Facebook & Free Speech: When Colleges Cross the Line

Trey Barnett says he uses Facebook like any other college student does: to socialize with friends and collaborate on group work for class.

“I mostly use Facebook to keep track of my friends,” says Barnett, a senior at the University of Tulsa. “A lot of times, we would do our group projects and make a Facebook group and that’s how we communicate and organize and get everything done…I don’t do much other than that.”

However, Barnett was suspended from the university because of his Facebook.

Last fall, Barnett’s husband (who is not a student at the University of Tulsa) posted comments on Barnett’s Facebook about certain university faculty and students, and tagged Barnett in each comment.

Barnett says the comments his husband posted addressed a student who was bullying him (Barnett), and “called out” faculty members for not setting a good example for students.

“It’s one of those things where [the faculty members] were just basically called out for not leading by example and not really doing their jobs,” he says. “He called out a student that we had been friends with for bullying me and he addressed why she was so mean by telling it as it is – he said she was morbidly obese and that’s where he left it. That’s all he said about her.”

Barnett says his husband’s posts were meant to protect him, and that he personally did not post any of those comment on his Facebook page.

But, he says the university felt that he should be held responsible for those posts: the school found Barnett responsible for harassment, suspended him from campus until 2016, and waived his right to a hearing.

The University of Tulsa also banned Barnett from finishing a degree in his major upon his re-enrollment next year.

Barnett says he explained his innocence to Vice Provost of University of Tulsa, Winona Tanaka, and that she did not understand how Facebook worked or how he was not involved in the actual postings.

“It was very clear from the get-go that I wasn’t the author and that I really wasn’t involved,” he says. “I had a meeting with the vice provost, Tanaka. Any time I tried to talk to her during that meeting, she was asking me why didn’t I password guard from people tagging me in posts and other things that don’t even exist with social media. When I tried to explain to her how Facebook worked she would respond with “I don’t care…” They decided ultimately that I was responsible even though I didn’t make the posts, and all the posts were taken off of Facebook within 48 hours.

“When we appealed to the university to tell them about how unfair it was that I didn’t receive proper treatment, they said that we didn’t really have a basis to make those claims and that I was treated as if any other student had been treated,” he says.

The University of Tulsa’s student-run newspaper, The Collegian, was also under fire by the school during Barnett’s case.

Kyle Walker, a senior at the University of Tulsa and The Collegian’s Editor-in-Chief, says the university told the paper’s staff not to publish any content about the case it deemed “confidential.”

“We were told certain unspecified pieces of information that we had were “confidential,” and that if we publicize or share any of these pieces of “confidential” information, it would be a violation of the university policy,” he says. “No one ever said that violation would result in disciplinary action, but it was difficult to hear anything else and I don’t know what that would mean otherwise.”

Walker says The Collegian printed the story anyways, and asked the university twice for the information it considered to be confidential.

He says he never received anything from the school.

“When we finally published the story, the president of the university sent out a mass email in which he claimed that we incorrectly assumed that the case was handled under the student code of conduct, when in fact it was handled under the policy of harassment, and therefore no hearing was required,” Walker says. “But I had already checked this: the student code of conduct and policy of harassment clearly states that they work in tandem, and that when the policy of harassment is being used, it applies under the student code.”

Issues at Large

Will Creeley, Vice President of Legal and Public Advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education (FIRE) says these social media cases are common in higher education, and have grown in the last ten years.

“Unfortunately, they are extremely common,” he says. “Every passing class we find that students are more often punished for expression that is found via Twitter, Facebook or YouTube posts than they are for expression that happens in the traditional campus quad.”

Creeley says that it is hard for colleges to draw the line when it comes to their roles in managing its students’ social media usage.

However, he says both students and colleges have a responsibility for what is expressed via social media, and how.

“I think it’s hard to draw a clear line in the sand that says this speech is fair game for university monitoring, this isn’t,” Creeley says. “I think there’s a dual responsibility for both students and faculty. On the one hand, recognize that if you have a public Twitter or Facebook account, the public can see it. But, I think the responsibility really lies with the campus administrators that hold the power to punish students for their expression.

“I think there needs to be recognition that just because we have a new technological means of communicating, it doesn’t mean that the First Amendment has changed,” he says. “The First Amendment has adapted through the centuries to accommodate new methods of talking to each other. Just because we are now conversing via Twitter instead of the telegram, doesn’t mean that certain speech is now able to be punished in ways that it wasn’t before.”

Creeley also says that schools like the University of Tulsa get defensive about negative publicity via social media because they feel attacked or cast in an unattractive light.

“I think in both the Tulsa situation and many of the cases we see here at FIRE, things get personal,” he says. “The administrators invested in a particular case feel personally attacked or personally criticized and react accordingly, or they feel it’s their job to silence that critic and protect the brand of their school.”

Tips to Nurturing the Relationship Between Students, Colleges and Social Media

Don’t delete ugly comments

Creeley says that colleges should refrain from deleting any negative comments on social media that pertain to them.

He says when colleges delete these comments, it makes them vulnerable to more criticism, and it looks like they are hiding something.

“Colleges try to maintain their corporate sheen online,” Creeley says. “They want to establish their brand and make sure they’re putting their best foot forward. But when we issued our press release taking Tulsa to task for how they had handled this particular situation, instead of answering the questions that critics had, they deleted them. I think that’s a losing tactic because it only invited more scrutiny.”

Get the conversation about social media started

Creeley says college administrators and faculty should openly discuss social media expression with their students.

Doing so sets the self-expression standards and expectations straight, and reduces the appearance of negative comments and unfair repercussions.

“Talking to your faculty and students beforehand about the protections you’ll give online expressions is extremely important,” Creeley says. “Make sure everybody’s on the same page and making sure your policies respect the First Amendment, or if you’re a private university like Tulsa, that your policies respect the promises of free expression that you’ve made to your students.”

Learn from other colleges’ mistakes and successes

Creeley says colleges should study how their peers have handled a scandalous social media situation.

He says watching how other colleges react will help an institution decide what actions work, and which ones do not.

“Learn from other schools,” Creeley says. “See how other schools have responded to controversial online expression and take some cues from it. See what’s worked, see what hasn’t worked.”

Understand the relationship between social media and the college experience

Walker says that colleges should educate themselves on how and why students utilize social media, and find ways to support that relationship.

He says that college students are paying their schools top dollar to get an education, and that colleges should work with students to ensure their experience is favorable, even with social media usage.

“The mission [of college] is to be at a place where people exchange ideas and criticize one another,” Walker says. “To police people’s accounts to the point of shutting down criticism of the institution or its community members is tantamount to cutting the heart out of the idea of higher education as a place of discussion.”

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