Myspace.com Accountable for Postings?
According to this story out of San Antonio, some students' threatening posts on MySpace.com that promised "shooting and killing" at the high school caused 400 students not to show up and ended in the arrest of the offending students, now facing felony charges. The focus of the story should be on the culpability of the students making the threats, rather the blame is placed squarely on--I find this ridiculous--MySpace.com. A representative of Northside school district, Pascual Gonzalez, says that the district will "hold MySpace.com 'accountable.'"Those arguments strike me as about as valid as, "If you are going to allow teenagers to use a phone to communicate with one another in an adult manner, you are looking for trouble. Phones have been a particular pain for our schools for a long time now. The phone companies should be held accountable. We will talk with the lawyers about suing them." Or maybe, "Bathroom stalls have been a problem for years now and the bathroom manufacturers have not done anything about them. They know that people of all ages must use the bathroom, yet they continue to make stalls with paint that can easily be scratched off to allow children the ability to post their insulting thoughts and ideas. Therefore bathroom stall manufacturers are liable." While we're at it, let's sue manufacturers and distributors of all media that allow minors the ability to communicate with them: The internet, the postal service, and maybe even schools for allowing large numbers of students to get together where they cannot be monitored. That just seems foolish. The blame is being pointed at the wrong people"It just seems to me that if you put up a public web site, and you allow students, teeangers [sic], minors to post their thoughts and ideas, and not monitor it in an adult manner, you are asking for trouble," Gonzales said. "This particular web site has been a pain for all Bexar County schools for a long time now, and it just seems that the owners of MySpace-dot-com should be held accountable."
He said a decision about whether to file a lawsuit will be made by district lawyers.
Don't get me wrong, I know that a lot of bad stuff goes on within MySpace.com. I am not condoning the users of the medium, but the medium is not inherently bad (the old Napster or one of the p2p clients whose primary use was piracy or perhaps the "dating" websites are a medium or use of a medium that is inherently bad) and the providers of the site cannot be held responsible for what its users post. The blame lies on kids who did this. They were simply using a medium to post their threats, much as if they had written them on the side of the wall, sent them by email, or phoned them to somebody. In a sense, because MySpace is so traceable and so public we can say, "Thank God they used MySpace," that way we have them in custody.
