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Lori Drew acquitted in cyberbullying case

July 3, 2009 By Anne 1 Comment

In a second ruling in the Megan Meier cyberbullying case, a federal judge yesterday threw out Lori Drew’s three misdemeanor convictions of late last year, the Wired “Threat Level” blog reports. “The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking.” US District Judge George Wu, who is expected to issue his written opinion early next week, told Wired that the prosecutors were basing their arguments on the premise that it’s up to a Web site operator “to determine what is a crime…. And therefore it criminalizes what would be a breach of contract,” the judge said, referring to a site’s Terms of Service. What Judge Wu’s ruling did not concern was testimony in the case last year which “showed that nobody involved in the hoax [against Megan Meier] actually read the terms of service.” In that testimony, Ashley Grills, who was also involved in the hoax against Megan Meier and was testifying under a grant of immunity, “also said that the hoax was her idea, not Drew’s, and that it was Grills who created the Josh Evans profile, and later sent the cruel message that tipped the emotionally vulnerable 13-year-old girl into her final, tragic act.” This latest ruling was about the prosecution’s application of the law to cyberbullying, and a commentary from the Progress & Freedom Foundation in Washington zooms in on that, saying that one problem with the discussion of this case (leading to confused lawmaking) has been conflation of cyberbullying (which the PFF calls “kid-on-kid” online abuse), general online harassment (involving people of all ages), and adult-on-kid online harassment (as in the Meier case). Here’s the Los Angeles Times’s coverage of this week’s news and my coverage last December.

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Filed Under: Law & Policy Tagged With: Judge Wu, Lori Drew, Megan Meier

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  1. Youth online risk: Accurate reporting | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    September 2, 2010 at 8:39 pm

    […] the dad and the reporter aren’t too clear on was what happened in the Megan Meier case (see this blog post of mine). But the advice from an expert the reporter interviewed – Sue Dowling of the Georgia […]

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Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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