What happened to Megan Meier was awful and unforgivable -- a 13-year-old girl bullied and humiliated towards suicide by Lori Drew, a friend's mother. Drew established up a phony MySpace account where she and others would pose as a local teenage boy she invented, manipulating Meier and crushing her spirits, ultimately telling her "Everybody in [town] 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."
Megan wrote back, "You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over." That same afternoon, she hanged herself in her bedroom.
This, however, is not the answer:
111th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 1966
To amend title 18, United States Code, with respect to cyberbullying.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
April 2, 2009
Ms. LINDA T. SANCHEZ of California (for herself, Ms. KAPTUR, Mr. YARMUTH, Ms. ROYBAL-ALLARD, Mrs. CAPPS, Mr. BISHOP of New York, Mr. BRALEY of Iowa, Mr. GRIJALVA, Mr. HARE, Mr. HIGGINS, Mr. CLAY, Mr. SARBANES, Mr. DAVIS of Illinois, Mr. COURTNEY, and Mr. KIRK) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
A BILL
To amend title 18, United States Code, with respect to cyberbullying.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act'.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
Congress finds the following:
[Blah blah blah cyberbullying is bad] ....
SEC. 3. CYBERBULLYING.
(a) In General- Chapter 41 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`Sec. 881. Cyberbullying
`(a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
`(b) As used in this section--
`(1) the term `communication' means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user's choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received; and
`(2) the term `electronic means' means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.'.
That's correct: if you repeatedly make posts on this site that intending to harass or cause substantial emotional distress to another person, and do this in a "severe, repeated, and hostile" way -- gosh, did some of us do this to Joe Lieberman or George Allen? -- under a plain reading of this statute you could go to jail for up to two years.
Notice, too, that there's no minimum level of damage in the bill -- it doesn't require that the cyberbullying results in death, or severe emotional harm. All it requires is that the speaker have bad intent. Other behavior swept into this bill, per Eugene Volokh, includes:
- The politician votes the wrong way. I think that's an evil, tyrannical vote, so I repeatedly and harshly condemn the politician on my blog, hoping that he'll get very upset (and rightly so, since I think he deserves to feel ashamed of himself, and loathed by others). I am transmitting a communication with the the intent to cause substantial emotional distress, using electronic means (a blog) "to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior." (I might also be said to be intending to "harass" -- who knows, given how vague the term is? -- but the result is the same even if we set that aside.) Result: I am a felon, subject to the usual utter uncertainty about what "severe" means.
- A company delivers me shoddy goods, and refuses to refund my money. I e-mail it several times, threatening to sue if they don't give me a refund, and I use "hostile" language. I am transmitting a communication with the intent to coerce, using electronic means "to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior." Result: I am a felon, if my behavior is "severe." ...
You get the idea.
Look. There is a lot of horrific behavior that happens online, often anonymously or through the use of pseudonyms. That doesn't require a response of employing federal criminal law and roping in broad swaths of constitutionally protected speech, especially when there are other responses available. Indeed, the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress would seem to be well-suited for this sort of case.
No amount of jail time for Lori Drew can compensate the Meiers for their loss, nor can any money through civil suit fully heal that wound, or even come close. I understand the desire to find some way to capture this wretched behavior within the criminal law, but H.R. 1966 is not the answer.