Cyber-bullying, as it's sometimes called, hit the headlines in 2006 when an already emotionally fragile Missouri girl killed herself after the mother of a former friend created a fictitious MySpace profile of a boy who befriended her online but ultimately started e-mailing and posting cruel things about her.
Citron prefers the term harassment, which is also what the bill uses. "The term cyber-bullying seems to trivialize it," she said, "like it's just schoolyard pranks."
It's not. For one thing, adults engage in it, to pretty horrifying levels, as a recent story in Portfolio magazine details. The article, in the March issue, is about two law students who launched a legal battle against posters on a Web forum who made outrageous, and false, claims about them - that, among other things, they had sexually transmitted diseases, used drugs and had slept their way to better grades.
It was bad enough that any readers of the forum would have seen this, but because of search engines like Google, the nasty stuff could, and probably did, find a vastly larger audience.
"It becomes a bigger issue because once something is done digitally, it becomes a fossil," said Davina Pruitt-Mentle, director of Educational Technology Policy, Research and Outreach, which works on issues of cyber-safety, and whom Kipke had lined up to testify for the bill. "It doesn't matter if it's taken down - someone may have made a screen grab. So what is the impact in terms of future employment? Or college admissions?"
If you ever doubt that the Internet is basically the Wild West without a sheriff, you only have to check out a few discussion boards. Truly, anything goes - anything racist or sexist, crude or rude tends to emerge because of the cloak of anonymity that the Internet provides.
It's doubtful any law can rein in every last excess of the Web - sites like Google that transmit rather than produce content cannot be sued for defamation. And I'm not sure I would even want it to. You don't want to throw out all the great, funny, illuminating chatter out there along with the disgusting and hateful. You may not want to sit next to some of these posters at a dinner party - and surely they don't get invited to many, thus their need to spew online to be heard at all - but my guess is that most people are smart enough take what's on the Internet for what it's worth.
Still, once the talk turns personally threatening - someone posted that he planned to sodomize one of the Yale students - or, as in the case of the girl in Anne Arundel County, it takes the form of someone posing as you, that's another story. Citron said that while much of what is on the Internet is protected as free speech, more states are realizing that they need to target the kind of cyber-harassment that involves a true threat or causes severe emotional distress.
The Anne Arundel mother eventually got her daughter's fake profile taken down.
"But right now, there's no reason," she said, "that they couldn't do it again."
