US court rejects Internet free speech cases

protection for public school students on the Internet, Herald Sun reports.

In all three cases, students were punished for posting obscene and derogatory information about students or school officials using their home computers.

In one "cyber-bullying" case, a female high school student, in West Virginia, was punished for posting crude and insulting information in 2005 about another female student on a fake page on the MySpace social media site, AFP notes.

A US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in July 2011 that officials at Musselman High School could punish the perpetrator without violating her free speech rights because they could reasonably believe that those comments would create a disruption at school.

The cases offered the justices a chance to update their student speech rulings for the digital age. A 1969 ruling says schools cannot punish non-disruptive political speech, while a 1986 decision lets administrators punish lewd or vulgar student speech, Bloomberg Businessweek says.

The cyber-bullying case concerned Kara Kowalski, who was suspended for five days and kicked off the cheerleading squad at her high school, in Berkeley County, West Virginia, for creating a MySpace page dedicated to ridiculing a fellow student in 2005. The page was called “S.A.S.H.”, which Kowalski said stood for “Students Against Sluts' Herpes”.