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Proposed Legislation Would Outlaw "Cyberbullying" in US
physman_wiu writes "We all remember the recent incident of 13-year-old Megan Meier. Now legislation is set to be passed at least in Missouri (and possibly through Congress) that would make cyberbullying illegal. The new legislation (PDF) reads: 'Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.' Now, this seems like a great piece of legislation — until I get put in jail for some kid on WOW calling the Feds on me." Eugene Volokh is not impressed.
You know, if it wasn't for that pesky 1st Amendment, we could fix a lot of the problems that people think they have.
We could limit advertisers.
We could limit hate groups.
We could stop bullies.
We could stop lobbyists.
But, alas, we are stuck with the damn thing. Ooh, have an idea. We can pass laws to limit the 1st Amendment protections in clear violation of the Constitution. And no one will have the balls to take it to the Supreme Court. And if they do, the Supreme Court *may* overturn the law but we'll have stopped literally *tens* of cyber-bullies.
After all, USians have been shitting on the 2nd Amendment for the last hundred years. It's about time the 1st gets some love too.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
They stopped requiring that when mass media came around.
And/or simply 'Grow a pair'
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
... legislation requiring mommy to wipe your ass until age 18, at which time it becomes the responsibility of your employer (or the EDD if you are jobless).
"Fuck the Children!
What I'm talking about is this constant, mindless yammering in the media. This neurotic fixation that somehow everything, EVERYTHING, has to revolve around children. It's completely out of balance... The sooner you face it the better off you're gonna be.
You can't save 'em all. You gotta let 'em go. You gotta cut 'em loose. You gotta stop overprotecting them, because you're making them too soft. Today's kids are way too soft. For one thing there's too much emphasis on 'safety'... Kids have to wear helmets now for everything but jerking off! Grown ups have taken all the fun out of being a kid... Whatever happened to natural selection? Survival of the fittest? The kid who swallows too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own! Simple as that.
If you want to know how you can help your children: LEAVE THEM THE FUCK ALONE!"
Obviously some of the points he makes are exaggerated for comedic effect, but I think the underlying idea is spot on. Trying to protect kids from 'cyberbullying' is just stupid. There are assholes in the real world, that's just a fact of life. Trying to shield your kids (or anyone for that matter) from what basically amounts to name-calling will only ensure that they're not prepared to deal with people they might not like (something most adults have to do on a regular basis).
As the RIAA has learned (or at least should have by now) is that trying to persecute something like this will only help to make it more popular. The way I see it, there are two things that need to be done to reduce online bullying (you can't stop it completely, of course).
1. Keep people from becoming bullies in the first place. This is easier said than done and I can't say that I have any insight into how you'd even do this.
2. Make sure that the targets of online bullies don't play into the role of 'victim.' Most Internet Tough Guys act the way they do for their own amusement, which they mainly get from the reactions of the people they irritate. If no one bothers to even flinch at their efforts you can bet that most of them would change their ways or simply disappear to try their hand elsewhere. Either way it's a victory.
I was once a horse.
This law is a blatant violation of free speech and the first amendment. While I do not agree with "cyberbullying", we are talking about speech here rather than an actual physical act of violence. As well, it is much eisier to ignore verbal abuse on the internet, with block lists, or simply minimising the window, that a law is truly unnecessary. There are a class of crimes called stalking, but on the internet medium these can be fairly easily combated with the ignore lisr etc.
We should not have to live in fear of everything we say perhaps being misconstrued in some wa. That is the kind of society which this will lead to, where people live in fear basically of saying anything.
Be sure to hide your face as you walk out of the building, as you know most every square inch of any major city has a camera trained on it, right?
The 9/11 TV coverage pretty much showed you are not anonymous in this country in the metro areas. It was amazing what they got from *private* cameras as they retraced that one morons steps. ( ATMs, gas stations, etc )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This law just proves that our political leaders are complete idiots, at least the people deciding writing the wording on the laws.
Why the hell should we be worried about virtual bullying when we have real bullying to outlaw?
In fact, the best cops are usually the people who have been bullied.
Thanks to a Supreme Court decision back in the nineteenth century (I think), a company is a "person" and has the same rights. So what would prevent this legislation being used against sites such as "AOLsucks" or "Don't buy at Walmart" ?
Because defense lawyers would be too adept at arguing that "there isn't a 'specific' law against the alleged actions of their clients, and that the prosecutors are reaching far outside the scope and intent of the drafters of the law(s) in question". And some of the judges would probably agree with those arguments enough times to create precedences.
Look at all the grief the Supreme Court throws at obscenity laws when cases involving them get appealed to their level... people should just give up on passing those laws and find other ways, but they won't. Either the law is too specific or overly broad, and there really appears to be no middle ground for the Supremes.
These kinds of "cyber-bullying" laws won't help much, either, but it makes everyone feel good because "something was done". And they will tend to be unevenly applied, as well. Children of Mayor Dailey in Chicago getting "cyberbullied" while playing WoW? Better watch out... Children of someone who is not too fond of The Mayor? Good luck, oh, and, well, sorry for taking so long to plow your street or pick up your garbage... With the fluidity of establishing new on-line identities, it would take some pretty far-reaching steps to enforce on someone w/o throwing them in jail, and somehow I could see a judge having something to say about the overreaching of the authorities and the punitive nature of any judgments against the scale of the (alleged) criminal behavior...
These kinds of laws are kind of like magnetic yellow ribbons on cars & such.
Does the dragging death of the guy in Texas really need "hate crime" laws? Well, no, but yes, they were passed in Texas. However, legislatures giving the judges the ability to weigh in on the punishment phase taking the nature of the crimes (including criteria that are involved with hate crimes) to increase penalties would make more sense, as would allowing the prosecution to seek special status on the charges, like in many jurisdictions involving a potential death penalty prosecution.
I became a comedian.
It might be me, but if I knew my kid had problems with depression, as this girls mother has said she did, I wouldn't be letting them spend much time online, particularly unsupervised.
If I had kids, they'd hate me. Keyloggers FTW, accounts w/ passwords I know. As they got older I'd get less restrictive, but I would understand it is not the worlds job to watch my kids.
No sig for you!!
This is something I've put a lot of mental effort towards understanding, as I used to feel the exact same as you. The issue, though, is much more complex online than it is in real life. For example, online someone has the capabilities of impersonating you and making, say, libelous claims about your person, which is not a luxury that your regular run-of-the-mill bully could accomplish. Think fake online Facebook profiles, MySpace ads, etc. that offer real pictures of you, information about your life, and more.
Cyberbullying, I believe, is a real issue. I've never been subjected to it, thankfully, but I can imagine that, to a teenager, it can be especially damaging, and even more so than real life bullying given how important the internet has grown to be for teenage social interaction.
Maybe that "fat kid" shouldn't be so focused on himself or his studies that he forgets to exercise or that people are different.
I wasn't bullied in high school. I got into a few shouting matches, shoved a few times, but overall, it wasn't bad. The kids who had it bad? They were the ones who THOUGHT they were smarter than everyone else, and didn't realize that answering every question the teacher asked was just rubbing everyone else's face in it. I knew the answer too, but there was no reason for me to answer EVERYTHING. That's why I was friends with most of the "bullies", and the other kids were targets.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Sure. I was beaten up at school on a regular base until I had enough and, finally standing on higher ground than my constant bully, I kicked a few teeth out of his face.
The result was that I got dragged in front of the principal and got to hear a rather unpleasant lecture how I should not do that. Complaining that I reported repeatedly that he kept punching and kicking me without any result didn't faze him. Instead I was sent home for a few weeks, only to get more heat from my dad (who tried the "grow a pair" approach first).
This experience taught me a few valuable lessons:
1. Don't rely on due process, it doesn't work. If you get wronged, you're on your own.
2. Don't rely on your family, for when you apply their advice, you are wrong.
3. Find people who have the same problem you do. After that incident, I had quite a few good friends.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then it's a good excuse to start requiring some kind of "internet ID" from everyone, so people can't evade internet laws and internet tax, and of course can be tracked should they voice "questionable" ideas. Or did you think this law was really supposed to reduce online bullying? If it was, why does it only apply to online bullying when real life bullying is far more a concern (because, well, that usually comes along with bodily harm rather than just emotional)?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is also about the bully spreading semi-plausible rumours in the Internet to relative strangers. Now again the bully could go to the street and yell the same rumours to everybody who passes by, but that would actually make the bully look like a lunatic. But again, using the Internet, the bully suddenly can do this successfully, and anonymously too.
Even "growing a pair" doesn't really help against Internet bullying, since you might not even know who the real culprit is, if the bully doesn't want you to.
I don't know if this law is any kind of solution, but at least it tries to address a real problem.
To controlling and censoring everything on the internet, if this comes to pass, soon, you can be jailed for 20 years for "unamerican speech" locking the internet down in the US and creating the great US corporate Intranet.
What's sick about the law, and I think Megan Meier's parents are blinded by the fact they lost their daughter, so blinded that they fail to remember exactly what killed her. Not a child, but a fully grown adult. Her neighbor in fact, the mother of a former best friend of the girl.
They're those typical butthurt parents who want justice regardless of how many toes they step on, no matter how many people are hurt by it, they're selfish and blind, and politicians love people like this as it helps get unconstitutional laws like this passed.
If it gets passed, They better build a shitload of new prisons, hell, find a relatively empty state, give all the residents money for the land, and build a massive prison complex that takes up a majority of the state, or the entire state, because you're not going to have enough room to imprison all those people.
Actually, let's forget prisons, as they cost too much and start killing people, kill anyone who says anything someone else doesnt like, yeah, that way, all they have to do is dig mass graves. Now, that isnt economical, better idea, give everyone guns and let them sort it out, Morticians would benefit greatly from this. There, got your economy part fixed.
Now, on to the issue of banning guns...oh wait.
Seriously this is all a bandaid fix to a bigger more destructive problem in society, the fact kids are not to be punished for their actions, or else the state takes them away, and are encouraged not to fight or defend themselves against bullies who always get around the rules no matter what they do, so now you have the emotionally weak who wont even defend themselves because they were raised to rely on someone else to do their fighting for them, vs. the outright insidious, unpunished assholes of life who disregard the rules and the laws and dont get punished by the people who are supposed to stop them, because even they fear them.
The point is, this law is not going to work as advertised, it's going to open a whole new set of problems, and these bullies, instead of harassing their victims, will turn around and use this very same law against them by claiming they're being harassed and will make up chat transactions and myspace pages against themselves to get anyone they want to ruin put in jail.
*golf claps*
This isn't about your little guy getting beaten up by bullies at school (that's still pretty much legal, at least this law doesn't address it at all). It's about being called names on the internet.
No, actually it's about Megan Meier who committed suicide after being harassed by a 49 year-old woman named Lori Drew. Missouri prosecutors decided there was no legal basis to pursue Drew for her acts; this bill is the result.
The real concern isn't this bill, but the Federal indictment against Drew in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. Drew is being prosecuted under anti-hacking statutes because she violated MySpace's Terms of Service and impersonated a teen-aged boy in order to carry out her harassment. I'm much more concerned with establishing a Federal precedent that website operators' Terms of Service can be backed up by Federal law than I am about this Missouri law. Of course my submission on the LA case here was rejected; I guess it wasn't as easy to laugh at as the Missouri bill.
I actually just had the same sort of experience but in modern times. My kids were the new kids (we just moved to the area) and were having bullying problems which were reported time and time again. I went through the due process, continually escalating through new people. I was amazed at the number of people that I actually had to tell, and at the lack of response - apparently everyone was so focused on working on FCATs (standardized tests) that there wasn't time to address the issue.
That changed however very quickly. I simply sent a note to the teacher telling him "I do not know who else I need to inform of this as I've already escalated through four separate people, but my son is still having trouble with Logan. I have instructed my son to use his Taekwondo and strike the bully if anything he has any other problems with him. Please understand that I have directed my child to do this and take full responsibility for his actions."
That same day, I received a phone call from his teacher, and the principal. The next day I met with the principal and explained the note. One week later, Logan was expelled from the afterschool program my son was also enrolled in. Two months later (last week actually), school let out for the summer. From the time I sent the note through the last day of school, my son was not bothered again.
Unfortunately, the proper process and procedure failed my son utterly. What my son and I learned was that the process fails until you are willing to resort to "old school" techniques. At that point, the school's unwillingness to follow up on your complaints becomes a liability to them and they will do just about anything you ask.