YikYak, like most other social media start-ups, emerged as the brain-child of two recent college grads that borrowed money from their parents as their first mode of venture capital. Fast forward just 24-quick months, and we have a company valued at $200 to $300 million, receiving venture capital from the big boys of Silicon Valley.

The YikYak app allows localized user groups within a mile and a half radius to post anonymous instant messages to other users on any subject they want. The user agreement is designed to keep the user's identity private, short of a court-issued subpoena or court order.

You see the potential, for harm, embarrassment, harassment and abuse, we're quite sure. Think: Twitter without the profile.  If you have the inclination to being a cyberbully, this is your app.

Due to its short microcell radius, YikYak is ideal for the college campus. In one recent episode highlighted by family law blogger Jeanne Hannah, a philosophy professor at Eastern Michigan University was horrified when a teaching assistant with a YikYak account showed the professor what her students thought about her and the subject matter she presented that day.

The professor was so distraught over what she characterized as defamation, verbal abuse, even sexual harassment, she is pondering hiring legal counsel. Forevermore, this professor will be thinking about what her students are up to on their phones as they sit, presumably listening, to her lectures.

The NYT describes YikYak as the "go to" social media feed among college students. Taking the bad with the good, however, the Times also claims the app has been used to issue threats of mass violence on more than a dozen college campuses, including at Michigan State University.

Reaction to the app's basic function of anonymous hyper-local communication has been mixed; among the several petitions floating around on the Internet, Change.org's petition has garnered over 70,000 signatures. This number pales in comparison to the millions of satisfied users claimed by YikYak's board of directors in response to criticism of the company mission.

For our part, we here at the Law Blogger have to wonder about the utility of an app designed to deliver anonymous communication within a hyper-local community. We are all for free speech, but if you decide to communicate threats, real or imagined, should you be able to hide behind the software-engineered walls of privacy?

The real chilling aspect to this is the high value put on such a company by Silicon Valley, knowing that the hyper-texting youth of today cannot wait to spew venom from behind  such walls.

www.clarkstonlegal.com
info@clarkstonlegal.com

Alabama Blogger Roger Shuler

On Sundays, the NYT often supplies this blog with grist for our content mill; this Sunday's edition did not disappoint.  There it was, referenced on bottom of the front page, ranked as the 6th most read article at mid-day on the NYT's web site:  "Blogger's Incarceration Raises First Amendment Questions".

Apparently, Mr. Roger Shuler, through his blog titled Legal Schnauzer, does not know when to shut-up, or to stop posting.  At least that is the opinion of the local judge who jailed him back in late October for his contempt of court arising within the context of a defamation tort lawsuit filed in Shelby County, Alabama against Shuler by the son of a former Alabama Governor.

Now, to be fair, Mr. Shuler is litigious.  When he is the plaintiff or the petitioner in a law suit, he rarely wins.  In fact, one thing at which Shuler excels is getting creamed in civil law suits; to the point where it has cost he and his wife the ownership of their private residence.

In his blog, Shuler rails -conspiracy style- against an assortment of conservative local and state politicians.  All manner of sexual and criminal escapades are alleged against the public figures in the blog, without attribution or reliable verification.

Not content with simply being  a noisome cyberbully, Shuler has filed law suits against the following persons and entities:

• his neighbor; 
• his former employer; 
• the local police department; 
• the county sheriff; 
• the lawyer that won the case against said neighbor; 
• judges that have ruled against him; and
• the State Bar of Alabama, among others.

This nutty blogger is now on the short-list of imprisoned journalists maintained by the Committee to Protect Journalists; he is the only, er, "journalist" from the Western Hemisphere and shares company on the list with journalists from Iran, China and Egypt.

We here at the Law Blogger think Shuler likes the attention that his jail stint for contempt has garnered.  Through his inflammatory and defamatory posts, Shuler may have purposely set-out to be the blogosphere's poster-boy for free speech martyrdom.

By jailing the nutty blogger, the local county judge has attracted criticism from First Amendment scholars from across the nation who contend that his harsh remedy is a form of prior restraint; a content-based muzzle rather than a matter of judicial enforcement of orders and decorum.

On the other hand, Shuler blogs about the former governor's son, Robert Riley, Jr., petulantly leveling bald wholly unsupported allegations that Riley impregnated a lobbyist and paid for a secret abortion. In the blogosphere, you had better be ready to back-up such words in the inevitable defamation suit.

Here at the Law Blogger, one of our lawyers had a probate case that attracted media attention when the Wayne County Probate Judge assigned to the matter jailed one of the interested parties for contempt during live proceedings.

The party found in contempt by the probate judge had been blogging about the attorneys and the judge in the case.  While one of the interested parties, also a target of the blog, was presenting oral argument for an injunction and a contempt finding against this thrash-blogger, one of the judge's clerks was printing pages from the blog and feeding them to the judge for his review.

In this case, it sure did not aid the cyberbully's cause that her blog roundly trashed the presiding judge that was conducting the hearing.  She was sent to the courthouse lock-up for contempt until such time as she could prove to the probate judge that the offending pages had been removed from the Internet.

Now that was a judicial overreaction and a clear-cut case of prior restraint in possible violation of the declarant's First Amendment right to free speech.  As a result, the woman was featured in an above-the-fold article in the Detroit Free Press the next day, holding her cat, broad grin spread across her mug.  The article was not favorable to the judge's contempt ruling.

Perhaps justice would have been better served in the Shuler case if the local judge stuck to the merits of the defamation case and just let the nutty blogger keep paying the high-cost of his ridiculous conduct in the form of damages, fines, costs, attorney fees, liens, and all the other stinging components of adverse rulings in the civil courts.

www.clarkstonlegal.com
info@clarkstonlegal.com