Rules to curb online bullying raise concerns

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

Avery Doninger has put off going to college so she can volunteer with AmeriCorps — at least when she’s not in court.

Doninger, 18, graduated from Lewis Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., last June, but she has not left it behind. She is at the center of a landmark free-speech case, stemming from her days at the school, that appears headed for the Supreme Court.

Doninger was a star student at Mills, and in 2007 she wanted to run for senior class secretary, a position that included the honor of speaking at her graduation ceremony.

But Karissa Niehoff, the school’s principal, rejected Doninger’s candidacy over a personal blog entry Doninger posted from her home computer. In the posting, Doninger reported — inaccurately, it turned out — that a school event she had helped organize had been canceled. She blamed “douchebags in central office” for the supposed cancellation and reported that a flood of complaints had “pissed off” the school district’s superintendent.

Doninger ran as a write-in candidate and won, only to be barred from taking office. That led her mother to sue the school district on her behalf. The Doningers lost this month in U.S. District Court; their attorney promised to appeal the decision all the way to the Supreme Court.

To Doninger, the case hinges on her First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

“I think that it’s really important for students to stand up for their rights, because if we don’t maintain democracy on the lowest levels, we’ll never be able to maintain them on the highest levels,” she said.

But to school officials, Doninger is a cyberbully whose writings threatened to disrupt operations at the school.

“When kids are in a position of privilege, there are certain standards of behavior we expect them to uphold,” Niehoff said. “Our position stands for respect. We’re just hoping kids appreciate the seriousness of any communication over the Internet.”

Suicide sparks a national debate
Doninger’s case, which runs contrary to the student-as-victim storyline typical of cyberbullying cases, illustrates the difficulty legislators and authorities are encountering as they try to rein in what experts say is an increasingly common and virulent form of harassment.

Connecticut does not have a law against cyberbullying, defined by the National Crime Prevention Council as the use “the Internet, cell phones, or other devices ... to send or post text or images intended to hurt or embarrass another person.” The state has an anti-bullying statute on the books, but it says nothing about the Internet and electronic communications, and it addresses only situations in which students are the victims.

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.

Cyberbullying resources Numerous organizations offer information about cyberbullying and guidance on how to respond: • Cyberbullyhelp.com • Project Safe Kids • Wired Safety • Stop Cyberbullying • Safe Schools Coalition • Anti-Bullying.net

“Prohibiting the libelous speech, prohibiting (and) regulating true threats, regulating harassment under certain circumstances — these laws need to be more precisely defined,” he said.

The issue of cyberbullying became the focus of a national debate last year, after Lori Drew, 49, was prosecuted in connection with the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., in October 2006.

Believing Megan had spread rumors about her own daughter, Drew and an employee of her small business assumed a false identity, that of a 16-year-old boy. After winning Megan’s trust, they began sending her venomous messages through her MySpace account.

“You are a bad person and everybody hates you,” said the last message sent to Megan from the fake account, according to court documents. “Have a [expletive] rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you.”

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. The following NBC stations contributed to this report: KBJR of Duluth, Minn.; KSDK of St. Louis; KYTV of Springfield, Mo.; WAVE of Louisville, Ky.; WMBF of Myrtle Beach, S.C.; WOAI of San Antonio, Texas; and WVIT of Hartford, Conn.

Later that day, Megan was found hanging from her neck in a closet; she died the next day.

Local prosecutors concluded that there was no law addressing Drew’s behavior, and they declined to press charges. But in May, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles, where MySpace.com has its headquarters, indicted Drew on charges of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress — in other words, violating MySpace’s terms of use by faking an identity.

Drew was convicted of three misdemeanor violations of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and faces a maximum of three years in prison when she is sentenced in April.

The case was closely followed in Internet forums and blogs, in which many commentators complained that Drew was being prosecuted for ignoring the fine print of her MySpace account, not for a role in driving Megan to kill herself. And in its wake, a national movement to clamp down on cyberbullying — psychological abuse by and of children through the Internet — was born.

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