Jeffrey Herbst USA TODAY

Are the First Amendment freedoms that have enabled social media killing the First Amendment on campus. Will they kill, someday soon, the First Amendment in our society?

There is no doubt that student protests from Yale to Missouri to Claremont McKenna College are striking examples of the First Amendment in action. Students are creatively using every imaginable social media platform, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many others, to advance their views. They no longer need to resort to traditional outlets, that may not have been receptive to them, in order to express their discontent. Indeed, one of the characteristics of the student protests (including the sit-in that I faced last year as president of Colgate University) is that these movements often occur outside recognized groups or student government. They are like flash mobs that mobilize quickly and fluidly via social media posts.

It is particularly disturbing and ironic that some of the current student protesters position themselves as averse to the rights of free expression. Threats to reporters, demands for “safe spaces” free of opposing opinion and interruption of speakers who hold unpopular views have caused today’s college students to be called “cry bullies,” both overly sensitive and authoritarian. The Smith College student protesters who barred reporters with a “neutral stance” from covering a sit-in are emblematic of this attitude.

Granted, these high-profile examples of censorship by the crowd are atypical of the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities, but the problem should not be underestimated. Far more pernicious is the self-censorship that is promoted at many campuses that may fear ending up in the media spotlight should students protest. For instance, after Brown University students prevented former New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly from speaking, many other campuses may simply decide that it is not worth the trouble to bring a speaker to campus who is associated with controversial police practices (in Kelly’s case, “stop and frisk”). This silent fear is potentially crippling free speech.

“Free expression for me but not for you” is simple hypocrisy. However, deeper forces are also at work.

Today's millennial college students are the first generation to have grown up surrounded by social media. They are used to expressing their views instantly through posts and tweets rather than sending off letters to newspapers or getting interviewed by reporters. Their ability to promote themselves and their causes is easily separated from an appreciation of the First Amendment guarantees of free press and free expression.

Then, there is the only partially realized dream of the Internet, which initially promised the hope of promoting exposure to a greater diversity of ideas. Rather, the sheer richness of the Internet allows almost anyone to stay in his or her own “filter bubble” (to use a phrase popularized by Internet activist Eli Pariser). For instance, it used to be that college Republicans and Democrats would have to interact with each other if they wanted to engage with politically active students. Now, both young Democrats and young Republicans can find vast online ecosystems where they only have to talk to people they know will agree with them.

Online discussions, often anonymous, also shape the attitude of today’s protesters. Nuanced, long conversations that respectfully consider the legitimate attitudes of others are not exactly a feature of many posts and are, of course, impossible in the 140-character world of Twitter. Rather, online discussions often degenerate quickly into personal attacks, with the more obnoxious commenters so determined that others simply give up. Lawyer and author Mike Godwin’s 1990 theory that, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1” was an early — in Internet terms, practically prehistoric — indication of the arc that continues to reflect many online debates. That some students rush to hyperbole and to trash their opponents is a reflection of the social media culture they have experienced all their lives.

As a society, we have not done a particularly good job of educating young people who have, without much societal discussion, grown up in a world where discourse is fundamentally different than previous generations. In a recent poll, thePew Foundation found that 40 percent of Millennials would accept limiting speech that is offensive to minorities. In contrast, only 27 percent of Gen Xers, 24 percent of boomers and 12 percent of what Pew calls “Silents” (those born between 1928 and 1945) believe that government should limit speech accordingly.

We seem to believe that since the Internet is, in many ways, the ultimate example of free expression, those permanently affixed to their smartphones simply will absorb the ideals of the First Amendment. However, since actual discussion on the Internet has been far from a model of reasoned discourse, we are seeing the norms of social media discourse transplanted from their electronic roots onto campuses. The results are at once a blossoming of expression and efforts that sometimes seem repressive.

We have no reason to expect the situation to improve without a much more intentional discussion of what First Amendment rights actually mean. I am also not optimistic that the desire to suppress others will end simply because students graduate. Their generation’s views of the First Amendment may begin to infiltrate society at large as their demographic influence grows.

To combat these ugly trends, the case must be made forcefully to people of all ages that the First Amendment freedoms are critical because those freedoms, rather than Facebook or Twitter, are what guarantee their rights to express themselves. At a time when the average age that children get a cell phone is as young as age 6, our society must start educating young people about the shared value of our fundamental rights at a very early age. Only then will we be able to realize the tremendous opportunities afforded by social media and address the very real challenges of this new age.

Jeffrey Herbst is the president of the Newseum. He was previously president of Colgate University, provost of Miami University and a professor at Princeton.