USA colleges rejuvenating: Appeals Court: Colleges Must Censor, Block Online Services If They Offend Someone - [PEACE] - cypherpunks

22 Dec 2018

      Snowflakes rejoice and SCOTUS here we come after this Appeals Court
ruling that University of Mary Washington has failed to censor
"possibly students at the university, but no one is sure" from using
Yik Yak, some location-based pseudonymity app.

Hey, what good's a court (((they))) can't game?
[ For 'intolerant Marxist' values of "they". ]

Appeals Court Rules Colleges Must Censor, Block Online Services If
They Offend Someone
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-20/appeals-court-rules-colleges-must-...

 … Here’s some background:

 A location-based social media app called Yik Yak used to exist. It
 let users post things anonymously in a given geographic area, such
 as around colleges.

 Unsurprisingly, a lot of people posted boorish and offensive things.
 Even less surprisingly, people with fascist tendencies demanded
 their universities identify and punish those people.

 A feminist group at UMW took this to the next level by filing a
 lawsuit last year alleging the public university failed to protect
 them from a “sexually hostile environment.”

 Also named as a defendant was the university’s former president
 Richard Hurley, who allegedly retaliated against the plaintiffs
 ...by publicly defending the school against the students’ claims.
 I’m not kidding.

 The lawsuit’s other legal reasoning was not particularly convincing.
 The plaintiffs said UMW should have shut down Yik Yak by banning the
 app from the campus network. This would not have stopped anyone with
 a data signal from using the app. Which is basically everyone.

 A federal judge knocked down the lawsuit a year ago, saying that
 implementing the plaintiffs’ demands “may have exposed the
 university to liability under the First Amendment.”

 It wasn’t even clear the university had control over the people
 posting on Yik Yak, since they could have been members of the
 broader Fredericksburg community in the vicinity of the university,
 or just visitors passing through, or students communicating
 off-campus.

 Assumed but never demonstrated in the lawsuit: whether the speech at
 issue in Yik Yak was unprotected under the First Amendment. You’d
 think this would be the first thing the 4th Circuit would nail down.

 Nope!

 As analyzed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education,
 the Richmond, Virginia-based appeals court completely ignored the
 legal status of the very speech at issue.

 That was the focus of a friend-of-the-court brief filed by FIRE and
 other free-speech groups earlier this year. They argued that not
 only were the “yaks” cited by the plaintiffs “crude and offensive”
 at worst, and nowhere near unprotected “true threats,” but that
 their cited case law only applied to K-12 contexts.

 The university did everything short of violating the First Amendment
 rights of other students to assuage the concerns of the plaintiffs,
 the brief argued: It was anything but “deliberately indifferent,”
 the threshold for private damages under Title IX.

 The 2-1 majority took 57 pages to showcase its willful ignorance of
 First Amendment law, not only describing the yaks as “harassing and
 threatening” but explicitly rejecting a narrow remedy for the
 alleged problem
 …

USA colleges rejuvenating: Appeals Court: Colleges Must Censor, Block Online Services If They Offend Someone - [PEACE]

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