Criminalizing Meanness

Last week, the town of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., made it a crime to use the Internet to make another person feel bad about himself. The measure is the result of an incident in October 2006 in which a girl named Megan Meier committed suicide, purportedly because she was subject to a series of insults and attacks from people she had befriended on the “social networking” site MySpace. The attacks were orchestrated by the mother of one of Megan’s ex-friends. This infantile woman created a false account, claiming to be a “cute” 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. She then befriended Megan, trying to get the latest gossip on her own daughter, until finally she turned on the girl and told Megan she was “a bad person and everybody hates you.” The pain was too much, and Megan killed herself shortly after receiving these very mean messages.

While this is certainly a sad story, hopefully never to be repeated, the town’s new law, passed unanimously by the Board of Aldermen, is the wrong reaction. The law provides for a $500 fine and 90 days in jail for individuals who engage in “Internet harassment.”

The original intent of harassment laws was to prevent discrimination, as in the 1986 Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson Supreme Court decision, or to stop threatening and anonymous phone calls. Even the seriously flawed 2006 Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act only punishes only those spammers who send e-mails “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.” There is no precedent for a broad stroke against hurting people’s feelings on a social network.

Unlike these laws, the Dardenne Prairie law has none of these issues in mind. And unlike a telephone that is disturbing and can ring, MySpace has filters and blocking devices built in to fight harassment—the simplest of which is to just stop using the site. A law criminalizing not-niceness is an unnecessary safeguard.

The law is also extremely vague. It defines harassment as engaging in a “pattern of conduct” that would cause a reasonable person to suffer “substantial emotional distress.” But what period of time results in the distinction of a “pattern” rather than haphazard nastiness? And what does “substantial” entail for the “average” person? Suicide? A few tears?

These vagaries highlight the problem with this type of legislation—namely, that it is arbitrary. If someone’s feelings are hurt, they can claim harassment. Of course, arbitrariness is endemic to the justice system, but our laws should not add to the problem; they should try to alleviate it, especially if aimed at curtailing free speech. Further, teasing and name-calling are part of every young person’s daily life. Learning to deal with that is called growing up and, if intervention is necessary, we usually call that “parenting,” not legislation.

The case is also flawed because it ignores individual responsibility within the family unit and leaps straight to the government to solve the problem. Megan’s parents (or perhaps even Megan herself) might have dealt with the problem by seeking help or limiting usage of the Internet. Adolescence is, of course, difficult, but the actions Megan took don’t really seem to constitute a “reasonable” or predictable response to the “harassment” she experienced.

The fact is that there are many people in the world; some lie, some are very mean. Legislation “protecting” us from these types of people is excessive and panders to an emotional story at the expense of the individual’s right to free speech.

Shai D. Bronshtein ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.