Why is "abuse" in scare quotes?
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.
> 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?
If there's anything untrue and damaging to his reputation the defamation laws are available, if he can afford to take it through court.
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.
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.
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'?
Mechanically, this sort of legislation is no different from proposed modernizations of things like the CFAA.