• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, April 2, 2009

New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram is making political hay out of condemning "cyberbullying." Last year, she targeted the now-defunct gossip site JuicyCampus.com, and now she's backing legislation that would require social networking sites to police comments.

Milgram surely knows that Web sites are protected from liability for user comments. There's also a significant First Amendment problem with trying to regulate posts by Web users. The government can pass laws criminalizing some types of speech -- making a threat, say, or inciting a riot -- but not insults.

Apparently, however, that's not going to stop lawmakers from trying to crack down on so-called cyberbullying. In addition to the efforts under way in New Jersey, West Virginia lawmakers also are looking to criminalize Web speech.

There, State Senator Mike Green is pushing a bill that makes it illegal to: "Publish via the internet a webpage or posting on a newsgroup untrue statements about another person which are false and designed to entice or encourage other people to ridicule or perpetuate the untruth about that person."

Supporters can argue that bills like this one would discourage people from maliciously picking on others online. But it's easy to see how it could discourage people from posting entirely legitimate complaints about the authorities -- politicians, judges, etc. -- because any untrue statements, even inadvertent ones, could subject the writer to criminal charges.

Victims of libel already have recourse: they can sue for civil damages. There's no valid reason for West Virginia to even consider imposing criminal sanctions for making online statements that turn out to be untrue.