Another Cyberbullying Case Resulting in Suicide; WHO IS TO BLAME?

by Pat VanHall

In the fallout of the recent suicide of 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick, from Lakeland Florida, the finger pointing has begun. Police, after making two arrests of a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old, believe the relentless bullies are to blame. The parents of one of the two alleged bullies (who both face felony charges) are deflecting blame to Facebook claiming a hack of their daughter’s account. The father of the younger of the two arrested bullies has been quoted in saying that “he wishes he could have done more” but his lack of social media savvy prevented him from knowing about the bullying. The school district, which “did all it could” to stop the bullying in school, claims it didn’t know about the cyberbullying. All of this, in light of bullying legislation already enacted in Florida which was amended as of July 1, 2013 to include cyberbullying. So what else can we do?

Across the country states are taking direct aim at cyberbullying and new bills (Wisconsin passed such a bill on October 10th) look to add cyberbullying, texting, and social media language to fully encompass this issue. The main question still remains; will more criminalization of cyberbullying help? Will tweens and teens be deterred by threat of legal consequences? It clearly didn’t help in Florida. I think the bigger problem that schools face is how they will go about monitoring a student’s account once a report of bullying has been made. In my opinion there still remains an enormous divide among generations when it comes to social media know-how. This is my own generalization, but I believe the percentage of students in middle school that are not proficient with at least one type social media (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the like) probably isn’t that far off from the percentage of middle school teachers that are proficient with one or more of the platforms.
The parents of the bullies in this case are a prime example of this dilemma. One parent wishes he knew more about Facebook so he could have done something to prevent it. The other set of parents is claiming a Facebook hack of their daughter’s account insisting that they check her account every day. Both statements seem highly unlikely based on some of the posts the media has shown taken from their daughters account (pictured in the gallery here). So how do we expect teachers and school administrators to be able to monitor the students’ accounts if the parents are unsuccessful in doing so? Facebook used to have age limits (which they clearly cannot revert to) and they do have parental controls, but do parents even know about them? Should there be an age limit that requires parental consent and monitoring for a pre-teen to set up an account? Would that help? I’m not sure what the answer is, but tragic cyberbullying examples like Rebecca Sedwick are indications that things are not getting any better.


 

 

Social Justice and Social Media

Ariel Levy’s piece, Trial by Twitter,  presents an astute recount of how Twitter lead to the identification, prosecution, and ultimately conviction of two Steubenville High School football players who raped a classmate.  The article, which appears in this week’s New Yorker, supports a theory subscribed to dearly by authors of this blog; Social Media makes it harder for officers and defenders of the law to avoid prosecution of politically sensitive crimes.  As Levy points out, the Steubenville case came to light, in part, because the victim’s parents presented attorneys with a “jump drive” of tweets relating to the horrible incident.  The case divided a city, that was otherwise united in its adoration of its football team, making the prosecution somewhat contentious.  Despite the cadre of support for the young men and although at first there was no direct evidence of the crime, the stream of Facebook posts, tweets and other social media, on which high school students posted, created a mountain of evidence that was just too hard to ignore.

In the case of the Steubenville rape, the evidence that spurred the arrests not only lead to the public outcry for prosecution but also provided a start to the acquisition of enough evidence to support a prosecution.  In some cases, the social media rally sounds louder than the evidence can bear. In such an instance, we have, arguably,  a “Trayvon Martin” type of situation, in which the public outcry caused an attorney general to reconsider opening a case that had previously been deemed unwinable.  Ultimately, the initial call may have been right since the jury did not find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

In both instances, however, we have a bit of a cautionary tale.  The blaring sound of social media can not be ignored when it comes to matters of social justice.

The Birth of RoboTweeting

NBC News reports that companies are becoming “Twitter-savvy” when it comes to consumer complaints.  In some instances customers logging complaint are retweeted with patronizing responses.  For example, according to the article, when @OccupyLA tweeted “you can help by stop stealing people’s houses!!” The Bank of America retweeted “We’d be happy to review your account.”  Corporate manipulation of Twitter is yet another example of how “the system” can corral innovative technology for its own use.   Gen-xers, hipsters and naughts have fled Facebook in droves  once businesses hijacked the social media.  Now Twitter.  Can Instagram be far behind???

Context Doesn’t Matter When Posting Rants

A defendant who posted a series of rants on the website “Ripoff Reports” claimed that the nature and tone of the website, and the posts that appeared on it, were enough to defeat a claim of libel.  Plaintiff, Piping Rock Partners, and its sole shareholder posted a series of rants about David Lerner Associates.  Piping Rock claimed that the rants were just that, and raised an “everyone knows the internet is just for ranting and not to be taken too seriously” defense.

The Court disagreed and with a shoutout to a popular search engine, ruled that anything that is searchable on google is presumed true.

Piping Rock Partners Inc. v. David Learner Associates Inc, (here) represents another case in the shifting tide toward giving more credibility to website postings.  Is it time to shift the presumption of posts from false to true ?  I would argue context matters.  After all, think about all those dating website posts.   Looks like Poppy won this one.

 

Spoliation is a Serious Issue

Professor Garfield brought up Spoliation of Facebook evidence in an earlier post, and that got me thinking.

There’s intentional spoliation – where a party makes the decision to destroy evidence to avoid responding to a discovery request, or to ensure the evidence is never found – but there’s also unintentional spoliation.

The link above directs you to an Above the Law blog post – describing how the Plaintiff in a wrongful death action lost, after trial, big time, when it became clear he deleted his Facebook page intentionally, so that he could “claim” he didn’t have one. The case has pretty awful details – a young 25 year-old bride killed in a motor vehicle accident, and her husband had some photos of himself partying. His lawyers wanted the pictures down – he sure didn’t look like he was in mourning wearing a “I Love Hot Moms!” t-shirt… so that’s intentional spoliation.

But how about when you remove something from your Facebook Page, or your Twitter Feed, or your Linkedin Profile? Lots of college students who started using Facebook circa 2006 might have posted photos that they’d be pretty embarassed about today – and a lot of those students have removed those types of photos as Facebook has grown in scope and popularity. But I think of other types of unintentional spoliation, too – what if someone ELSE posts a photo of you that’s in poor taste, and you “remove tag” – you’ve “destroyed” the link to yourself, but the photo still exists. Is the removal of the link a type of spoliation? Don’t you have the RIGHT to remove the link to yourself if you didn’t post the photo? What if you ask Facebook to remove the photo in its entirety – could that be viewed as potential spoliation in a later suit?

These questions are going to be critical as this issue arises again and again in litigation with social media aspects.

Should Court’s Hold LinkedIn Postings to a Higher Standard than Postings on Twitter or Facebook?

In a nod toward the power of social media postings, one company sued a former employee who dragged his feet when asked to remove the company’s name from his LinkedIn profile.  Michael O. Loatman of Bloomberg Law reports that plaintiff Jefferson Audio Visual Systems, Inc. (JAVS), which fired Gordon Light, a former executive of the company, for allegedly defaming it, asked Light to “remove any indication that Light still worked for the company” from any of his social media profiles.  Light dragged his feet and the company sued for Fraud.

A District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, dismissed the claim in Jefferson Audio Visual Systems, Inc. v. Gunnar Light, failed to allege facts sufficient to prove each element of the claim.  This fraud claim required proof that the plaintiff reasonably relied on defendant’s misrepresentation.  Misrepresentation could not occur in this instance since JAVS already knew Light was no longer in its employ.

Perhaps JAVS should have found a different plaintiff.  A firm considering hiring Light following his dismissal from JAVS seems the likeliest of candidates.  Assuming the latter to be true, it suggests that there is a quality of veracity to LinkedIn that is not necessarily ascribed to other types of social media such as Twitter or Facebook.  Should we ascribe more honesty to messages posted on LinkedIn because of the nature of business nature of the site?

 

NY Court Overturns Teacher’s Dismissal for Facebook Post

Finding that “sometimes there are second chances and that compassion is a quality rightly valued in our society” New York Supreme Court Appellate Division overturned a lower court, which upheld elementary school teacher an elementary school teacher’s dismissal, stemming from an inappropriate Facebook post. Christine  Rubino posted her comments the day after a student drowned during  a school trip to the beach.   Rubino wrote on her Facebook page, “after today I am thinking the beach sounds like a wonderful idea” and other assorted inappropriate comments.

The court asserted that the test for Rubino’s dismissal is whether termination “shock[ed] one’s sense of fairness.”. Here the court found that  her otherwise unblemished 15 year professional record, the fact that she was not Facebook friends anyone any else associated with the school and her repeated apologies justified the reversal.

The case, Rubino v City of New York, NY App. Div. No. 03272. 05/07/13 represents something less than the zero-tolerance approach society seems to call for in instances where employees make inappropriate posts.  Rather it seems to support the theory I asserted in my article The Death of Slander, 35 Colum. J. Law & Arts 17 (2011) that postings, tweets and texts are more akin to the thoughtless off-handed comments than to words written with reflection and should be treated as such.

 

 

 

 

 

Students Spend 40% of their Reading Time on Social Media Sites

No, students aren’t just catching up on the status of friends, or frenemies.  According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, students gather much of their information, particularly current events and news, from social media sites.  The findings, come from a study by SuHua Huang, author of “Reading Habits of College Students in the United States,” which was presented on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.  Another example of the proliferation of social media into our daily lives.

Spoilation, Shoulder Surfing and Forced Friending

The unchartered waters of employer access to employee social media accounts has added new words to the lexicon.  Speaking at the Society of Federal Labor and Employee Relations Professionals’ 40th Annual Symposium, Sean Rogers cautioned employers against “shoulder surfing” the practice of watching over an employee as he or she using her social media and “Forced Friending” which occurs when employers require employees to grant requests to connect to them to the employees facebook so that employers can monitor an employees online activity.  Spoilation, a third word to pop up with regard to employer-employee social media relations,  is the act of deleting social media activity before it can be retrieved, perhaps for discovery purposes.

Both spoilation and forced friending have made their way beyond the dictionary and into the Courtroom.  In Gatto v. United States, No. 10-cv-1090 (D.N.J. Mar. 25, 2013), the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey sanctioned a former JetBlue Airways employee who sued the airling and a second company for personal injury, after he deactivated his Facebook account in response to defense counsel gaining access to that account and printing out incriminating photographs.  In Downs v. Anapol, Schwartz, et.al., 2013 WL 1147449 (Pa.Com.Pl.) the Phildelphia County Court of Common Pleas is considering whether a firm’s forced friending of sorts, which ultimatly lead to firing, is grounds for employment discrimination.

These cases further illustrate the murky waters surrounding employer-employee social media relations.  Seems like as with everything else social media, society is able to ascribe a term to particular conduct much more quickly than the law is capable of its regulation.

 

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