Facebook User Arrested For a Poke

nk497 writes "A woman in Tennessee has been arrested for poking someone over Facebook. Sharon Jackson had been banned by courts from 'telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating' with the apparent poke recipient, but just couldn't hold back from clicking the 'poke' button. She now faces a sentence of up to a year in prison."

Comments

Re:No communication is no communication.

[DarKnyht]

I thought the story should have been "Moron That Got Restraining Order Kept Woman as an Unblocked Person on Facebook" myself. Seriously if you go through the hassle of a restraining order, perhaps you should add them to your block list.

Re: burden of proof / implications on free speech

[Golddess]

Are they? Forget AC, lets say both people have accounts, but they don't know each other. Through random chance, the person with the restraining order against them happens upon the person they are to avoid contact with, and in various discussions they get into heated arguments. This goes on for a few weeks. Eventually, the second person realizes that the first person is someone that they got a restraining order against, while the first person remains oblivious who the second person is. So now what?

I can certainly imagine what _should_ probably happen (second person informs the first person, _then_ if contact does not cease, the first person has violated the restraining order), but I'm finding it difficult to match that to a real life situation, so I can't imagine such a situation is already handled.

Though.. I guess a possible real life analogue may be something like the first person writing a letter that appears in the local newspaper, with the second person writing a letter to the newspaper in response to that, going back and forth using the newspaper as the medium instead of /..