Myspace’s ‘drunken pirate’ gets fired, sues employer
Filed under: Employee computer use, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Security and law
A recent court decision sends HR a welcome reminder: You do have the right to protect your company’s reputation online.
While working toward an education degree, a college student began working as a student teacher in a local high school. From the beginning, there were problems with her behavior toward students.
The teacher she was assisting repeatedly told her to adopt a more “down to business” approach and be less familiar with the class.
The last straw came when the student teacher invited the class to communicate with her via Myspace — even though the school had told her it was inappropriate to do so.
Breaking that policy was bad enough, but what was contained inside her Myspace profile was even worse. There was a picture of her in a pirate hat and a plastic cup, featuring the caption “drunken pirate.” She also posted a note discussing a conflict with the class’s teacher, referring to herself as the “official teacher.”
Once parents learned about the profile, they complained. The high school and university removed the woman from the student teaching program. She sued, claiming the college (a public university) violated her right to free speech.
But her case was tossed. Why? The court ruled the student had no right to speech that damaged her employer’s reputation.
Cite: Snyder v. Millersville University
Comments
One Comment on Myspace’s ‘drunken pirate’ gets fired, sues employer
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J on
Fri, 29th May 2009 9:36 am
I’d like to see the court’s ruling on this because this doesn’t sound like it’d be an actual First Amendment ruling. Most likely what it’d say is that the student teacher broke policy and the policy violation was grounds for dismissal. It likely stems from that initially, rather than the court ruling that you can’t trash your employer online somewhere.
….
Okay, having read the ruling now, I feel justified with the above comment because First Amendment rights were part of the case, but also because she was asking to be granted her BSE and the judge found that having agreed to the conditions of the degree program, her poor evaluations throughout the course of the semester were sufficient grounds for termination. The MySpace posting was just icing on the cake, as it were. The judge deliberated on that sufficiently to ensure that a higher court wouldn’t hear the case on potential Constitutional grounds, but to me it seems more of a policy related finding than a Constitutional one.
I could be way off base here as I’m no lawyer.
