N.Y. Set to Criminalize Much “Verbal” “Abuse” of Under-18-Year-Olds Online | Hacker News Reader

N.Y. Set to Criminalize Much “Verbal” “Abuse” of Under-18-Year-Olds Online

reason.com

30 pointsayanai27 comments

> "knowingly engage[] in a repeated course of cyberbullying of a minor."

How does it work for normal bullying? Why do we need a special law for "when things happen online"?

It seems that the online world needs separate laws from the non-digital one. This is nonsense.

Cyberbullying is just bullying on the internet. Do we have laws for phone-bullying, letter-bullying...?

Discriminations, bullying and other forms of abuse are a social problem. We need to solve the problem, not just try to hide it out of the public view that is the Internet.

> Do we have laws for phone-bullying, letter-bullying

Yes, the phone system and the postal system have their own set of laws.

I’ve seen exactly what this leads to in the UK, so I can only hope to hell our 1st amendment would prevent similar oppressive laws from standing in the States.

Too bad for whoever has to foot the bill for challenging this dumpster fire though.

Such as?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16571595

I don't think it's the State's job to shun individuals for poor social behavior. If school administrators do not have the authority to kick bullies out of school based on poor patterns of behavior, do they really need to escalate to criminal offenses that put them in prison? Maybe we should keep shunning criteria off the books when possible and let society establish its norms like actual human beings.

Citation needed for the idea that there was a golden age wherein healthy norms were formed and communicated, without at least the implication of backing by an authoritative enforcer. In what I know about such golden age references, one or more was true:

- deviants operated unacknowledged in shadows, - society operated under the idea that there was an acceptable class of victims, - an in group either openly or tacitly wielded the authority of the state

So I don't find the "why not let people solve their own problems at a societal scale" as being a particularly well-informed critique.

>Citation needed for the idea that there was a golden age

I didn't mean to imply this. There never was and will never be a golden age of people interacting, whether state or socially mandated.

I do think that person-to-person and community-to-community scales better than state-sized laws in terms of choosing who gets rewarded and punished. The problem is that laws are hard to write that capture emerging social norms. The "no child left behind" act may have kept too many people in school (bullies that these new laws are targeting). Giving teachers authority to throw out trouble-makers seems like a better solution (for all parties) than outright criminalizing deviant behavior.

I almost wonder if they will be issuing ASBOs ala UK... sigh...

You know the UK no longer has ASBOs, right?

I wonder why it explicitly calls out "by threats, intimidation or abuse, including cyberbullying" as the methods for causing physical or emotional harm. In the cheating boyfriend example, why wouldn't the boyfriend be considered a criminal for clearly creating emotional harm to the girl?

It seems like a stretch to think the N.Y. Senate is really stupid enough to think this is good legislation. Which makes me wonder if some of the unfortunate side effects are actually seen as a feature rather than a bug.

Why is "abuse" in scare quotes?

It’s a legal method of quoting terms of art.

No, it's not, its rhetorical device to indicate that the law calls things “verbal” and “abuse” but the author disagrees with the characterization.

Probably because

> A 16-year-old girl is cheated on by her 17-year-old boyfriend. She's angry, so she sends several e-mails to her girlfriends disclosing this and calling him names. One of them forwards it to someone who then forwards it to the ex-boyfriend. The boyfriend feels humiliated. That's a crime on the girls' part: She engaged in "repeated" "verbal" "abuse" using "any form of electronic communication," and this "would reasonably be expected to cause ... emotional harm" to the ex-boyfriend, and makes him feel like school is a "hostile environment" (since everyone now knows his misconduct). The girl is a criminal.

Why is the girl the criminal and not the forwarders?

How is this different from of this were done in the real world?

Wow that's a good point actually. I guess they cant prove that you said what you said verbally in person, but can prove it electronically

That's a good point. However if that were provable would this be punishable?

If it's a pattern of unwanted behaviour it might meet the threshold for harassment. In the UK this would be words of advice from police to stop, followed by a court order to stop, followed by punishment for disobeying the court order. In reality victims of harassment spend years trying to get it to stop so in the example given almost nothing would happen.

If there's anything untrue and damaging to his reputation the defamation laws are available, if he can afford to take it through court.

Why not both?

We don't actually know that the girl would be found to be a criminal. This is a very carefully constructed test case by the author, designed to attack the law.

>This is a very carefully constructed test case by the author, designed to attack the law.

As it should be in the context of discussing laws. If legislation can't stand up to the light level of scrutiny that comes from spit-balling hypotheticals to test for unintended consequences, then the law is poorly drafted.

The article, including the title, is not in favor of the legislation.

I personally am in favor of it, but I also think it’s complicated.

I was bullied growing up, but in real life. I do have a hard time imagining what it’s cyberbullying is like. I am familiar with online-mob behavior, though. If anyone has a link on what it’s like, please share.

The law has a low ceiling on what it can do about bullying. As long as our society lacks the social/cultural nuance to identify instead of reward so many forms of bullying, we can expect it to continue.

Due to the difficulty of identifying bullying behaviors (reaction over prevention) and the environment enforcing them, laws like this often punish the bullied more than the bully.

Because it's "reason," an online libertarian "thinkpiece." This is the ideal story for them: it involves regulation (a priori bad), and it's regulation concerning speech directed at minors (perfect for painting anybody left of them as illiberal).

Note that it's already illegal to harass people, and NY already has anti-bullying laws for minors[1]. This new law is the legal extension of existing protections into a domain that minors already inhabit. In other words, this law brings existing protections into the 21st century.

Note, also, that the standard for prosecution under this new law is precise: the minor's status as a minor must be known by the harasser, and the harassment must be part of a repeated course of action.

Volokh's examples (except for maybe the first) conveniently gloss over these conditions. His third, fourth, and fifth examples also conveniently muddle the legal process: nobody is a criminal until convicted, and the fact that any group of people "can be prosecuted" is not any sort of evidence of either guilt or innocence.

[1]: https://www.stopbullying.gov/laws/new-york/index.html

I don't understand why existing protections must be brought into the 21st century.

Was it not already illegal to harass minors, regardless of how you do it? Were people able to say 'Oh, I only wrote words about it, and didn't verbalize it so it doesn't count'?

It was already illegal, but poorly scoped. We now know how effective of a medium the internet can be for harassment, and our legislation should reflect that.

Mechanically, this sort of legislation is no different from proposed modernizations of things like the CFAA.

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