Danny Cevallos, a young CNN legal analyst, has
written an op-ed today outlining what he sees as wrong with a lot of proposed
anti-bullying legislation. In short,
vagueness. The link for the piece is
here. He says he is “anti anti-bullying legislation”.
The Supreme Court has ruled that schools have more
leeway in regulating student speech (even from home computers on social media)
than government would normally have with adult speech. Still, verbal online bullying is a little bit
like obscenity. It’s hard to define
prospectively, but you know it when you see it.
It would seem that Cevallos’s piece should be
contemplated in relation to another case before the Supreme Court for the next
fall term, when hyperbole or parody on the Internet morphs into making a threat
illegally.
It’s also true that there is
a risk of prosecutorial overreach (a concept known form the Aaron Swartz tragedy
– “The Internet’s Own Boy”), as with trying to make major felonies out of
behavior that is normally handled administratively (like terms of service
violations, which was made the basis of prosecution in a 2006 case where
Myspace bullying resulted in a suicide in Missouri).
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