This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 6, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Does a young person have the right to broadcast pointed complaints about school to her friends using social media and can a school

punish her for it and what's the standard for deciding when a school can or can't?

Cato's Thomas Berry argues that in this case now now before the US Supreme Court, the young woman will likely prevail, but for future cases, we should understand precisely why.

So this is a case about a minor, so she's just known by her initials in the case caption,

B L, and essentially she was a rising sophomore at a Pennsylvania public school and she had a lot of frustrations

going on in her life. The main one was she had

failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad. She also had a private softball team that she was not getting a lot of playing time on and exams were coming up.

So she was out with a friend, she was feeling stressed and she pulled out her phone

and opened Snapchat which for members of the audience who aren't as tech savvy.

It's kind of like Facebook but more ephemeral.

You send photos or captions to your Snapchat friends,

but it disappears after 24 hours unless someone takes a screenshot.

So she takes a selfie of herself, flipping the bird to the camera, and the polite version of what she

captions it with is F cheer, F softball, F school, F everything.

And that goes out to her friends. Normally that would have just been the end of the matter.

They might have opened it and chuckled. Someone took a screenshot of it, and it eventually

made its way to one of her cheerleading coaches

at this public school.

And the coaches were not happy about this message and her frustration with the

squad and she was banned for the year from the junior varsity cheerleading

...