| While this is good... Citing newly revealed information that 90,000 registered offenders have profiles on the MySpace social networking site, Attorney General Greg Abbott today called for tougher laws to keep predators from using the Internet to find victims.
...this would be a better place to focus: "Cyberbullying" is when a child, preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones. It has to have a minor on both sides, or at least have been instigated by a minor against another minor. Once adults become involved, it is plain and simple cyber-harassment or cyberstalking. Adult cyber-harassment or cyberstalking is NEVER called cyberbullying.
The big issue, of course, is whether laws against cyberbullying violate free speech: But states’ efforts to bring some clarity to the realm of new communications technologies like blogs, instant messages and e-mail have done little to resolve when threatening or unruly behavior trumps freedom of speech, said Jeffrey Shaman, a First Amendment scholar at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. “Prohibiting the libelous speech, prohibiting (and) regulating true threats, regulating harassment under certain circumstances — these laws need to be more precisely defined,” he said.
Cyberbullying is the more pervasive internet crime than sexual predators; however, its also an issue that would require real leadership, attention, and focus. Those are things typically not under the realm of Republican elected officials' qualifications. Again -- stopping online sexual predators is a terrific place to focus, and it's great to see it getting attention. But I worry that it got attention just because he saw a report; I worry that there was no real policy thought to this, but that instead someone just saw "sexual predator" and yelled out, "bad." That's how this kind of public policy is made; and newspapers report on it because sexual predator stories get read by news consumers. And while all that is fine and good, along the lines we lose sight of the real challenges and the bigger problems because we focus so much on the technical ones. There is a larger discussion: how do we regulate behavior on the public space of the internet that we can barely regulate in the public space of the real world? |
