The painful issue of cyberbullying has recently taken center stage in the ongoing debate about online child safety. Last week I wrote about Lori Drew’s acquittal on charges related to Megan Meier’s tragic suicide, suggesting that the judge in the case was right to overturn her conviction on a very expansive reading of the federal anti-hacking statute. While I think that decision was necessary on legal grounds, it’s sure to add “fuel to the fire” of calls for “action” in Congress. Thus, I emphasized that observers of the case need to separate their understandable outrage from the from the questions of (1) whether that statute was properly applied and (2) how the law should treat such cases in the future.
On the second question, Adam and I recently released a major entitled, “Cyberbullying Legislation: Why Education is Preferable to Regulation.” We distinguish among:
- Cyberbullying: kid-on-kid abuse online
- Cyberharassment generally: people of all ages using the Internet to harass each other
- Adult-on-kid cyberharassment: For example, Lori Drew’s alleged (but still unclear) role in the Megan Meier case
In a nutshell, we argue that education is the better approach to cyberbullying (Problem #1)—an approach taken by a bill introduced in the Senate by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and in the House by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) . We go on to argue that, while it would be difficult to create criminal sanctions for cyberharassment generally (Problem #2) without infringing free speech and due process rights, it might be possible to craft laws narrowly tailored to cyberharassment of kids by adults (Problem #3). Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.