Opinion  of  the  Court  

THE JUDICIAL BRANCH OF THE STUDENT GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, KNOXVILLE Case No. 2016-6 CHALLENGE, PLAINTIFF v. HARDEE MORRIS McCANDLESS, DEFENDANT: SNAPCHAT VIOLATION Argued 5 April 2016 – Decided 5 April 2016

I On Tuesday, April 5th at 11:36am an election complaint was filed with the Judicial Branch against the Hardee Morris McCandless campaign. This complaint stated that the Hardee Morris McCandless campaign had created geofilters on the social media app “Snapchat” advertising their campaign which contained text reading “Sponsored by: UTK SGA”. This allegedly compromised the neutrality of SGA as a body, thus threatening the integrity of the elections as a whole.

II The Court received a significant amount of evidence from both sides of the argument. The Plaintiff made it very clear that the Defendants did indeed have a Snapchat geofilter that presented the text “Sponsored by: UTK SGA” during normal use of the app. The Defendants presented evidence that they had no reasonable way of knowing that the app would present this text during the use of their geofilter. Furthermore, the Defendants presented mitigating evidence that the impact of the Snapchat geofilter SGA endorsement was minimal. These mitigating factors included: evidence that the text disappeared after a couple seconds, evidence that the text did not appear in Snapchat “Stories”, evidence that the area in which the geofilter was available was very limited, and that it is doubtful that the text appeared in “Snaps” sent to friends. The Plaintiffs responded that there was no way to prove that the sponsorship image did not appear after the “Snaps” were sent out and furthermore that the image could have been captured and distributed through other means such as screenshotting.

III The Court rules in favor of the Plaintiff and finds that the Defense did illegally use the name of the University of Tennessee Knoxville Student Government Association in promotion of their campaign. The Court finds that a reasonable student at the University of Tennessee with no prior knowledge of student government could misconstrue this use as official sponsorship by the organization.

 

   

CHALLENGE  v.  HARDEE  MORRIS  McCANDLESS  

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Opinion  of  the  Court  

  However, the Court finds that the Defendants had no reasonable way of knowing that the text would appear alongside their logo on the app during course of regular use. Furthermore, the Court finds that there were several compelling mitigating factors in this case, and that the likely impact that the action had on the average voter is minimal. *

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The Court rules that the Hardee Morris McCandless campaign may not use a Snapchat geofilter until after noon on Wednesday, April 6th, 2016. If and when a Snapchat filter is used, it cannot state that Hardee Morris McCandless nor any other campaign is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Student Government Association. It is so ordered. NIEHAUS and MARSHALL delivered the opinion of the Court in which CLEVELAND, MCNICHOLAS, and WHITE joined. CROSS C.J., filed a dissenting opinion.