CONVERGING MEDIA

Case Study

Convergent Bullying

In his 2008 report “The Trolls among Us,” Mattathias Schwartz describes a variety of cruel pranks and anonymous bullying online: hacking the MySpace account of a teen suicide victim and altering photos to make him look like a zombie, or attacking the Epilepsy Foundation’s Web site and posting flashing seizure-inducing graphics on its discussion forums.¹ These sorts of acts have spawned a number of state laws meant to curb online harassment and bullying, but bullies know the new laws are virtually impossible to enforce. Local police usually do not have the technical know-how and resources needed to track down an anonymous troll, and federal agencies have larger concerns in terms of Internet crime, like identity theft, terrorism, and child pornography.

Internet-based convergence means that many people need not stay in front of a computer screen to access e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media; bullies, then, can follow their victims virtually anywhere. Though some of this harassment depends on anonymity, the most devastating form of cyberbullying is committed by people who know the victim. This was certainly the case in a series of widely reported teen suicides over the last ten years. One, thirteen-year-old Megan Meier, ended her life after receiving a MySpace message: “The world would be a better place without you.” Megan thought the message was from a cute boy named Josh Evans. But Josh Evans turned out to be the invention of a forty-seven-year-old woman named Lori Drew who lived down the street from Megan. Megan had recently ended her friendship with Drew’s daughter, a decision that prompted Drew to create the Josh Evans MySpace page and, as she put it to another neighbor, “mess with Megan.” Though Drew’s subsequent conviction of a misdemeanor violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would later be overturned, the case prompted Missouri to update its harassment law to cover the Internet. It also inspired the proposed Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would have made it a felony to transmit by electronic means any message “with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person.” Though supported by such groups as Web Wise Kids, the bill also attracted the scorn of free-speech advocates who pointed out the proposed legislation was inconsistent with First Amendment protections. As a consequence, the bill never made it out of committee.

Online bullying demonstrates another way in which the virtual world and “real” world have converged, and that while online harassment may seem less real, it can have equally dire consequences. As such, the ubiquity of the Internet makes it subject to the same tough questions regarding freedom of speech as other media, and raises even more difficult questions of what is considered allowable free speech and what constitutes harassment or hate speech. Hateful forms of speech may indeed be the acid test of a vibrant democracy, a test with such paradoxical implications as tolerating intolerance, or defending the indefensible. Such contradictions are at the heart of living as an informed, media-literate citizen in a diverse and conflicted democracy.