A beauty school in Illinois is suing a student for his “defamatory” comments on a Facebook site that encouraged students to vent about their instructors.
The Salon Professional Academy of Elgin, Ill., says Nicholas Blacconiere created a site called Tspa RobinHood that looked similar to TSPA Elgin’s Facebook page because it used the academy’s logo. The suit, filed in July, also says that he posted libelous comments about school officials on the site.
Print-outs of the Facebook page included in the suit show several posts by “Tspa RobinHood.” The site says it gives “the students a voice, because what happens when we need to be heard? Nobody gives a s___.” It encourages students to send messages to the site, which it says will then be posted anonymously.
The site uses an obscenity to say that a dean at the school, Aaron Aven, has sex with “teenage girls” and implies that he is HIV positive. Another post suggests that Mr. Aven and Gwendolyn Nelson, the academy’s admissions director, are intimately involved.
Another unnamed student is also a defendant in the case.
Case law on critical speech on Web sites is not definitive. In 2005, Justin Layshock, a high-school student in Pennsylvania, posted a fake profile of his principal on MySpace. School officials, after discovering the profile, suspended the student for 10 days. A federal court later ruled that the punishment violated Mr. Layshock’s free-speech rights. But in Connecticut, a court approved a school’s decision to keep a student from running for student government because she referred to school officials as “douchebags” in a post on her blog.
3 Responses to In Facebook Fracas, Beauty School Sues Student for Online Comments
11272784 - September 21, 2009 at 5:08 pm
From the minimal info given, sounds to me like the guy in question might fall under libel or slander laws.
paievoli - September 21, 2009 at 6:52 pm
This is why schools have to ban it and use their own social networks that they can admin themselves.
22266017 - September 22, 2009 at 9:16 am
@paievoli: Banning social networking sites? That will go over well.