The Rule applies to:

Operators of commercial Web sites and online services directed to children under 13 that collect personal information from them;

Operators of general audience sites that knowingly collect personal information from children under 13; and

Operators of general audience sites that have a separate children’s area and that collect personal information from children under 13.

The Rule requires operators to:

Post a privacy policy on the homepage of the Web site and link to the privacy policy on every page where personal information is collected.

Provide notice about the site’s information collection practices to parents and obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children.

Give parents a choice as to whether their child’s personal information will be disclosed to third parties.

Provide parents access to their child’s personal information and the opportunity to delete the child’s personal information and opt-out of future collection or use of the information.

Not condition a child’s participation in a game, contest or other activity on the child’s disclosing more personal information than is reasonably necessary to participate in that activity.

Maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of personal information collected from children.

In order to encourage active industry self-regulation, COPPA also includes a safe harbor provision allowing industry groups and others to request Commission approval of self-regulatory guidelines to govern participating Web sites’ compliance with the Rule.

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She is also friends with the stars of the highly successful TV movie High School Musical, including Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron, and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody stars including Brenda Song and Ashley Tisdale.

In an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, she stated that she looks up to Hilary Duff as her role model. She also has many pets, including horses, dogs, cats, fish, and chickens. On January 29, 2008 Miley Cyrus announced her intent to officially change her name to “Miley Ray Cyrus,” her middle name reflecting that of her father’s. The name change became official May 1, 2008.

In an interview with USA Today, Cyrus was quoted as saying her faith is “the main thing” and is the reason why she works in Hollywood.

When interviewed by Parade, she added that she attends church regularly with her family.[18] In an interview with Christianity Today, Billy Ray said, “Being Christian, we believe in heaven,” and “We also had a great church, and when you give up your church, your pastor, and the community you are involved in, you’re making a big sacrifice. Let’s face it, Hollywood is a completely different environment than Franklin, Tennessee.”

But, beginning in February 2008, Cyrus and her friend Mandy Jiroux (who is also a backup dancer for Cyrus) have been creating videos on YouTube called The Miley and Mandy Show. The show, described as a “YouTube hit”, is said to be filmed for fun by Cyrus and Jiroux and to be entirely their work, with Cyrus and Jiroux editing the footage together. It is mostly filmed in Cyrus’s bedroom.

Now, for the (upcoming) September 2008 issue of Seventeen magazine, Cyrus stated she was in a relationship with Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers for 2 years, and that the two “were in love”. They broke up at the end of 2007.

Pregnancy hoax
On September 24, 2007, rumors began circulating that Cyrus was pregnant. The cause of the rumor was an image of a page of J-14 Magazine circulating on the Internet entitled “Miley’s Meltdown” and saying, among other things, “Miley herself confirmed the pregnancy rumors during a J-14 interview”. J-14 immediately responded saying that, “Someone doctored the “This Just In” article that appeared on page 16 of J-14’s July 2007 issue” and that “this story is completely fabricated!” The real story on J-14’s Page 16 magazine was about ‘Miley’s Gross Habits’ told by her co-stars on the set of Hannah Montana.

Seat belts
In her movie, Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert, there is a scene where she and her dad did not put their seatbelts on, causing her to be labeled by some newspapers as a “bad role model”. Billy Ray Cyrus later apologized for this, and said:

“We got caught up in the moment of filming, and we made a mistake and forgot to buckle our seat belts … Seat belt safety is extremely important.”

Vanity Fair photos
On April 25, 2008, the televised entertainment program Entertainment Tonight reported that Cyrus had posed topless for a photo shoot with Vanity Fair. The photo, and subsequently released behind-the-scenes photos, show Cyrus with her bare back exposed but her front covered with a bedsheet. The photo shoot was taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz.

The full photograph was published with an accompanying story on The New York Times’ website on April 27, 2008. On April 29, 2008, The New York Times clarified that though the pictures left an impression that she was bare-breasted, Cyrus was wrapped in a bedsheet and was actually not topless.

Some parents expressed outrage at the nature of the photograph, which a Disney spokesperson described as “a situation [that] was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.”

In response to the internet circulation of the photo and ensuing media attention, Cyrus released a statement of apology on April 27:

“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.”

The photographer Annie Leibovitz also released a statement:
“I’m sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted. The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful.”

On April 28, 2008, Vanity Fair published their full interview and photo shoot with Cyrus and her father Billy Ray Cyrus, as well as the behind-the-scenes photographs, on their website. According to the interview, Cyrus’ parents and/or minders were present during the entire duration of the photo shoot. The idea to pose with the sheets on was suggested by Annie Liebovitz. When asked if she were “anxious” about the pose, Cyrus stated to interviewer Bruce Handy:

“No, I mean I had a big blanket on. And I thought, this looks pretty, and really natural. I think it’s really artsy. It wasn’t in a skanky way.… And you can’t say no to Annie. She’s so cute. She gets this puppy-dog look and you’re like, okay . . . . ”

These pictures are from Miley’s cell phone; they aren’t quite as scandalous as her half naked pictures that popped up recently, but you can still see them !!!

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HitTail is one of the companies that does that for us; they track all of our visitors and determines which keywords our visitors used to find us and which of those would be good topics for blog posts.

They come up with a select list every once in a while (adding to it daily), and we thought we’d at least document that list for the searches of summer of 2008.

What we’ll do is scour the net for some interesting articles written on/ around these terms and post them on this site! So, if you can think of any other terms that reflect the types of articles you’d like to see, let us know! Just fill in the comment box below.

Then, check back in a week or so; in the meantime, here goes:

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We have more terms than these, of course, but HitTail thinks these are particularly “auspicious”. What do you think??

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Facebook is a failure waiting to happen, MySpace is a wasteland, and AIM is practically an artifact. O yeah! Did I mention Twitter is going the same direction? It is easy to play devils advocate, especially in retrospect. But Facebook is still a hot tamale in many peoples’ books. These internet ventures, and most others for that matter, share a common thread. They unify people for a moment in time with a new, well-structured technology, but they fail to foster a belief with users that supersedes their own corporate agenda - the belief that it is YOUR network.

Though Facebook started off as a social networking site, I don’t think they are really helping me network better than anyone in the past if they don’t have a plan that can last beyond the next fad website. Monetization is turning out to be quite the task for these social networks. In realizing they have a need to generate revenue, social networks that started out with the goal of designing a friendly user interface to allow users to connect and share with other users in new ways, have lost their core value that drove people to their site in the first place. The need to monetize is obvious to anyone who likes to eat, but hoarding information and users doesn’t help social networks achieve this goal better than pushing connectivity further. For example, users have to go to Facebook.com to connect to one another. I put profile information in, for the hundredth time, and start reconnecting with and making new friends, which is what I did on AIM ten years ago and have continued to do for every new social networking site since then.

So how about social networking sites giving us control over our friends, our profile, and they can just HOST MY NETWORK, instead of insisting that it is THEIR network? Facebook and others aren’t helping me connect to anything beyond their website and the widgets that they monetize through monopolizing code. While widgets allow smaller companies to put their stakes in a larger company’s soil, it isn’t opening up new connectivity for users. It is just giving other companies more connectivity to TAKE your information.

I want my friends to be with me everywhere I go online. I want a detailed profile that I can choose to GIVE to various websites I visit. After all, these are my friends, with loyalty to ME, not the likes of Facebook. They go where I go and if Facebook loses me, my friends will follow. Not because I said so, but because Facebook made them believe they were connecting people, not just now, but into the future as well. I’m sick of filling out profiles, I’m sick of making the same friends over and over. All these sites need to do is standardize my friends as a hosted OPML file that acts as a permanent address book, HOST my resume, HOST my rss OPML file, HOST my personal information. I want to sign onto any service and start communicating with the same friends that I have on LinkedIn and Doostang. I do not want to have to enter my age, address, phone number, and credit card info ever again. It is possible for Facebook to do this with the position they are in, but instead, they are busy conjuring up new ways of taking my information for money. I used to believe Facebook was a pioneer in networking, helping me to find friends, but I learned they don’t help me KEEP them. Until Facebook sets industry standards for HOSTING (not owning) my life, I don’t believe they will be around much longer.

Some would argue that, in order to more rigorously protect children, social networking sites should be more aggressive in their use of age verification. After all, age verification procedures effectively limit access to adult sites; but then, adults have various forms of government or business-issued identifications, such as driver’s licenses and credit cards. The problem in this case, is that there are no similar forms of identification for minors!

So, at base, there’s no accurate way to verify the age of any young internet user who wants to claim another age in order to visit a social networking site.

Most youth, over about the age of 10, know that it’s possible to lie about their age to register on a site governed by age restrictions. And, social networking sites are highly attractive to students in middle school, many of whom are under the age of 13. Many underage students register on these sites, often with the permission of their parents, but then, there are probably just as many who register without their parents’ permission.

It is important to note, when considering the usefulness of available technologies, that students can often use their school district’s internet service (either on-campus, at school, or off-campus, at public libraries) to access online communities or electronic communication services where they can engage in cyberbullying. So, it’s probably a mistake to think that a filtering technology will, or even can, prevent cyber-bullying or trash-texting from happening.

A school district’s filtering software can be set to block access to popular online communities, but a moderately intelligent middle school student can easily set up a home computer system that will provide the capability to circumvent the school computer to get to these sites or simply access a proxy site that will facilitate bypass of a filtering system…

Don’t believe me? Prove it to yourself. Conduct a Google search for yourself on the words bypass Internet filter to see how easy it is for students to find instructions on how to defeat any blocks established by a school district using filtering technology.

And, as if that weren’t already enough to be concerned about, it’s important to remember that students can also engage in cyberbullying by using cell phones or PDAs while at school. Anyone can easily access their online social networking profile using their cell phone.

Now, it appears that most school districts have policies prohibiting students from using cell phones during class, but in many schools, there are active programs teaching students to use personal digital assistants (PDAs) for educational purposes (mathematics, chemistry, descriptive statistics, etc). And, all the while, the prices of these devices are dropping rapidly.

The major emerging concern is how parents and schools will manage student use of technology, when many students have wireless personal digital devices that they use in the classroom for legitimate educational activities — but, that function outside of the school’s filtering environment and can also be used to engage in online social aggression.

In the UK, there has been a growing, and nasty, trend over the last year for teenagers (mainly) to film unprovoked attacks on innocent victims using their cellphones. The resulting video footage or images are then distributed to friends in an almost cult like fashion. This has become known as the happy slapping craze.

I see that the Washington Post is today running a story about online ‘Fight Club’ postings. While these, it would appear, are organized street fights between consenting adults, the worry must surely be that happy slapping will eventually crossover to the online fight club scene…

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I hope, by identifying some of the concerned parties and laying out some of the basic considerations involved, that this series will generate more interest in conducting reputable criminal background checks, as these should sharpen parental awareness and place teens ahead of the curve so they can act more responsibly.

That said, we’ll begin our discussion in the usual way, by defining a few key terms.

Part 1: The Slippery Slope of social networking
Also known as virtual communities or profile sites, a “social network” is a website on the internet that brings people together to one central location where, from the comforts of their own home (or basement, it depends), they can talk, gossip, share ideas, photos, videos, stories, their journals, make new friends and so on.

Some of the more popular social network sites include Bebo, Facebook, MySpace (which, I’m sure, you’ve heard of), YouTube, and Yahoo 360. More of these types of sites are being launched every day, especially catering to smaller niche areas (i.e., bodybuilding, sewing, specific colleges, etc).

Over the past few years, social networking sites have become especially popular among younger kids/ teens (8 - 16). Some, as a result of which, have unfortunately become popular destinations for cyber-bullies and online predators who intentionally prey on younger kids.

Internet safety expert Nancy Willard, and author of the newly released, Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats, and Distress, gives parents and others the tools they need to help keep their children and teens safe from online threats such as sexual predators, pornography, and cyberbullies.

“Online communications,” she explains, “can be extremely cruel and vicious. They can cause great emotional harm and can take place 24/7. Damaging text and images can be widely disseminated and impossible to fully remove.”

Willard doesn’t lead parents to believe they can fully prevent their children from using these sites, but they can use positive, practical strategies (including criminal checks) to teach their children to make safer, more responsible choices online.

On the one hand, her book spends considerable time explaining to parents the dangers that lurk online; on the other, it shows parents that the best way to protect their children is to give them the information and strategies to make good choices, and to simply remain engaged with what their children are doing online.

I’m not sure about you, but I have small children in my family. I was not blessed with children of my own, but have nieces and nephews who are all affected by the ways their friends and neighbors handle themselves. Technology’s not the culprit, no more than it’s ever been. It’s people who use poor judgment with whatever technology is at their disposal, and sometimes, they commit unspeakable acts of violence on innocent others. None of us want to see these things happen, but if we don’t talk about them responsibly and before-the-fact, we just set ourselves up for whatever comes down the pike. I believe we can do better than that.

If you feel likewise, take a quick minute while you’re here, and leave a comment below. Voice your anger, your outrage, your interest, your questions, whatever — or are you one of those people who just want to rely on the rest of us to do all the heavy lifting, while you sit back and not even care whether we fail our youth by not schooling them properly on something as fundamental as “how to play nice with their neighbors”? Tell the truth!

“Nowadays, virtually all kids have cell phones, many of them have computers, and they’re now able to make and stay in relationships, using Facebook and other social+networking" rel="tag">social networking sites, which collectively will mean they won’t have to say goodbye to one another. Their list of friends can simply grow larger and larger and, for a lot of them, they’ll probably stay in touch… Not all, but let’s just say a lot of them will. And, years later, what will they be like??”

The point I was trying to make was that I’ve grown a lot (socially, psychologically, intellectually) while staying out of touch with a lot of the people who I had previously allowed (taking personal responsibility here) to limit my thinking, influence my values, etc. such that keeping my distance from them has given me time/ space to grow in ways I might not have grown otherwise.

I’m sure that a lot of those same people have influenced me in positive ways as well, but had it not been for the distance, I might not have grown on my own. I think it would have been sad to have not had the opportunity to grow in my own way, and in my own time.

I liken someone’s socio-psychological growth, metaphorically, to the growth of a bean stalk. If you grow a bean stalk next to a stick, it’ll grow up nice and strong alongside that stick. You tie it to the stick and it gives the bean something to lean on. However, if you grow a plant without that stick, it’ll still grow, probably not as straight and tall, but however much it grows, it will have done so on its own. Now, if you take the stick away from the first plant, it’ll probably fall because it’s growth was predicated on leaning. The second plant never had anything to lean on, so its growth was more autonomous.

We don’t really know what will happen in our lives, so oftentimes, when a situation develops beyond our control, where we’re no longer able to lean on those who’ve always been there for us . . . we either crumble (because we never learned how to take care of ourselves), or we thrive (because we learned how to live without the support of others).

I wonder how the current generation will develop/ mature as time goes on, insofar as they’re not allowing themselves the same kind of distance from close associates that I had, which led to a lot of growth — a lot a good growth.

In the end, I expect they’ll do just fine. They always do. I just wonder about these kinds of things sometimes because there’s a lot of people from my past who, quiet as it’s kept, I don’t really care to get back in touch with. I’d like to know that they’re doing alright, but beyond that, I can only think there’s a good reason why we haven’t stayed in touch over the years — and I’m comfortable with whatever that reason might be, .

After all, I’m no longer single. I’m a happily married man, and (like most happily married men) I don’t live the way I used to live. I don’t think the way I used to think. I’m 1000 times more responsible and in control of myself than ever before, and when I engage certain personalities from the past, they remind me of a time when none of this was true about me; a time when I had a lot less to be proud of. It’s not anything to do with social networking privacy issues; I feel comfortably secure in where I’m at these days, and I work for myself; I just don’t feel as if I have very much in common with them any more.

So my thinking has simply been to “let sleeping dogs lie”; like the Beatles used to say, “Let it be.” There’s a lot to be said for social networking, no doubt, but apparently there’s a lot to be said for the lack of social networking also. In the end, it still appears that we’ll make of our lives what we will, despite our greatest technological challenges and/ or discoveries. I don’t know for sure. I’m not that smart.

What I do know is that I’ll remain on Facebook. I’ll just remain mindful of what I am and of what I’m becoming, rather than what I was.

Like most people, I’ve been adding new friends/ people from the past, people from college and high school. I’ve been looking at their faces, their profiles, and wondering what I would say to them after so many years have passed.

The main thing is that by engaging my memories about them, and what they meant to me — it all just reminds me of how much I’ve grown since then. I mean, we’re talking 30 years since high school and 25 years since college.

I got friends out there who are now grandparents, and interestingly — most of them, when I look at their profiles, have anywhere from a few to maybe a dozen so-called “friends.” Then, of course, there are the youngsters that I know also, nephews and nieces, people like that (they’re “20 something”), and I’ve noticed that a lot of them have anywhere from 200 to 300 friends!! Of course, they’re in college and they’re attacking it like any other fad.

For them, it’s cool to have a Facebook presence and to join hundreds of arcane Facebook “groups,” so their numbers will naturally soar as a result of their being involved with one another, in college, and let’s face it, Facebook’s only been around since 2004.

In other words, we didn’t have social networking sites like Facebook when I was coming up.

When I graduated from Carleton College (Northfield, MN) in ‘76, our school had just snapped up its first computer. It was not exactly the “talk of the campus” (it was more of an “interesting oddity” at that time); it filled up a whole room that was always refrigerated, and no one that I knew had ever actually “seen it.” Still, it was apparently memorable.

Guess that goes to show just how much things have changed in a relatively short amount time.

What’s worth teasing out, is the idea that I grew up knowing that the “school trip” (i.e., the whole “going away to boarding school/ college experience”) involved getting to know someone for a couple or few years, and eventually, splitting up and going your separate ways — knowing that you’d probably never see each other again for the rest of your lives! Heck, I finished college, grad school, my doctorate and taught for 10 years and, for the most part, things were still like that! We didn’t make associations that were “that close” because we knew, in the back of our minds, that pretty soon, we’d have to split up. There were no “best friends forever” (BFF); in fact, nothing was “forever.”

I mean, that’s the way things were, we all knew it, and though we didn’t exactly like it, we accepted it and worked around it — by putting more into the time we had together.

Nowadays, virtually all kids have cell phones, most either own or have access to computers, and they’re now able to make and stay in relationships, using Facebook and other social networking sites, which collectively will mean they won’t have to say goodbye to one another. Their list of friends can simply grow larger and larger and, for a lot of them, they’ll probably stay in touch… Not all, but let’s just say a lot of them will.

So, I ask myself: what are they going to be like when they get to be grandparents??

Because the terms “cyber-bully” and “griefer” are often tossed around interchangeably, I began the first part of our discussion by clarifying the term “griefer,” the second part by clarifying “cyber-bully,” and by explaining (in both cases) when and under which circumstances the two terms were meaningfully distinguished.

I will begin this section by introducing the legal term harassment.

Where Cyber-Bullying Becomes Harassment
We can certainly split hairs over whether we’re looking at a simple case of “griefing” or “cyber-bullying” or whatever else one might prefer to call it. But, whenever we’re looking at conduct that substantially interferes with the education or physical or mental health of a student, or that threatens or intimidates a student — we are at the same time, looking at what the courts have overwhelmingly held as “plain, old-fashioned harassment.”

Once the perpetrator has engaged in harassment, the law could care less whether they were doing so while playing an online game (as a “griefer”), or were just being malicious to a fellow student (as a “cyber-bully”).

Either case, where it constitutes a pattern of inappropriate, disrespectful behaviors, becomes unlawful when (a) enduring the offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued education (for the victim), or (b) when the conduct is severe or pervasive enough to create an educational environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive.

“Online harassment,” aside from occurring in an online environment, can still be construed as simple harassment. It can be direct or indirect, where direct online harassment would include threats, intimidating messages and/ or bullying that is sent directly to a victim by email or other forms of online communication, or by hindering the victim’s internet service, by hacking.

Chat rooms, instant messaging services, and social networking sites are all among the most popular venues for cyberbullying, and account for almost all instances of online harassment. Online harassment can even follow the victim home.

Two of the more important things we learn by looking at cyber-bullying from a legal perspective, is that (a) where harassment is found, the responsibility for creating a safe and respectful school environment is placed on the manager; and (b) schools have a legal responsibility to intervene when they know or suspect students are being harassed. One way to intervene is to punish. But, before punishing students, schools must draw a distinction between harassment and student expression (i.e., free speech) that is protected by law.

“. . . schools do not need to wait to respond to conduct until it escalates to a point where it may be punished. Schools may respond to such conduct in ways other than punishment. In fact, they have a responsibility to do so. For example, if a teacher were to overhear a student directing a homophobic slur at another student, she would have a responsibility to explain why such language is inappropriate and harmful. The teacher should also point out that if such conduct continues, it could be subject to punishment. There is no better way to prevent student harassment than to educate students about why slurs and other harassing behavior are harmful.”

- ACLU

By narrowly tailoring its punishments to fit the case at hand, a school strikes the proper balance between two equally important and entirely compatible constitutional rights — the right to equal protection of the laws and the right to free speech.

Insofar as my professional training does not lie directly in the area of law, I think it best at this point to simply direct your attention to the ACLU, which provides a model anti-harassment policy that can prevent harassment without violating student’s free speech rights.

Because the terms “cyber-bully” and “griefer” are often tossed around interchangeably, I began the first part of our discussion by clarifying the term “griefer,” and explaining when and under which circumstances the two terms are meaningfully distinguished.

That in mind, I will begin this section with a clarification of the term “cyber-bully.”

The Cyber-bully
Cyber-bullies operate outside the context of games, be they online or off.

Cyberbullying can include cruel jokes, malicious gossip, embarrassing information or photographs, and/ or Web sites designed to target a specific child or teacher. It can involve someone your child knows, maybe or a complete stranger. Cyber bullying is often limited to online insults about someone’s physical appearance, friends, clothing, or sexuality. But, some cyber bullies are more creative; they can be completely horrid, emotionally damaging but mostly, just plain cowardly.

Cyber bullying is the new way that bullies target their victims. It can involve tricking someone into divulging personal or potentially humiliating information and then sending it to other people online. Perpetrators use instant-messaging (IM), chat rooms, and websites to threaten, humiliate, and belittle their victims. Cyberbullying is primarily relational bullying — it takes place online, which for today’s teens, is the most social of social spaces. Instead of rumor being whispered in the hallway at school, it now is copied, pasted and forwarded.

Out of respect for all involved, the following extended quote was copied in whole from the commentary of a recent YouTube video entitled, “Megan Meier’s Death Linked to Friend’s CYBER-BULLY Parents!”

Should the adults involved in deceiving Megan, Lori and Curt Drew, be held accountable for their actions? The Drews have been besieged with negative publicity, and Meier’s death prompted her hometown of Dardenne Prairie to adopt a law engaging in Internet harassment a misdemeanor. In a bizzare twist the law’s first use could be to prevent possible harassment against the Drews!

Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. The final message Megan Meier saw on her MySpace account: “Everybody in O’Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you.”

On Oct. 16, 2006, Ron and Tina Meier discovered Megan had tied a cloth belt around a support beam in her closet and hanged herself. Megan died the following day.

Six weeks after Megan’s death her parents were informed that Megan was the victim of a cruel hoax on MySpace. The perpetrators were the parents of Megan’s one time friend. The Drews had concocted Josh Evans to get back at Megan for quarreling with their daughter. After Megan’s death, they even asked Megan’s parents if they could store their foosball table in Megan’s parent’s garage. Upon learning the details of what had happened to their daughter and who was behind it, Megan’s father destroyed the, “alleged” hoaxers Curt and Lori Drew’s, foosball table.

Because Ms. Drew had taken Megan on family vacations, she knew the girl had been prescribed antidepression medication, Ms. Meier said. She also knew that Megan had a MySpace page.

Ms. Drew had told a girl across the street about the hoax, said the girl’s mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter, a minor.

“Lori laughed about it,” the mother said, adding that Ms. Drew and Ms. Drew’s daughter “said they were going to mess with Megan.” Over the last year the Drew’s have had threatening phone calls, a brick through the window,a lawn job and paintball attacks.

This Wednesday [late November, 2007], officials in Megan Meier’s home town vote on whether to make online harassment a local crime. The proposed ordinance would make online harassment a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by a $500 fine and up to 90 days in jail.

Or, the telecommunications harassment law. Amended in 2005, the law prohibits people from anonymously using the Internet with the intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass another person.

aliceangel17

You can read more about this case on this website; relatedly, you can join a Google group devoted to exposing online predators and cyber-paths here.

In the meantime, it’s important to consider that those who engage in cyber-bullying are probably not thinking about the consequences of their actions, and probably believe they are smart enough to not get caught because of their presumed “invisibility.” From what we’ve read of Lori Drew (above), this was probably not so in her case (far from it) — but, either way you look at it, cyber-bullying is still a repeated attack (i.e., a harassment) on others, and chances are, if someone is being cyber bullied, they are probably also being physically bullied at school; as, again, we found with Megan Meier.

Long story short: CYBER-PATHS NEED TO BE VERY SURE WHAT THEY ARE ACCUSING SOMEONE OF! THE TRUTH is a 100% defense to defamation or libel. Accusing someone of defamation or libel when they are telling the truth, however, IS actionable.

While we are reticent to call “cyber-bullying” a crime or in any other way, to treat children as adults — we cannot hold them as innocent or otherwise ignore the damage they inflict on innocent others, damages which in some cases have resulted in suicide.

For this reason, we look to the law to understand how it views such behaviors, where it draws important distinctions, what it requires in terms of responsibilities, and what it provides by way of civil remedies. The final section of our discussion will take up the question of where cyber-bullying becomes harassment.

Because the terms “cyber-bully” and “griefer” are often tossed around interchangeably, I’d like to clarify when and under which circumstances they are meaningfully distinguished (at least for our purposes), and when they are not. General definitions, set in their proper context, will probably suffice for this purpose. Where such definitions fail to adequately reach, or address, problems involving physical or psychological damages, we will look to the law to determine (a) whether it has come to recognize meaningful distinctions between griefers and cyber-bullies. More importantly, we will look to the law to (b) get a better understanding of the types of remedies it provides where damages are incurred (Note: though it would seem to “round-out” our discussion to lie it alongside an actual case study, our blog format is not suited for such elaborations . . . so anyway . . . ).

Let me begin with a general clarification of the term “griefer.”

The Griefer
“Griefer” is a slang term used to describe a player in a multiplayer video game who plays the game simply to cause grief to other players through harassment. Griefing is a malignant form of emergent gameplay (see “griefer” at Wikipedia.org).

I think of griefers, metaphorically, as the annoying kids at a birthday party; they keep yelling, crying, and throwing things until you ignore them long enough for them to realize they’re not actually changing anything with their off-the-wall behavior. If you give them credit, or attribute any change to them, good or bad, they’ll continue acting out. In this sense, griefers are simply immature pranksters who only feel important when they can successfully frustrate other people.

The video below shows how a griefer disrupts a Second Life interview. They invade the interview with flying penises, and plaster obsenities and racist materials over the scenery. For this reason, viewers should be be over 18 years of age.

Griefers dedicate their online lives to destroying the time others have, while engaging in virtual communities; they are a sub-culture unto themselves. Griefers’ existence revolves around the idea that there is nothing online so serious that it cannot, in one way or another, be ridiculed or trifled.

The idea that SecondLife (a popular online game) is a “free place to live your second life,” is said to be under attack by griefers, but it’s the money makers who are worried because here, griefers affect their revenue streams, which is why those who have a vested interest in such games have turned to real world courts to settle their disputes with griefers.

Looking back on Wikipedia’s definition — particularly where they suggest griefers want to “cause grief to other players through harassment” — we find literal evidence that griefers intend to harass. And, while some might reasonably overlook the more playful intent of griefers as “good clean fun,” the money makers are not alone in wanting to draw a line. Countless others have been affected where griefers have chosen to harass innocent others, particularly those who are not involved in any game whatsoever.

This is where we distinguish “griefers” from “cyber-bullies” . . . the only question remaining, for purposes of assigning legal responsibilities, is whether such distinctions are at all productive?? I will address this question in the second part of our discussion, which begins with a clarification of the term “cyber-bully.”