An Internet hoax that ended with the suicide of a 13-year-old has led to calls from her family for better protections against online harassment, though any solution may run afoul of constitutional free speech rights.
Megan Meier, 13, hanged herself on Oct. 16 last year, just minutes after receiving mean messages on the social networking Web site MySpace. She died the next day.
Megan's parents learned about six weeks after her death that their daughter, who thought she was communicating online with a 16-year-old boy, was being deceived. The boy was created by a mother down the street who wanted to know what Megan was saying about her own daughter, who had had a falling out with Megan.
Lieutenant Craig McGuire of the St. Charles County Sheriff's Department said authorities could not find a crime to charge anyone with in Megan's case.
"How do you legislate bad behavior?" he asked.
Megan's family wants reforms that would make it illegal for adults to misrepresent themselves to children online and make it illegal to harass or bully online.
Aldermen in Dardenne Prairie, the Meiers' hometown of about 7,000 residents about 56km from St. Louis, have proposed a new ordinance related to child endangerment and Internet harassment. And Representative Cynthia Davis, a state lawmaker who represents the area, said she is trying to see if existing Missouri laws can be improved.
But, she said, any legal reforms must protect freedom of speech rights. And federal reform might be more appropriate since someone from outside the state could interact with Missouri children online, she said.
Even so, it is hard to know what would work as a response to Megan's situation, Davis said.
"This girl was not threatened on the Internet. Somebody said some things that were extremely horrid," she said.
What happened to Megan is not just awful, it ought to be criminal, her mother, Tina Meier, said on Monday.
"You cannot, absolutely cannot, as an adult, pose as a 16-year-old boy on a computer and play games with someone," Meier said.
"If there's not a law out there to punish someone for that, that's despicable," she said.
Tina Meier, who admits she let her daughter open a MySpace account before she was 14, said she monitored her daughter's activities, logging on for her daughter and using software to capture Megan's communications online.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
RSS