The campus free speech wall let anyone post, and one group taped over 40 messages overnight

Finley Lewis · 2026-10-09T12:05:03.665717+00:00

Last month at our student union in Madison, I helped set up a free speech wall where anyone could pin up notes about anything. I figured it would be a cool way to see what people really think, maybe 20 or 30 notes would go up in a week. Instead, one group came in around 2am and taped a single giant poster right over everything, covering about 40 notes from other students. The whole thing turned into a fight at the next student gov meeting about whether covering someone else's speech counts as silencing them. Has anyone else run one of these walls and found a rule that actually keeps it fair?

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The campus free speech wall let anyone post, and one group taped over 40 messages overnight | Campus Speech Wars - Free To Speak