Have you ever been annoyed by something that someone posted on your Facebook wall?
Have you ever seen anyone using profanity in a Twitter post?
In some states, new laws might make these actions illegal under the guise of combating cyberbullying.
They will also likely create a legal nightmare if they become law and are enforced.
A bill making its way through the Alabama State Legislature, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, would criminalize “transmitting, posting, displaying or disseminating, through electronic communications ‘with the intent to harass, annoy or alarm.’”
The Arizona legislature passed a bill Tuesday that “could send people who ‘annoy or offend’ to jail for up to six months,” according to ABC News. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has yet to sign the bill into law.
While the desire to curb cyberbullying is noble, going after speech on the Internet could have some negative, unintended consequences.
Neither bill explains what it means to “annoy” or “offend,” a vagueness that makes almost anything that occurs on the Internet subject to criminal charges.
According to FIRE, if the Alabama bill becomes law, “it would be a Class A misdemeanor to send an email to classmates lampooning Canadians for their usage of the word ‘eh’ or their inexplicable love of ice hockey if that email has the effect of substantially embarrassing or humiliating a Canadian student in the eyes of his fellow university classmates.”
The Arizona law also suffers from the same level of troubling vagueness.
In a letter to the governor of Arizona, the activist group Media Coalition argued that the bill “is not limited to a one-to-one conversation between two specific people. The communication does not need to be repetitive or even unwanted. There is no requirement that the recipient or subject of the speech actually feel offended, annoyed or scared.”
Instead, the language of the bill implies that the state can go after any electronic communication that it finds annoying or offensive.
The letter continues by arguing that the bill does not “make clear that the communication must be intended to offend or annoy the reader, the subject or even any specific person.”
According to the Media Coalition’s interpretation of the bill, even if you post something online that was not meant to offend or annoy, the state could still potentially pursue criminal charges against you if someone somewhere finds your post annoying or offensive.
Not only do these pieces of legislation completely squelch free speech on the Internet, they serve as perfect examples of well-intended laws with unintentional consequences.
