Free speech organizations raise concern over First Amendment rights on college campuses

Images have circulated of a few users on USC Sidechat — an anonymous platform that allows users to post among different communities — making threats to students who attended pro-Palestine protests.

“Btw we had people there photographing everyone at that rally. Yes u have been reported not only to usc, but the FBI. We are going to spend hours making sure terrorists don’t roam free,” one user wrote.

Another user replied to the post: “Terro**st on campus were protesting. I reported them to DPS, LAPD, FBI with their pictures and full names and majors.”

One student even requested that the Daily Trojan remove an image of them at a pro-Palestine protest on campus from its Instagram due to harassment for their participation. Threats and harassment like this are quickly becoming a norm on college campuses.

On November 1 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released an open letter to colleges and university leaders. The letter called on them to “Reject Efforts to Restrict Constitutionally Protected Speech on Campuses” and addressed recent attempts to limit the freedom of speech of student activists protesting the war in Israel and Palestine.

This letter was a response to an order from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues to shut down the chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at public universities in the state.

DeSantis and Rodrigues claimed these student groups were connected to Hamas. Citing the lack of evidence that these groups have any connection with Hamas, a U.S.-recognized terrorist organization, the ACLU affirmed that statements made by these organizations are constitutionally protected.

“We urge you to hold fast to our country’s best traditions and reject baseless calls to investigate or punish student groups for exercising their free speech rights,” read the conclusion of the letter.

At the November 9 meeting of the Florida Board of Governors, the State University System of Florida announced a pause in its plans to suspend these chapters of SJP. This was after they received legal advice warning of administrators’ personal liability in potential infringements of constitutionally protected rights. If administrators were found to have obstructed students’ civil rights, they could be held individually liable.

Instead, Rodrigues will be asking chapters to make “express affirmation … That they reject violence, that they reject they are a part of the Hamas movement, and that they will follow the law.”

“While universities can ask all student groups to commit to following the law, they cannot force them to expressly renounce a particular ideology or otherwise express views they don’t actually hold,” asserts the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “Students shouldn’t be compelled to disavow certain disfavored views in exchange for funding and recognition. Compelling speech violates the First Amendment.”

Fear and harassment at USC

Students’ pervasive fear is evident on our own campus, where some have refused to give their full names to USC media outlets when speaking about their experiences. Many say they fear for their safety, facing death threats and harassment for their beliefs and activism.

There are over 200 names of people affiliated with USC on the Canary Mission website, an organization dedicated to publicly identifying opponents of Israel, with personal information, photos and even social media accounts linked identifying them.

The former president of USC’s chapter of SJP also faced extensive harassment, which student organizers speculate was one reason SJP has not been active for the past few years. Trojans for Palestine (TFP), an online presence and organizing student group, was founded in October, seeking to fill the gap in a USC pro-Palestinian student movement after the recent dormancy of SJP.

The president of TFP, who was granted anonymity due to her own fear of harassment and retaliation, spoke with Annenberg Media about doxing on campus.

“We are constantly aware of the fact that we might be doxed, we have gone through protocols you know, we’ve talked to Title IX about it,” said the president, a junior at USC. “Even at our last event, there were Zionist students who were trying to intimidate us, who were taking pictures and videos of us.”

The TFP president provided photos and videos of these students at their event for over two hours, waving an Israeli flag and laughing at the names of Palestinians who were killed.

“It was absolutely an intimidation tactic to keep people from approaching the names obviously because they don’t want their picture taken,” she said. “A girl came up to us and was like, ‘Hey, they just took my picture. I don’t want them to take my picture.’ She went up to DPS who was on the sidelines and DPS told her that they couldn’t do anything.”

The president expressed that Trojans for Palestine does not conflate Zionism and Judaism, clarifying that they are not against the Jewish religion and have Jewish members in their organization. To her knowledge, no members have been doxed since the group’s founding in October and they are actively taking precautions to protect members.

A few years ago, a USC alum who was involved with the Palestinian justice student movement was sent a photo of a bomb with the caption “With Love” and an Israeli flag emoji, according to the president of TFP. The photo, sent by an Israeli student, also included the signatures of the Israeli students’ family members.

On November 17, the Office of the Provost sent out a university-wide email updating the community on its policies regarding free speech, hate speech and the First Amendment. The email pointed to the university’s website on freedom of expression to answer student questions and concerns.

“We designed this site to help everyone better understand free speech at USC,” the email read. “It’s geared to helping you understand, for example, how most hateful speech is actually legally protected, even though it may run counter to our values.”

Doxing on other college campuses

Doxing is defined as publicly identifying or publishing information about an individual as a form of punishment or with malicious intent — and without the victim’s consent.

Websites such as the Canary Mission make the information of supporters of the pro-Palestinian cause widely accessible and open those people up to widespread harassment.

These issues of freedom of expression related to Israel and Palestine are not limited to the Israel-Hamas war as it has unfolded since the Hamas attack on October 7.

In the wake of the Great March of Return in Gaza, in spring 2018, the ACLU released an open letter to Congress following the introduction of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. The ACLU was concerned that the bill would “chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism.”

“The bill is part of a disturbing surge of government-led attempts to suppress the speech of people on only one side of the Israel-Palestine debate,” the ACLU wrote in 2018. “Those who seek to protest, boycott, or otherwise criticize the Israeli government are being silenced.”

The same can be said of college campuses today, where students are increasingly facing harassment, silencing and threats of doxing for speaking out against the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza.

Joel Bellman, a board member and the Advocacy Committee Chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Los Angeles chapter, spoke of SPJ/LA’s opposition to this doxing in an interview with Annenberg Media.

“Free speech principles don’t mean freedom from criticism or freedom from other people objecting to what you’re saying.” Bellman said. “What it means is, those people can’t shut you down. Doxing and intimidation is one way of shutting you down in a public forum, systematically trying to exclude your viewpoint.”

One of the most prominent of these cases is that of the Harvard University students who signed and posted an open letter condemning the actions of the Israeli government. Almost immediately, students began receiving threats, which caused many student organizations to remove their signatures and distance themselves from the letter.

Students’ personal information was posted online, family members threatened and harassed, Wall Street Executives called for lists of those students to blacklist them from being hired — all culminating in a doxing truck circling campus with a digital billboard showing student signatories’ names and photos with the caption “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”

Accuracy in Media, the conservative media group funding the campaign, then sent a doxing truck off campus to the Harvard students leaders’ homes. Adam Guillete, the president of Accuracy in Media, said that the group intended to continue for weeks and even send the trucks to students’ homes in Burlington, Vermont.

The doxing campaign against one Palestinian American Harvard student caused an employer who had offered her a job to rescind the offer. She said to The Nation, “The day I learned that my cousin was killed by the IDF on a raid of his refugee camp, was also the day that I found out that the truck with my name and face on it, calling me an antisemite, would be sent to my parents’ home.”

A third doxing truck then arrived at Columbia University, where it displayed the names and faces of “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.” In response, Columbia launched a “Doxxing Resource Group” to support students who are experiencing this intimidation and harassment over exercising their constitutional rights.

Jewish students held a protest called “Not in Our Name: Stop Doxxing Now,” and used their presence to cover the screens at Columbia. Others participated in a planned walkout of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy class in solidarity with pro-Palestine demonstrators due to her pro-Israel stance.

PEN America, an organization dedicated to protecting freedom of expression by combatting book bans, educational censorship, disinformation and attacks on freedom of speech, also condemned these instances of doxing.

“Exposing students’ private information and intimidating them into silence is an undeniable threat to freedom of expression. We strongly condemn the harassment of any students, regardless of their viewpoint,” said Kristen Shahverdian, PEN America’s senior manager of free expression and education.

The organization has long advocated for freedom of speech on college campuses, dating back to the principles of their 1948 PEN Charter, and has followed the issue of Israel-Palestine free speech controversies, even undergoing a case study of the 2013-2014 upheaval on UCLA’s campus.

“By acknowledging and addressing legitimate concerns regarding racism and bigotry in the context of free speech debates, universities can help ensure that the defense of freedom of expression is not misconstrued as a cause that is at odds with movements for social justice,” PEN America asserts.

This philosophy is particularly applicable to the current situation in which freedom of expression of pro-Palestinian individuals is widely being misconstrued as antisemitism. As students oppose the actions of Israel, they face the same silencing and suppression denounced by the ACLU in 2018.

“Putting students on blacklists for future employers is a tactic that echoes the McCarthy era, and it is easy to imagine how such a precedent could be used against students across the ideological spectrum,” Shahverdian said.

The McCarthy era denotes another time in which fear-mongering and threats were used to keep people from expressing their political beliefs that went against the U.S. establishment. In the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have a list of communists within the U.S. government and used that threat to suppress political views contrary to his own.

“That era is so powerful to invoke I think it’s an era that we are very ashamed of in this country, where we weren’t embracing the free expression principles that we enjoy now,” said Sam LeFrance, the manager of editorial projects for the free expression and education team at PEN America, in an interview with Annenberg Media. “We definitely have concerns when it comes to things like doxing and chilling political expression, I think that is undeniable.”

Institutional suspension and suppression

Columbia doubled down on their stance November 10, officially suspending the Columbia SJP Chapter and Jewish Voice for Peace as student organizations for the rest of the fall semester following a peaceful protest art installation that was unauthorized by the university.

Students have even begun receiving handouts at protests from “University Delegates” calling for students to “stop your disruption now … you may be subject to interim sanctions from the Provost up to and including suspension for the rest of the semester.”

Students questioned the legality of these cards given to peaceful protesters, but Columbia’s position as a private university blurs the lines of their responsibility to protected free speech under the First Amendment.

“Because private universities are not government entities, they are not required to uphold First Amendment protections in the same manner as public universities. In other words, private institutions may impose stricter limitations on free speech,” states PEN America’s Campus Free Speech Guide.

Columbia was not the first university to ban SJP, nor is it the latest: Brandeis University derecognized its chapter of SJP on November 6 despite its own free speech policy affirming a responsibility “to prevent attempts to shut down conversations, no matter what their topic.”

David Cole, the ACLU’s Legal Director asserted in a statement that “it is precisely in times of heightened crisis and fear that university leaders must remain steadfast in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus. These principles are the bedrock of academic freedom at all universities.”

Free speech and hate speech

Jewish students have faced an increase in antisemitic messaging and violence, including the drawing of swastikas at Drexel University, Bates College and American University. A Jewish student’s dorm was set on fire at Drexel and an Israeli student at Columbia was beaten with a stick for confronting someone taking down missing posters of those kidnapped by Hamas.

On USC’s campus, multiple instances of people taking down hostage posters on USC’s campus have been documented on social media and some Jewish students have said they find these actions to be antisemitic and fear-inducing.

At the University of Pennsylvania, someone vandalized a Jewish fraternity with the phrase “The Jews R Nazis.” A Cornell student was recently arrested for a series of posts on Cornell’s Greekrank forums violently threatening Jewish students and the Center for Jewish Living.

PEN America denounces these actions as well, encouraging university leaders to consult their guidance on handling hate speech on campuses. The nuances of this topic are particularly necessary to understand because, as they cite, “Hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment and has long been cited as such by the United States Supreme Court.”

The ACLU concurs, writing that “Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible.”

However, both of these organizations — and the Supreme Court — draw a distinction when it comes to speech that constitutes targeted harassment or threats of violence.

“We would just encourage universities to lean into the education and the almost restorative kind of approach, rather than punitive, when it comes to these things,” LeFrance said in an interview with Annenberg Media. “If that hate speech is crossing into something that is violating the law, then universities also have the right to stop it.”

Lawrence Summers, an outspoken advocate against antisemitism and the former president of Harvard University, wrote about the need to maintain freedom of speech principles even when that speech is harmful.

“How are we now to reconcile our hurt, our fear, our rage with our responsibility? Not by doxing students and inciting mobs to threaten even those whose views we abhor most,” Summers wrote in a Washington Post editorial. “Not by seeking to shut down criticism of governments or countries to which we feel a strong connection. Not by calling for guilt by association or discipline or humiliation of anyone without due process.”

If you or someone you know is being doxed or fears doxing, access PEN America’s guide on “How to Respond to and Prepare for Doxxing” for assistance. Students, faculty and staff in higher education can reference PEN America’s “Guidance on Campus Free Speech, Amid Controversies and Protests Related to Israel and Gaza” as a further resource for protecting free speech on campuses. The International Women’s Media Fund (IWMF) also offers anti-doxing resources, including this short video “How to Quickly Become Hard to Doxx.”