A school district in Minneapolis suspended a Rogers High School senior, the captain of the school’s football and basketball teams and a National Honor Society student with a 3.8 grade point average, because he tweeted in January that he had made out with a teacher at the school, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports.
Reid Sagehorn, 17, was suspended for seven weeks and has since transferred to another school in the Elk River Area School District (ISD 728), the paper reported.
Actually, yes
His two-word tweet, in response to a question asking whether he had made out with a 28-year-old female teacher at the school, was determined to be untrue. He said he tried to apologize as soon as he returned to school, but the teacher didn’t report to work that day.
“I never meant to hurt anybody,” he was quoted as saying. However, written communications like tweets or status updates, intended to be sarcastic or humorous, most often miss the mark.
Citing insufficient evidence of a crime, the county attorney declined to pursue criminal charges, but the matter may still be open for civil claims if brought by the teacher.
Misinterpreting tweets and status updates is common
In an article published online in December in the journal Information, Communication & Society, Kjerstin Thorson of the University of Southern California looked at how the social ambiguities concerning audience and reception of posts on Facebook shape the forms of political interaction among young citizens on the site.
She finds that some users increase their level of involvement in social media by “inventing modes of … interaction.” This is what Mr Sagehorn did, fabricating the details of an interaction between himself and a teacher. Others “suppress opinion expression by creating the sense that talking … on the site is a high risk endeavor,” which is probably what he should have considered before tweeting that he made out with a teacher.
The case in Minnesota concerns interactions of a social nature, not political, but the likelihood that tweets will be misinterpreted and interactions invented by young people is no less acute.
Ways to use humor in writing
There are two effective ways to use humor in writing:
- Make it clear from the context that the statements are not true
- Make sure all the statements are, in fact, true
An example of the first type, as the Supreme Court found in the case of Falwell v Flynt, might be to make what you write so unlikely that no reasonable person would ever believe it’s true. Rev Jerry Falwell sued Hustler Magazine and Larry Flynt, its publisher, for (a) libel, (b) invasion of privacy, and (c) intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The definition of libel requires some strict standards about actual malicious intent, applied from a New York Times case. Based on his statements, malice appears to be absent in Mr Sagehorn. Also, invasion of privacy has a different set of rules when the suit concerns a public figure like Mr Falwell, so that clearly doesn’t apply here. Nobody in this case is a public figure.
But on the question of intentional infliction of emotional distress, the Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court disagreed. The Supreme Court said Mr Falwell was not entitled to damages because Mr Flynt never represented the untrue statements he had made about Mr Falwell as “facts.”
I know neither Mr Sagehorn nor the teacher he said he had sex with, and I would interpret his tweet as a statement of fact. There is no context of humor or sarcasm, and the very short tweet must be taken at face value, which asserts that an act happened when it didn’t. Furthermore, Mr Sagehorn knew his statement was false when he made it, and it shows a bit of recklessness.
While some scholars argue that the Supreme Court misapplied the test for intentional infliction of emotional distress in Falwell, Mr Sagehorn’s case doesn’t seem to fit even that classification.
A tweet, which only allows 140 characters, doesn’t give the writer much space to establish a sarcastic context. That means, if you’re going to try to be funny in a tweet and want to make sure everyone knows you’re being funny, your only option is making sure all the actual representations you make are true, such as these, quoted from Thomas R Peltier’s Information Security Policies, Procedures, and Standards: Guidelines for Effective Information Security Management, available from Google:
- Avoid alliteration. Always.
- Contractions aren’t necessary.
- Avoid clichés like the plague. (They are old hat.)
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
If you can’t use one of these two approaches in your writing, my strong recommendation is to stay away from humor, and if you must say something funny, make sure it’s not something negative about another person.