A school in Mississippi is getting a first hand lesson in the power of the internet to take an issue and make it go viral.

Constance McMillen, a student at Itawamba County Agricultural High School, was planning to go to her senior prom. However McMillen is a lesbian and wanted to bring her girlfriend along and the school has rules that all dates must be of the opposite sex. McMillen did what any American youngster would do and took the school to court.

The ACLU got involved and it looked like McMillen was going to go to the prom after all. However, the school board decided, in its wisdom, to cancel the entire prom rather than let a same sex couple darken its door. It issued a statement saying it hoped someone would host a private party instead, which isn't covered by discrimination laws.

Now this would seem to have drawn a line under the affair, and pre-internet chances are it would have. But the school administrators had reckoned without the power of social media.

This morning a Facebook group called 'Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom!' was set up to support McMillen and it went from zero members to over 40,000 in less than 12 hours. It's one of the fastest viral developments we've seen in years.

The news media is, of course, all over the story and McMillen has been on CNN, ABC and the rest of the networks all day, and now the BBC has picked up on it and the story has gone international. Famed relationship adviser Dan Savage caught wind of the story and published the email addresses of the school board and suggested people send in polite letters of complaint. The response apparently caused the school to shut down the email addresses of some staff, presumably due to the volume of traffic.

From a tech standpoint we'll  be watching this closely. Viral issues like this tend to have a short half life so tomorrow will be interesting. If this rate of growth doesn't let up this could be a major meme and it'll be interesting to see how the school deals with it.

12 Mar 2010