New Cyberbullying Bill May Damage 1st Amendment Rights

As the internet has grown ever more popular so has cases of cyberbullying. It seems that no matter where we go in this world, when we are around other people there will be bullies. At first glance many people would see online bullying as a ridiculous thing to get bent out of shape about. I mean after all it is just some idiot bad-mouthing you on the internet, right? Well unfortunately many people, especially today’s youth, put a lot of stock in the online social scenes that they can find. Chat rooms, forums, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The options available seem endless.

One of the most horrific results of these online acts of bullying are that several unfortunate young souls have taken their own lives due to the heart-wrenching torment that a few unscrupulous people have put them through. One particularly horrific case I personally remember is one from Missouri where a 13-year old girl hung herself after being befriended online by a boy named Josh. He turned out to be a fake person that was created by another woman to see what the girl was saying about her daughter. In the end the woman told the girl that the world would be better off without her. The girl promptly took her own life. The case ended in the woman being convicted of online fraud, the only charge that law would allow her to be prosecuted under at the time.

This case and many others has spurred parents and lawmakers into action to help protect children and teens against this different type of online predator. The desire for true justice and real significant punishment for the offenders is understandable. I, myself, have a sense of personal attachment to this subject and my emotions tell me to demand justice. To demand that these monsters be locked away and flogged daily and in general be forced to feel the same torment that their victims felt. But then my mind always has to remind me that we have to understand the scope of the laws we write and the cost-benefit ratio of it. I don’t mean to be cold or calculating about the subject at all. However, while we try to protect ourselves and the ones we love from new threats and dangers we must also remember that would could be creating more problems than we solve.

Take this case in West Virginia. Ars Technica writes about a new law being sent through the state legislature that would make it illegal to post online any false statements about others. A quote from it specifically says that it would apply to “untrue statements about another person which are false and designed to entice or encourage other people to ridicule or perpetuate the untruth about that person.” And at first glance this sounds flawless. As though this were a direct victory for victims everywhere. But there are several problems already with the broad language. As pointed out in the Ars article, it doesn’t specify that the person must know that the information is false for them to be guilty of the crime. While this is already a gaping hole in the law I also see a few other problems.

The first of which is that the broad language makes the murky grey area between opinion and passing information as fact a large target for lawsuits. An opinion can be false information, but the point of an opinion isn’t facts but expressing ones feelings. If this law were to pass then everyone would have to start being meticulously careful about anything they say on the net because one small slip up could become a horrible lawsuit. I am already envisioning the droves of lawyers salivating over this loophole. This makes anything up for grabs.

It also takes a stab at a cornerstone of the internet and that is anonymity. In line a(2) it states that it is illegal to “Make contact via the internet with another without disclosing his or her identity with the intent to harass or abuse”. Almost sounds like a shot at cyber-stalking, which on a whole would not necessarily be a bad thing, but I worry about the precedent this would set. This may lead to other laws that quickly erode at anonymity and the protection that brings online to dissidents and outspoken protesters. It is common practice in law to use prior precedent to make decisions in other cases and write new law.

Another problem I see with this law is that it is specific to the internet, yet lawmakers seem to forget that there are other means of electronic data transmission, such as SMS, that could also be used for bullying. What is more is that if the harassment occurs on a high school or college network and the crime is only committed on those intranets then the language that specifically says “the internet” could become another loophole for the law as long as the communication stays on that network. This seems like a big oversight and should be addressed.

Overall I think that lawmakers are stepping chest deep into an ocean they know very little about and are hardly qualified to fully understand the ramifications behind the laws the pass around it. I cringe every time I hear about a new law being worked on or passed that has anything to do with technology because it seems that lawmakers are generally older and uneducated in the ways and intricacies of technology. I worry that we are slowing losing more and more rights and are becoming larger and larger targets for greedy lawyers and corporations because of it. This law in particular seems to create more problems than it solves and I for one would like them to go back to the drawing board on this one.

Full text of this law can be found here: http://www.legis.state.wv.us/bill_status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=SB740%20SUB1.htm&yr=2009&sesstype=RS&i=740

-Pjerky

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Tags: 1st Amendment, Constitutional Rights, Cyberbullying, Justice, online rights, SMS, social networking, the internet