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Facebook Crime The Courts

Court Rules Parents May Be Liable For What Their Kids Post On Facebook 323

Posted by samzenpus from the sticks-and-stones-may-break-my-bones-and-fake-profiles-will-always-hurt-me dept.
schwit1 writes Parents can be held liable for what their kids post on Facebook, a Georgia appellate court ruled in a decision that lawyers said marked a legal precedent on the issue of parental responsibility over their children's online activity. The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that the parents of a seventh-grade student may be negligent for failing to get their son to delete a fake Facebook profile that allegedly defamed a female classmate.
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Court Rules Parents May Be Liable For What Their Kids Post On Facebook More

Court Rules Parents May Be Liable For What Their Kids Post On Facebook

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  • Why not? When you have kids.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Thursday October 16, 2014 @07:20PM (#48164311)
    If your kids happen to make money, parents control that money until they are 18. They should also suffer the liability as well. You can't have one without the other. Either children are responsible or they are not.

    • If your kids happen to make money, parents control that money until they are 18. They should also suffer the liability as well.

      You can't have one without the other. Either children are responsible or they are not.

      You have it wrong.

      The page was created on a school computer while the school was acting in loco parentis for the child. If anyone should be held responsible *instead of the child, whose fault it is*, it would be the school, with "contribution to the delinquency of a minor" by the "friend" who helped them create the page.

      At worst, the parents are guilty of "contributory negligence" for not being software engineers.

      • Re:You have it wrong. (Score:5, Informative)

        by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Thursday October 16, 2014 @09:00PM (#48165173)
        At worst, the parents are guilty of "contributory negligence" for not being software engineers.

        Nonsense.

        If your kid is in a park, grabs a rock, throws it at someone and causes harm, then you are responsible. Not the parks office, not the city, not the state, and not in the case of this incident, the school.

        As a parent you are responsible for the actions of your kids in place of themselves since they are children. If you want to understand if the school should be blamed, ask yourself, would the school be blamed if the person was an adult? No. Of course not, that would be silly. The School had as much to do with the activity as the ISP serving the school. It isn't accepting full liability because you chose to exercise their facilities to perform your actions. Just like an ISP isn't responsible if you use their network to organize a murder (see Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act [wikipedia.org]). The school is not liable, the person is. But, because the person is underage, the person's parents are responsible. Its as simple as that. You are responsible for your kids actions, you in place of them. Don't like it? Don't have kids. Having kids involves accepting responsibility for them. Its that simple.

        So, no sir, you have it wrong.

        • If you want to understand if the school should be blamed, ask yourself, would the school be blamed if the person was an adult? No. Of course not, that would be silly. The School had as much to do with the activity as the ISP serving the school.

          They didn't control access to the computers in such a way as to prevent this kind of usage by students. In the case of an adult in the same situation, the school is guilty of, at a bare minimum, presenting an attractive nuisance in the form of a computer that could be used for this.

          But this is all hemming and hawing about "how can we blame someone other than the kid for the actions of the kid?", which is pretty stupid on the face of it. In any other bullying situation, such as assault and battery, you don

          • Re:You have it wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday October 17, 2014 @05:52AM (#48167095) Homepage Journal

            In any other bullying situation, such as assault and battery, you don't blame the parents; you send the kid to juvie, and they get to go to school there, with all of the other genetic sociopaths.

            For any other bullying situation, such as assault and battery, the perpetrators are jocks and they don't get punished at all, but the kid who got beat on gets told that he shouldn't do whatever he did to make them angry.

            You're acting like schools do something about bullying, but that's complete bullshit. Only when there is a lawsuit do they give a fat flying fuck. And that's why we're hearing about this now. I was bullied from sixth grade on and literally nothing was ever done about it. I was consistently blamed for the bullying. Mental health is the last illness we consistently blame on the victim.

        • Re:You have it wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Mr.CRC ( 2330444 ) on Thursday October 16, 2014 @10:26PM (#48165701)

          You are advocating that one person should be liable for the actions of another person.

          This is sloppy without clarifying how the different categories of criminal vs. civil liability should be handled.

          Holding parents criminally liable is intractable because there is no certain way to control a child or any other person. I'm talking absolute control. Any law that holds you responsible for forces that you cannot control must be invalidated, or else societal disintegration will eventually result. Such inherent contradictions predictably lead to disaster.

          Furthermore, there are also laws making it felony child abuse to employ nearly any sort of corporal punishment (not that I advocate that) and laws are interpreted so liberally that nearly any attempt to employ physical force to restrain, control, or restrict the behavior of a child may be interpreted as felony child abuse. So our society wants a person to be liable for the actions of a child, and also makes them criminally liable if they try to use force to discipline a child.

          Also, as has been mentioned by others, children are legally mandated by the state to attend school. Parents cannot possibly control a child while they are at school. Yet they should be prosecuted if the child commits a crime while under state mandated separation from the parents?

          This is all complete insanity. Of course, I only expect matters to get much, much worse...

    • Re:Why not? When you have kids.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sumdumass ( 711423 ) on Thursday October 16, 2014 @07:50PM (#48164645) Journal

      There is a principle in most states that place limits and in some cases indemnify parents from some acts committed by children due to the fact that children are thinking creature capable of acting on their own will. It's sort of like school, you can teach them all day long but will they learn and will they put what they learned to use or will they attempt something they have not even learned yet.

      In some cases, your kid may be the only one liable for the broken window.

      But this case isn't exactly like that. It was a defamation case over a fake facebook profile and it wasn't the fact that it existed that made the parents liable. It was that it remained up for 11 months and viewable after the parents were contacted and the two students behind it was suspended from school as well as disciplined by their own parents.

      This is more sort of more like if your kid kept swinging balls into the neighbors window for 11 months after being told he broke it the first time.

    • If you are going to make me liable for something then I has to be something under my control. Short of tying my kids up in chains and never letting them do anything there is no way for me do absolutely guarantee that they will never do anything which causes liability. Not only would I refuse to do that it would be illegal and society does not want parents to do that: kids have to learn to control their own behaviour and that means giving them the freedom to do things wrong.

      Parents have to be responsible

      • If you are going to make me liable for something then I has to be something under my control. Short of tying my kids up in chains and never letting them do anything there is no way for me do absolutely guarantee that they will never do anything which causes liability. Not only would I refuse to do that it would be illegal and society does not want parents to do that: kids have to learn to control their own behaviour and that means giving them the freedom to do things wrong.

        If you read at least the summary, the parents weren't liable for their kids making a post (which kids can do since you can't control them permanently). The parents were liable for their kids not removing a post, which is something the parents should have been able to control.

      • If you are going to make me liable for something then I has to be something under my control. Short of tying my kids up in chains and never letting them do anything there is no way for me do absolutely guarantee that they will never do anything which causes liability. Not only would I refuse to do that it would be illegal and society does not want parents to do that: kids have to learn to control their own behaviour and that means giving them the freedom to do things wrong. Parents have to be responsible but not necessarily liable. If we are taking reasonable measures to supervise our kids online including giving them guidance on how to behave as well as punishing them when they do not then I believe we have fulfilled our responsibility as parents and should not be held liable if one of them disobeys us and libels someone while we are not watching. On the other hand if parents completely ignores their kids, provide no guidance or consequences then by all means find them negligent and hence liable through their act of negligence...but making parents automatically liable for their kids actions under all circumstances is unfair and encourages poor parenting since if means that you can't risk letting them fail. Indeed the only way to be sure would be to ban them from access the net: does society really want that?

        Responsibility must mean liability. You can't claim to be responsible for something and then when it goes all wrong, stick your hands up in the air and say "not my fault!". If you are not liable and responsible, then you shouldn't have kids. They are under your control, thats what society has determined over generations to be the appropriate path to raising human beings.
        Now, I do agree with you that they are not totally under your control. For example: you can not beat your kids, even if you believe that i

        • "You can't claim to be responsible for something and then when it goes all wrong, stick your hands up in the air and say "not my fault!"." Sure you can, but only if your in the government lol

  • I don't get it. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BitterOak ( 537666 ) on Thursday October 16, 2014 @07:20PM (#48164315)
    If the remarks were truly defamatory, then couldn't the girl or her parents simply get Facebook to delete the fake profile?
    • Why would posting defamatory remarks make the profile fake, or warrant its deletion? Also, just because you can delete something doesn't mean no harm was inflicted. Granted, it limits the extent, but if you post something derogatory, and cause pain and suffering (or for example in a worst case scenario: suicide), deleting it only limits the damage, it doesn't undo that damage.

    • If you read either the article or the judgment, Facebook refused when the girl's parents contacted them. They said that only the original creator of the account could delete it.

      Another reason for friends not to encourage friends to use facebook. Just like the banks were "too big to fail", facebook is "too big to act responsibly."

      • If you read either the article or the judgment, Facebook refused when the girl's parents contacted them. They said that only the original creator of the account could delete it.

        Then Facebook is lying, cause they delete fake profiles all the time. If Facebook knew they were hosting defamatory content and didn't subsequently take steps to delete it, then it is Facebook that should be sued here, not the parents of the kid who created the fake page. For all we know, the kid may have forgotten the password!

        • The kids continued to use the account right up until the day it was finally deleted, so they had the password. The parents were properly sued because they were negligent in not providing proper supervision of their children's conduct for months after being so informed. But I agree, Facebook has liability as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Be...cause the kid's parents are negligent?

      • Be...cause the kid's parents are negligent?

        Are they always? Or now do we get another layer of lawyers involved?

        I've known bad seed children who were raised by very good parents. Seems like you would have ot prove the parents are negligent.

        Or in anther case, I worked with a guy who had raised several foster children, and adopted some special needs children. He's a great guy, and loves these kids as his own.

        I know it isn't popular among the "punish as many people as possible" set, but most of those children turned out wonderfully - a couple are

    • The school was involved because two students got together and said "Who do we hate them most" from among their classmates. The postings affected another classmate, the target of the posts. The to students invited all the other classmates, the teachers, etc., to be friends of the fake profile, which claimed that the libeled student was sexually promiscuous, racist, a druggie, and on medication for mental illnesses, all to hurt the target of their hate. In other words, this affected a lot of the school for

      • Was any of this done on school grounds or using school equipment? From what I read it was all done at their homes.

        The school has absolutely no business mediating online shenanigans, or really anything at all that happens off school grounds that don't directly affect the school. That's a massive slippery slope and them compelling him to make a statement is now a legal problem for him and his parents.

        We have courts and police for this stuff. Schools need to be focused on what happens on school grounds.

        • The school has absolutely no business mediating online shenanigans, or really anything at all that happens off school grounds that don't directly affect the school.

          It probably started on the school ground where the children met and will continue on the school grounds where the children will interact every day.

          We have courts and police for this stuff. Schools need to be focused on what happens on school grounds.

          Do you really want a 7th grader hauled off to juvenile court for posting a Facebook page when it can much more easily be solved within the school? A school's job is education and educating a student that online bullying is withing that purview. The schools are focusing on what happens on school grounds as Facebook bullying leads directly to school grounds bullyin

        • The picture used was taken at school. This was how they were originally able to identify the perps.

          This also ended up involving school staff not directly involved with the students in question, as the perps sent out invites to everyone they could.

          We have courts and police for this stuff. Schools need to be focused on what happens on school grounds.

          So the school should ignore that drug dealer hanging just outside the gates? Or students who complain about abuse in the home? Or kids who show up at school hungry or without winter clothing? Or kids who are being shaken down for their lunch money on the way

      • I think by freaking out over this, it legitimizes the idea that people should be hurt by things posted on facebook. It's like when a baby trips and falls, but it doesn't start crying until the parents freak out and alert the baby that it should be scared and in pain.

        I have been called worse things when I was in school. What difference does it make that it is on the internet? Why not just make more fake pages of every student to make everyone even? Or better yet we can work to teach kids that they live i

        • Please read the actual judgment. This goes far beyond name-calling. If this had been done by adults, they'd be facing criminal charges.

          • I wouldn't say it's "far beyond namecalling". Getting beaten up in an alley is far beyond namecalling. Having a defamatory website made about you is just an extreme form of namecalling.

            I don't doubt that people might face criminal charges for similar things. I am saying that nobody *should* face criminal charges for speech, whether it's protesting at military funerals, or wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit, or burning a flag, or calling a high school girl a whore on the internet.

            I am not condoning any of this

            • How about identity theft and impersonation? Your argument shields both those acts as "free speech", even though this is exactly what happened.

              I am not condoning any of this behavior. I am saying that the correct way to combat this kind of behavior is not to shutdown freedom of speech, but rather to use more speech to publicly shame people who deserve it. That's what free societies do.

              That's what societies do with adults. Children are a whole different ballgame. First, because they are children, they do not have the same ability to stand up for their rights, second because they do not have the legal competence to make such decisions themselves.

              • How about identity theft and impersonation? Your argument shields both those acts as "free speech", even though this is exactly what happened.

                I think you actually need to be engaged in something like fraud in order to be in trouble for identity theft. If you are just "impersonating" someone to defame them, I don't think treating it as identity theft is in the spirit of what those laws were intended to stop.

                I think the correct course of action was to lobby facebook to take down the page, and when they don't, then apply social pressure to try to force them to do it. It is in their interest to take down fake pages created by mean high school dick

                • The Department of Justice [justice.gov] disagrees.

                  The short answer is that identity theft is a crime. Identity theft and identity fraud are terms used to refer to all types of crime in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person's personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain.

                  "fraud OR deception". There was definitely deception involved here. That it wasn't for economic gain is irrelevant. "typically" as opposed to a necessary ingredient of the crime.

        • Having freedom of speech kind of sucks sometimes, but it's better than living in North Korea.

          In terms of logic that statement is a false dilemma [wikipedia.org]. You propose that that are only two choices; complete lack of free speech or completely unfettered free speech. That is not true. There is a third option which is the one that is generally followed by most countries. That is where speech is free except in a few well defined categories. Libel and slander are two such categories.

          • I am not presenting a false dilemma. I am presenting a true dilemma.

            Either we have unfettered freedom of speech, or we do not. This is true.

            There is a third option which is the one that is generally followed by most countries

            This "third" option is really just the 2nd option. When you have the right to say things that the government has deemed acceptable, you really don't have freedom of speech. The right to popular speech doesn't need to be protected.

            China has a democracy. Everyone can vote for any candidate they want except in a few well defined categories. The communist party does g

            • The US does libel and slander pretty well. For instance, if you're slandering/libeling a public figure, the burden of proof the public figure bears is higher than if you're talking about some random dude. The libeled individual has to prove the statement is false. There are cases of abuse, such as where someone gets sued by a rich person just to harass. It's not perfect. But I think anti-SLAPP laws are a better fix for that than saying, "it's perfectly okay to spread vicious lies about anyone you want.

              • Damnit Slashdot!

                Corrected post is here.

                The US does libel and slander pretty well. For instance, if you're slandering/libeling a public figure, the burden of proof the public figure bears is higher than if you're talking about some random dude. The libeled individual has to prove the statement is false. There are cases of abuse, such as where someone gets sued by a rich person just to harass. It's not perfect. But I think anti-SLAPP laws are a better fix for that than saying, "it's perfectly okay to spread v

            • Either we have unfettered freedom of speech, or we do not. This is true.

              You are correct but where does it say "unfettered freedom of speech" in the US Constitution? As far as I can tell it just says "free speech". It also says "freedom of association" when most conditions of parole state that the parolee can not associate with known criminals. All rights have limits. Also, since this is a civil suit not a criminal suit, where does it say one is free from liability for the damage caused by that speech.

              The right to popular speech doesn't need to be protected.

              That is correct but the right to lie and cause damage to someone else is not,

    • Schools are involved because they are less intrusive than juvenile court. Mediation between families by a neutral school official can be very helpful. Many of these issues can be kept out of the courts unless the parents are negligent.

  • The Actual Issue (Score:5, Informative)

    by hduff ( 570443 ) <hoytduff @ g m a i l .com> on Thursday October 16, 2014 @07:54PM (#48164673) Homepage Journal

    The parents were notified of the defamation and took no action to close the FB account, which remained available for another 11 months. The parents were held directly liable for failing to act once notified, not for what was posted on the fake FB account.

    It's all in the PDF of the decision linked in the summary above, if you're not too lazy to read it.

    • And they shouldn't have been. It's up to the person who created the FB account to close it, or for FB to close it for them if the court ordered that.

      • If they are a minor, are they not subject to legal proceedings?

        It has been generally held that, in civil matters, the parents and/or guardians are financially liable for damaged caused by a minor dependent.

      • I quoteth from the text:

        "Parents may be held directly liable, however, for their own negligence in failing to supervise or control their child with regard to conduct which poses an unreasonable risk of harming others."

        citation: Assurance Co. of America v. Bell, 108 Ga. App. at 766-767 (4) (“A
        parent may be guilty of primary negligence in failing to exercise reasonable care to
        prevent a child under his control from creating an unreasonable risk of harm to third
        persons, where he has knowledge of facts fro

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

          this was a major issue in the Bulger case as well, the argument was that the two little bastards' parents should have stood trial for neglect, but because it was such a public murder (more to the fact that it was actually a murder, hence a capital crime, hence tripped the strict liability threshold), the two little bastards should be tried as adults. It ALMOST got scuppered as a murder trial because of some basic errors my the officer leading the investigation, in which case it would have ended up as a tria

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msobkow ( 48369 )

        Parents are and have always been responsible for the behaviour and expenses incurred by their children. If they go on a rampage of vandalism, the parents are responsible for the damages. If they steal a car and wreck it, the parents are responsible for the damages.

        This is no different. The parents are being held responsible for the damages done by their children.

        To hell with absentee parenting that lets children do whatever the hell they want with no restrictions or monitoring.

        You bred your rug ra

    • The parents were notified of the defamation and took no action to close the FB account, which remained available for another 11 months. The parents were held directly liable for failing to act once notified, not for what was posted on the fake FB account.

      And Facebook was notified of the defamation and took no action for 11 months. Why is Facebook not liable? After all, Facebook had the technical ability to delete the account; the parents did not. For all we know, the kid may have even forgotten the password.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

        unlikely given that the account was still active and in use up to the day it was deleted.

    • It should be Mark Zuckerburg's parents who should have to go to jail for not compelling him to delete the fake account when asked.

  • In the UK that equates to a 12 year old.

    The minimum age for a Facebook account is 13. It's right there, in their terms and conditions.

    Parental fail.

    • In the UK that equates to a 12 year old.

      The minimum age for a Facebook account is 13. It's right there, in their terms and conditions.

      Parental fail.

      Maybe the *kid* was failing. He could be 15 if he's been held back enough.

  • Summary is _grossly_ wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jthill ( 303417 ) on Thursday October 16, 2014 @09:02PM (#48165187)
    Among the "undisputed facts"::

    The unauthorized profile and page remained accessible to Facebook users until Facebook officials deactivated the account on April 21, 2012,, not long after the Bostons filed their lawsuit on April 3, 2012 [3]. During the 11 months the unauthorized profile and page could be viewed, the Athearns made no attempt to view the unauthorized page, and they took no action to determine the content of te false, profane, and ethnically offensive information that Dustin was charged with electronically distributing. They did not attempt to learn to whom Dustin had distributed the false and offensive information or whether the distribution was ongoing. They did not tell Dustin to delete the page. Furthermore, they made no attempt to determine whether the false and offensive information Dustin was charged with distributing could be corrected, deleted, or retracted.

    [...]
    [3] Indeed, Facebook's records showed that, months after Dustin's principal notified the Athearns that Dustin had been disciplined for creating the unauthorized account, the fake persona continued to extend or accept requests to become Facebook Friends with additional users and that other users viewed and posted on the unauthorized page until the day before Facebook deactivated the account.

    From the court's discussion of the legality of the lower court's grant of summary judgement in favor of the Athearns:

    Under Georgia law, liability for the tort of a minor child is not imputed to the child's parents merely on the basis of the parent-child relationship. Parents may be held directly liable, however, for their own negligence in failing to supervise or control their child with regard to conduct which poses an unreasonable risk of harming others.

    Since the parents knew for almost a year that their child had posted (no kidding, chase the link) grossly offensive, defamatory, libelous information and admit they not only did nothing, at all, ever, to even so much as look at it, they didn't even tell the kid to take it down, the appeals court's reversed the summary judgement in their favor, because it seems apparent that a jury might find them negligent for that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by flopsquad ( 3518045 )
      Indeed. The GA Court of Appeals did not say that (quoting TFS) "Parents can be held liable for what their kids post on Facebook." What they did say is that the parents' 11 months of inaction, after they were given notice of their son's defamatory FB profile, could constitute negligence. A reasonable jury could possibly find that not telling your kid to take such content down was negligent, and it's a question for the jury. Thus the subject matter of this case is on the internet, but it's not really abou

  • Yawn (Score:3)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Thursday October 16, 2014 @10:21PM (#48165681) Journal

    Haven't parents always been liable for the actions of their children? I've always figured I was. If my kids made some mess they couldn't clean up, I knew I was on the hook for it. I suppose I shouldn't speak in the past tense, because I still have two who aren't yet legal adults.

  • Yet another blow to personal responsibility.

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