flickering pictures

From Slashdot:

“Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media ‘to cause substantial emotional distress through “severe, repeated, and hostile” speech.’ Rep. Sanchez and colleagues want to make it easier to prosecute any objectionable speech through a breathtakingly broad bill that would criminalize a wide range of speech protected by the First Amendment. The bill is called The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, and if passed into law (and if it survives constitutional challenge) it looks almost certain to be misused.”

If the bill passes, it will criminalize “any communication, [including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages] with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person,” and could lead to fines or even two years in jail.

Laws against physical intimidation and harassment make sense. But coercing? According to Princeton’s online WordNet dictionary, to coerce is “to cause to do through pressure or necessity, by physical, moral or intellectual means,” which is what we try to do every time we take part in a letter-writing campaign on a moral issue. It’s what activists do every time they march on the White House lawn. How would people push for legislative changes if not by pressuring their governments on moral or intellectual grounds?

And how can it be illegal to “cause substantial emotional distress,” when different people are distressed by different things? Who defines “substantial” distress, as opposed to the ordinary kind? And how do you prove the existence of emotional distress at all? Surely, Larry Craig must experience “substantial emotional distress” when he reads the online banter about his toe-tapping sexual encounter in a men’s bathroom in Minnesota — or watches the satirical “Larry Craig’s Guide to Men’s Room Signals” on YouTube. Should all this content really be illegal?

The bill could make it against the law to offend people online — though inexplicably not in person. Even here at Flickering Pictures, there have been posts critical of Republican National Committee chairman Mike Duncan, Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, and those homely, bucktoothed Torontonians down the highway from Montreal. If one of these folks claims that I caused them “substantial emotional distress,” should I really be hauled into court? And is it cyberbullying if a blogger calls the president names and he’s really, genuinely hurt?

This bill is apparently an attempt to fight online bullying, but opens the door to much more than that. Couldn’t we put an age limit on this law — making it apply only to children, say — since adult bullying is covered by existing harassment laws?

Good thing I live in Canada.

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