Court Rules Parents May Be Liable For What Their Kids Post On Facebook

schwit1 writes Parents can be held liable for what their kids post on Facebook, a Georgia appellate court ruled in a decision that lawyers said marked a legal precedent on the issue of parental responsibility over their children's online activity. The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that the parents of a seventh-grade student may be negligent for failing to get their son to delete a fake Facebook profile that allegedly defamed a female classmate.

Comments

Why not? When you have kids..

[saloomy]

If your kids happen to make money, parents control that money until they are 18. They should also suffer the liability as well. You can't have one without the other. Either children are responsible or they are not.

Re:Why not? When you have kids..

[Culture20]

The internet isn't some zone that is free from libel and slander laws just because "it's on a computer."

Re:Why not? When you have kids..

[epyT-R]

That's right. Words != action... The word 'hate' has been appropriated way too much to justify witchhunts. If your safety is threatened, call the police. People need to stop equating every little bullshit insult as 'threatening hate speech'. They also need to learn the concept of hyperbole.

Re:Why not? When you have kids..

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

In this particular issue, the kids who posted this page had already been suspended for a few days, the school and the parents all knew about this FB page for 11 months! It would be one thing if the page had only been up a little while, and no one knew about it. But it was up for almost a whole year AFTER the whole incident had come out in public. The page was identity theft, making the "user" look like a slut, very racist, made her look "fat" via some app. The school gave the kids two days in-school suspension, but refused to tell the victim's parents who it was even though they knew. 11 months where two sets of parents AND the school administration knew what was happening but just...ignored it? Why the perp's parents didn't force them to take it down either means the parents endorsed the page or their SO absent that, even though their kids got in trouble for a FB page, didn't care enough to do anything about it for almost a whole year.

Re:Why not? When you have kids..

[Pfhorrest]

That's the Declaration of Independence you're quoting, which was not authored by precisely the same people, not subject to the approval of the same people, as those who wrote and ratified the Constitution, which was written 11 years later and wasn't even a document of the same type. Jefferson and those he presumed to speak for may well really have found it self-evident that all men were created equal, at least self-evident enough to pronounce the fact to the British while effectively declaring war against them. But that's a far cry from convincing a continental convention of representatives of legislatures of thirteen recently-sovereign states, legislatures elected by and representing, in part, wealthy land- and slave-owners, to enshrine such principle in the nigh-immutible supreme law of the lands in which said electorate lived.

In other words, it's one thing for a small handful of people to profess principles to their enemies; it's another thing entirely to get whole societies to agree to bind themselves to those principles. The fact that the professed principles of the founders were immediately ignored says nothing about the intent of those founders, and everything about our collective disrespect for principle in general when the rubber hits the road.

Re:Why not? When you have kids..

[PopeRatzo]

Not all bad words can be ignored.

Let's say a young women is raped and killed. I bear false witness and tell the police that I saw you rape and kill her. Even without going to court, I've gotten you arrested. I convince thirty friends to also say they saw you rape and kill her. We all tell our stories repeatedly to the grief-stricken father who then beats you half to death.

None of us did anything but use speech. Of course, it's the father who would be liable for your injuries, but would you really say that we weren't complicit by taking advantage of a man's grief in order to see you injured?

Remember, libel laws are civil laws, not criminal. They indicate culpability in damages, not the commission of a crime.

Not all bad words can be ignored. And bad words, on their own can do real damage.

The Actual Issue

[hduff]

The parents were notified of the defamation and took no action to close the FB account, which remained available for another 11 months. The parents were held directly liable for failing to act once notified, not for what was posted on the fake FB account.

It's all in the PDF of the decision linked in the summary above, if you're not too lazy to read it.

Re:You have it wrong.

[saloomy]

At worst, the parents are guilty of "contributory negligence" for not being software engineers.

Nonsense.

If your kid is in a park, grabs a rock, throws it at someone and causes harm, then you are responsible. Not the parks office, not the city, not the state, and not in the case of this incident, the school.

As a parent you are responsible for the actions of your kids in place of themselves since they are children. If you want to understand if the school should be blamed, ask yourself, would the school be blamed if the person was an adult? No. Of course not, that would be silly. The School had as much to do with the activity as the ISP serving the school. It isn't accepting full liability because you chose to exercise their facilities to perform your actions. Just like an ISP isn't responsible if you use their network to organize a murder (see Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act). The school is not liable, the person is. But, because the person is underage, the person's parents are responsible. Its as simple as that. You are responsible for your kids actions, you in place of them. Don't like it? Don't have kids. Having kids involves accepting responsibility for them. Its that simple.

So, no sir, you have it wrong.

Re:You have it wrong.

[Mr.CRC]

You are advocating that one person should be liable for the actions of another person.

This is sloppy without clarifying how the different categories of criminal vs. civil liability should be handled.

Holding parents criminally liable is intractable because there is no certain way to control a child or any other person. I'm talking absolute control. Any law that holds you responsible for forces that you cannot control must be invalidated, or else societal disintegration will eventually result. Such inherent contradictions predictably lead to disaster.

Furthermore, there are also laws making it felony child abuse to employ nearly any sort of corporal punishment (not that I advocate that) and laws are interpreted so liberally that nearly any attempt to employ physical force to restrain, control, or restrict the behavior of a child may be interpreted as felony child abuse. So our society wants a person to be liable for the actions of a child, and also makes them criminally liable if they try to use force to discipline a child.

Also, as has been mentioned by others, children are legally mandated by the state to attend school. Parents cannot possibly control a child while they are at school. Yet they should be prosecuted if the child commits a crime while under state mandated separation from the parents?

This is all complete insanity. Of course, I only expect matters to get much, much worse...