Many schools have policies aimed at curbing cyber bullying, but most of those apply only to school-owned servers and equipment, said Adam Goldstein, an attorney advocate with the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.
WKU has not yet drafted any language for the handbook or set possible punishments for violators, a school spokesperson said.
The school already has vague rules against “accessible communications deemed inappropriate.”
Cracking down on accounts that poke fun at the university is sure to draw unwanted attention, said Adam Kissel, vice president of programs for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
“I don’t know if it’s even possible to harass an institution,” he said. “If you disrupt them with a bomb threat, that’s unprotected speech, but if you make fun of [the school] in an obviously satirical way, that would certainly be constitutionally protected speech.”
Susan Ragland, web content editor at Tarrant County College in Texas, said college officials nationwide have made a concerted effort to weed negative comments out of their schools’ social media “universe,” and for good reason: Fake Twitter accounts—even if they are clearly satirical—can gain momentum across social media platforms.
“The truth is that the conversations are happening, whether online or in person,” Ragland said. “One drawback to the online phenomenon of satirical Twitter accounts or college meme sites is that it could potentially lead to something greater, whereas some folks may not be as harsh in person with their comments, once the ice is broken to begin the negative comments, others may join in, just for the fun.”
That’s precisely what happened one week after the WKU student newspaper first reported on the school’s Twitter policies.
Various tweets that included the WKU hashtag urged the campus to “use social networking to better the university, not control the students” and charging that “chilling speech should be anathema to any public university.”
Another tweeter told the university that its new social media policies would “end up discouraging potential journalism students.”
James Larken Smith, a local Texas radio show host, tweeted Feb. 27 that “Western Kentucky University [should] rename itself Censor Ship University.”
Violators of a new rule may face sensitivity training, but the idea is not to limit speech among students, said Stacey Biggs, WKU’s chief marketing officer.
“The point is not to tell them what they can or can’t say, or what they can or can’t say about WKU,” she said.
Still, critics have cried foul. The campus newspaper recently wrote a lengthy article under the headline “WKU trying to pull strings on social media.” And the parody Twitter account—temporarily shut down because it wasn’t clearly labeled as a parody—recently tweeted, “Campus police department has been renamed to twitter patrol.”
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