common good here and now.

• “Gonna tie these feminists to the radiator and [g]rape them in the mouth”;3

• “Dandy’s about to kill a bitch . . . or two”; and

• “Can we euthanize whoever caused this bullshit?”

The University certainly took the threats seriously enough to assign university security to events that the members of the plaintiff's group were attending, and the University did absolutely nothing in response to the threats by simply claiming they were powerless. Keep in mind that the context of these threats was around the time that a member of the plaintiff group had been murdered (while eventually the murder was disassociated from the events/threats, the investigation took some time). Such context lends a lot of credibility to the threats from my point of view.

The basis of the appeal and the complaint in the first place was that the University made no action to even address such threats on YikYak (it is rather important to note that this is all about YikYak [2]). This means that one of two things was true:

1. The Yaks were posted by persons within a 1.5 mile radius of the campus

2. Someone was manipulating their GPS to alter their location to make the posts.

Threatening speech has repeatedly not been protected by 1st amendment rights, and the University's refusal to even try to investigate despite having received specific complaints and requests from the plaintiffs.

This isn't about randoms on twitch going KYS after someone trash talks in a game, there were specific acts of violence repeatedly threatened after this whole affair. The University had the ability to look into the events but did not, and their response was more exculpatory than educational/investigative.

Universities in fact do have a legal requirement to investigate these things and maintain a position of neutrality and encouraging an atmosphere and culture on campus that promotes learning. When you have people openly threatening one another, that's not an atmosphere that supports learning. All this is further exacerbated by the fact that one member of the plaintiff group was killed by their roommate who was a former member of the Rugby Team which is noted in the actual opinion as having been a key element in the Yaks coming up.

Even though eventually the murder was disassociated from the rest of the events, that was not for some time -- I don't see it as unreasonable for a group of persons who are receiving death threats and rape threats to take such threats very seriously after one of their members was actually murdered.

Please just read the actual Opinions [1] top to bottom and not the think tank summary. Think Tanks are fine for finding issues, but their summaries are not to be trusted. They are always politically charged and often omit very important facts, such as the exact reasons the Court accepted the appeals (basically, the previous decision failed to meet the standards for protections under the 1st amendment and also the University did not fulfill its legal obligation in many ways)

[1] http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/172220.P.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak

(Edits are fixing formatting and introducing the context of the murder earlier for clarity of my second paragraph)

This case is not about saying mean thigns to other people -- US first ammendment allows people to say mean things to others.

This case is about credible threats of violence being sent via a social network. One of the features of that social network was that you could only see messages from people who were geographically nearby.

--begin quote--

We first address the University’s expressed apprehension about punishing students for their speech. Put simply, we are satisfied that its First Amendment concerns about penalizing speech lack a proper basis. The University could have vigorously responded to the threatening Yaks without implicating the First Amendment because “true threats” 27 are not protected speech. See Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 359 (2003) (recognizing that “true threats” are not constitutionally protected and describing them as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals”). 7 The Supreme Court and our Court have consistently recognized the principle that threatening speech is not protected by the Constitution. See, e.g., Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705, 707 (1969) (upholding constitutionality of statute making it illegal to threaten president with physical violence); United States v. Maxton, 940 F.2d 103, 105-06 (4th Cir. 1991) (“Threats to kidnap or injure persons are legislatively proscribable, falling within that group of expressions, such as fighting words, which are not constitutionally protected pure speech.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). Moreover, both federal law and Virginia law criminalize the communication of threats to kill or injure others. See 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) (prohibiting transmission through interstate commerce of threat to injure another); Va. Code Ann. § 18.2-60(A)(1) (criminalizing electronic communication of threat to kill or injure another if threat recipient is placed “in reasonable apprehension of death or bodily injury”).

--end quote--

What they are talking about is more than saying mean things.

In the dorm I lived in at U Wisconsin, everyone was perfectly free to call anyone else a fat, ugly b word. But if you said, "I'm gonna go get my gun and kill all you fat, ugly b's." It should come as no surprise that you would be kicked out of the dorms. (Out of the university too, but I digress.)

Point is, some things you say, the university, or high school, or whatever, they just have to take action on it. They can't just let it go. To expect them to do so is just being unrealistic. Sorry, but that's just not how anyone else in the world wants it to work. And those other people are able to sue the university or high school or what have you to press their point when situations like this arise.

I reject this premise. The social costs for abusing people like this need to be quite a lot higher. Right now it's virtually free and the internet is awash in trolls and malicious behavior. This is a novel situation caused by the confluence of effectively unlimited communication possibilities and we're in no way required to normalize its negative aspects.

One novel approach to rebalancing such costs would be to give the recipient of a credible-seeming threat license to attack the threatening party in proportion to the perceived severity of the threat. So people who credibly threaten others with murder, for example, would be making themselves a legally valid target for homicide.

I've had someone call my work and try to get me fired, I've had someone make dozens of accounts on various social media platforms to harass me, and even when I blocked them they would post my personal information and make up lies about things I've done, and because I blocked them I had no idea, and then more people would believe the harasser because I didn't respond to it, and would pile on.

Filing a police report for some of the more threatening messages didn't do anything, as the police basically told me there wasn't going to be anything they could do.

Locking or whitelisting accounts like GitHub wasn't really an option as I work with it and I maintained a semi-popular project that I wasn't willing to just delete, but it came close.

In the end the harasser gave up eventually, and I was lucky that my job didn't believe them, but it was a pretty shitty time in my life that had me really worried that these lies would stick around my name forever and I wouldn't be able to escape them in the future.

If that were only true! When universities set up grief counseling and support groups for election results. Requiring warnings by professors for “trigger words,” or set up so-called “safe spaces” — it’s clear that universities have lost the plot. Universities have become bastions of coddling and infantilization. It’s a true surprise that universities haven’t begun issuing bubble wrap to student with which they can wrap themselves lest they trip over a challenging idea. Universities have become a farce: institutions originally set up to prepare students for the the messy marketplace of ideas have instead morphed into expensive day-care centers for delicate children. A stand-up comedian can’t even tell jokes anymore without being banished in a chorus of boos and hurt feelings. Chris Rock doesn’t do colleges anymore because of the absurdity.

The sites might have lies about you or they might even have your real data. Someone might post your real photos; discussing your body, your fashion sense, or whatever that makes you loser.

You are a broke college kid. Good luck finding a lawyer who would help you find anonymous posters and then sue them.

In mean time, your social life is being destroyed. Online harassment seeps into the real world. Your classmates make fun of you in your earshot. You can complain about it once or twice but school get tired of it and stop taking you seriously.

You will get depressed and sducidal unless you have a strong support system. Even then you will have poor grades, you might quit school. Your life is being ruined because people believe in black n white definition of freedom of speech.

Perhaps we should recognize that there are shades of grey. We cannot harass someone in physical world without getting kicked out of establishment or getting arrested.

Maybe we should go after platforms that let online harassment happen on their platform. After all they are profiting off your data, why shouldn't they be held responsible to police their platform better.

That is like saying schools should not punish bullies, let the victim sue the bullies.

"Don't visit their site" indeed.

Music and video download sites (and apps) that get blocked are presumably ones where the majority of music and video downloaded are done so without the permission of the copyright holders. There is plenty of unlicensed music and video on YouTube, but it is a minority of the content available because of YouTube's filters, so the site is usually not blocked.

In the other example, sanctioning a student for copyright infringement only affects the student that has been found guilty. I can't imagine a university disconnecting all students if just one student is found infringing copyright.

So, while these precedents do show the technical and practical feasibility of the blocking, they are not examples of long standing practices where the not-protected speech of a minority is sufficient grounds for restricting the protected speech of a majority.

I posted this below, but:

The complaint is not that YikYak wasn't blocked -- it's that no action was taken by the University to investigate the threats properly and readily, even so much as just creating a strong stance on "hey, don't tell people you're going to kill them". Blocking YikYak was simply __an option__ which the University could have taken, but that wasn't the thrust of the plaintiffs' argument at all, nor the Court's Opinion. The point of blocking YikYak was more of a point that "well, you absolutely could have done something", rather than a prescribed course of action.

You're arguing a point that was not made by the plaintiffs and also is not related to the actual court Opinion either. The crux of the complaint is that in light of real, credible threats, the University took no action whatsoever. The Opinion is more about how the defenses of anonymity made it "impossible" for the University to act and that 1st Amendment protections prohibited [the university] from doing so were considered invalid in light of other case law.

'ignoring the trolls' suffers from precisely the same problem - more so, as passive awareness of the threat may be construed as acceptance thereof by the threatening party. Basically you're placing the burden of assessing severity on the recipient and removing any leverage they have to mitigate it once they're aware of it.

Do not suggest 'report it to the police' or I will start linking cases in which people did that, were ignored, and were then murdered - at which point the free speech evangelists are nowhere to be found.