Family Forum / Parenting / Children's Health / December 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/us/28internet.html?_r=1

November 28, 2008

Guilty Verdict in Cyberbullying Case Provokes Many Questions Over
Online Identity

By BRIAN STELTER
Is lying about one’s identity on the Internet now a crime?

The verdict Wednesday in the MySpace cyberbullying case raised a
variety of questions about the terms that users agree to when they log
on to Web sites.

The defendant in the case, a Missouri woman, was convicted by a
federal jury in Los Angeles on three misdemeanor counts of computer
fraud for having misrepresented herself on the popular social network
MySpace. The woman, Lori Drew, posed as a teenage boy in using the
account to send first friendly and then menacing messages to Megan
Meier, 13, who killed herself shortly after receiving a message in
October 2006 that said in part, “The world would be a better place
without you.”

MySpace’s terms of service require users to submit “truthful and
accurate” registration information. Ms. Drew’s creation of a phony
profile amounted to “unauthorized access” to the site, prosecutors
said, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which
until now has been used almost exclusively to prosecute hacker crimes.

While the Internet’s anonymity was used in this case as a cloak to
bully Megan, other users say they have perfectly good reasons to
construct false identities online, if only to help protect against the
theft of personal information, for example.

“It will be interesting to see if issues of safety and security will
eventually trump the hallmark ideology of free, largely anonymous or
pseudonymous participation in cyberspace,” said Sameer Hinduja, a
professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic
University.

Andrew M. Grossman, senior legal policy analyst for the Heritage
Foundation, said the possibility of being prosecuted for online
misrepresentation, while remote, should worry users nonetheless.

“If this verdict stands,” Mr. Grossman said, “it means that every site
on the Internet gets to define the criminal law. That’s a radical
change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes
criminal prohibitions.”

The judge in the Los Angeles case, George H. Wu, is to hear motions
next month for its dismissal. Ms. Drew’s defense asserts among other
things, as it did at trial, that she never read MySpace’s terms of
service in detail.

“The reality, recognized by almost everyone, is that the vast majority
of Internet users do not read Web site terms of service carefully or
at all,” said Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard
Law School.

Representatives of MySpace declined to make any executives available
for interviews about the case. In a statement, the site said that it
did not tolerate cyberbullying and would continue to work with
industry experts to raise awareness of the “harm it can potentially
cause.”

Mr. Hinduja, who writes for the research site CyberBullying.us, said
there had been a handful of cases involving teenagers who were “driven
to suicide in part because of cyberbullying by peers.” What drew the
greatest attention to Megan’s death, he said, was that it involved the
actions of an adult, Ms. Drew, now 49, whose daughter’s friendship
with Megan had soured.

It remains easy to create a fraudulent account on social networking
sites like MySpace and Facebook, though a witness at Ms. Drew’s trial,
Jae Sung, a MySpace vice president for customer care, said “impostor
profiles” were deleted when they were flagged by users or discovered
by the Web site’s employees.

A number of corporations are competing to develop age verification
software for Web sites. But relying on technology to confirm a user’s
identity is not without drawbacks. There are legitimate reasons to
hide one’s name and other information online, be it concern about
identity theft or a need for comfort when asking for advice or help.

“We’ve been telling our kids to lie about ID information for a long
time now,” said Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, at Harvard.

Ms. Boyd said forms of digital street outreach were needed.

“There are lots of kids hurting badly online,” she said. “And guess
what? They’re hurting badly offline, too. Because it’s more visible
online, people are blaming technology rather than trying to solve the
underlying problems of the kids that are hurting.”