Getting Expelled from School for Tweeting

Attention, high school and college students: Your online speech is not nearly as private as you think. [...] All too often, students face unwarranted punishment for online communications.

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There's a difference between the speech rights afforded to public high school and public college students, too. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that public college students enjoy full First Amendment rights. In contrast, the Court has held that public high school administrators may regulate student speech that substantially disrupts school activities; that is "offensively lewd and indecent"; that the public would think bears the school's imprimatur; and that arguably promotes illegal drug use.

So the bottom line is that public college students are just as free as the rest of us to exercise their First Amendment right to express themselves, whether online or off. And even given the more limited speech rights possessed by public high school students, high school administrators can't punish student speech simply because it's posted on Twitter or Facebook. Indeed, recent federal court decisions have suggested sharp limits on administrators' ability to punish high school and grade school students for online speech posted by students outside of school grounds.

It's important for students, administrators, and courts alike to recognize that technological advances need not come at the expense of expressive rights. Just because student speech is newly visible and accessible when posted online doesn't mean that administrators have increased power to police and punish it.

  

Yes, but can your parents afford a lawyer?

Really, this amounts to the same thing the US government is doing regarding whistleblowers: intimidation of others who might think of doing the same thing.