The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act would make it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to transmit an electronic 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…to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior.”
Neither Orwell nor Huxley could have predicted our dystopian society would run on unadulterated, abject stupidity. At a certain level, most literary dystopian societies rely on some crafty or evil manipulators, but in reality, nobody outwitted or exploited us to get here. Our stupidity has overcome us and it is now persecuting us while we cheer it along.
I’m sick and tired of hearing about Megan Meier. It’s a story that pulls at our heartstrings, but we really need to rethink how we approach it. If you’re unaware of the story, a couple kids and their parents (!) used Myspace and AIM to trick Megan, a 13 year old girl, into going out with a fake virtual boy in an effort to extract information and humiliate her. She killed herself over it.
Between horrible adults who would cruelly harass a child and someone deciding bullying was worthy of killing oneself over, how could a functionally intelligent person think the problem lies in Myspace or AIM? Sure, this is an improvement on the post-Columbine approach of placing blame squarely on video games and music, but that inclusion of the “cyber” aspect to this anti-bullying bill goes to show just how little thought was put into addressing this issue. If I wrote a letter bullying someone, it’s okay, but if I used email, I could get two years in prison? I’m literally aghast at how painfully stupid our representatives are, but let’s go back to Columbine. The media picked up on how bullying was one of the factors that led to the shooting, but how many people thought the government should make it a felony to bully people? I mean, wasn’t it the unstable kids who shot everyone who were at fault?
On top of that, the language this bill uses is so vague that just about anyone could be arguably guilty of this felony. The US government repeatedly causes me substantial emotional distress in the form of the years of insults to my intelligence, provoking others to use terrorism against me and my family, torturing people in my name, destroying the environment, hurting the economy I have to find a job in, deceiving me, revoking my constitutional rights, and persecuting me for the sake of sensationalism and fear-mongering.
