• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 14, 2008

In the wake of the suicide of 13-year-old MySpace member Megan Meier, officials are stepping up efforts to crack down on online bullying.

In the latest example, Kentucky state legislator Tim Couch has proposed a bill that would ban anonymous comments on boards or message boards. Among other provisions, the act, introduced this month, would demand that operators of blogs or message boards require commenters to register their names, addresses and e-mail addresses.

But civil liberties advocates say that such legislation, no matter how well-intentioned, violates First Amendment rights to free speech. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that people have the right to speak anonymously, said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While that right isn't absolute--judges, for instance, can order the disclosure of users' identities when they've defamed someone--courts also have protected online commenters' anonymity in numerous cases.

"There's certainly an impulse, a desire on the part of various people across the spectrum to try to pierce the anonymity of online speakers," Zimmerman said. But, he added, courts turn down such requests unless there are solid legal grounds to order disclosure. "You have to demonstrate that there's a reason to do it other than wanting to know."

That principle was reiterated in December, when a judge in New Jersey ruled that officials from Manalapan wasn't entitled to learn the identity of "daTruthSquad," a blogger who had criticized the township.

In Kentucky, in addition to requiring that publishers capture commenters' names and addresses, the Couch bill would also require online publishers to "establish reasonable procedures" to allow people to request identifying information about anyone who had made false or defamatory comments. Web publishers who violate the bill would be fined $500 for a first offense and $1,000 for subsequent offenses.

Drew Curtis, who operates the Kentucky-based news aggregation site Fark, said the mere prospect of such fines is unsettling. "I don't think this is going to happen, but I don't like seeing anything like this get filed because it's a giant axe over my head," he said.

Digital rights advocates add that beyond the constitutional problems with the bill, it also seems impractical. "I don't know how any Web site operator would ever know they're getting valid information," said Sam Bayard, assistant director of the Citizen Media Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Still, Kentucky isn't the only place where the authorities are taking on anonymous speech under the guise of fighting bullying. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, where MySpace is headquartered, reportedly is investigating whether sending pseudonymous messages to Megan Meier violated computer fraud laws.

Meier committed suicide after being harassed on her MySpace account by other teens who sent messages to her under the moniker "Josh Evans." Prosecutors in her hometown of St. Louis ruled out the possibility of charges because the state had no laws banning online harassment.

Computer fraud laws prohibit users from impersonating others online, but Zimmerman said that prosecuting someone for using a fake name to post comments--as opposed to hacking into a secure system--would raise First Amendment concerns. "Those statutes are created to go after people who are trying to impersonate someone else to get access to computers," he said. "That's a very different thing from using a pseudonym."