Parents May Now Be Liable for What Their Kids Do on Facebook
Parenting is a difficult and often thankless job. And now, thanks to a Georgia court, that job just got a whole lot more troublesome. The appellate court ruled that parents can be held liable for what their (idiot) kids post on Facebook. Let that sink in for just a minute. Think about how moronic kids are. Then think about how hard it would be to monitor their online activities. Now think about going to jail because of all of that. Thanks, Georgia court!
The ruling has its roots in a 2011 Facebook page. That year, a boy created a Facebook page pretending to be his female classmate. The page, as you might imagine, wasn't flattering. He used an app to make the girl's picture look awful, then progressed from there. "Some of these postings were graphically sexual, racist, or otherwise offensive and some falsely stated that Alex was on a medication regimen for mental health disorders and that she took illegal drugs," read the court filing.
The girl of course eventually found out about the page when her friends pointed it out. This was middle school bullying at its finest. So the girl told her parents, who contacted the school, and ultimately suspended the boy. The boy's parents also reportedly punished him by grounding him. What the boy's parents didn't do was make him delete the page. And so it stayed up for almost a year. And that brought forth the girls' parents lawsuit. The court, noting the absence of common sense, was blunt about the boys' parents.
"During the 11 months the unauthorized profile and page could be viewed, the [boys parents] made no attempt to view the unauthorized page, and they took no action to determine the content of the false, profane, and ethnically offensive information that [the boy] was charged with electronically distributing," reads the court's ruling. "They did not attempt to learn to whom [the boy] had distributed the false and offensive information or whether the distribution was ongoing. They did not tell [the boy] to delete the page. Furthermore, they made no attempt to determine whether the false and offensive information [the boy] was charged with distributing could be corrected, deleted, or retracted."
The boy's lawyer is now filing an appeal on the ruling, so this is far from over. But the fact that a court could rule this way is alarming. It sets a precedent that can only go badly. We're not saying that the ruling isn't correct in this situation — the parents should have sought to have the page deleted — but it is an awfully slippery slope. Parents might be better off just destroying every computer in their house and giving their kids a Motorola Razr. Hey, just an idea.
[Image via Flickr - Bhundier Napier]
