The Information Superhighway is becoming the education autocrat’s Autobahn. I’ve already written about the Facebook Police at NC State and elsewhere. Now I read about the MySpace Militia in middle school:
COSTA MESA, Calif. (AP) ? A middle school student faces expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against a classmate on the popular MySpace.com Web site, and 20 of his classmates were suspended for viewing the posting, school officials said. …
According to three parents of the suspended students, the invitation to join the boy’s MySpace group gave no indication of the alleged threat. They said the MySpace social group name’s was “I hate (girl’s name)” and included an expletive and an anti-Semitic reference.
A later message to group members directed them to a nondescript folder, which included a posting that allegedly asked: “Who here in the (group name) wants to take a shotgun and blast her in the head over a thousand times?”
Because the creator of a posting can change its content at any time, it’s unclear how much the students saw.
What the kid did was certainly not nice, but that doesn’t sound like a credible threat (a “thousand times” sounds like just idle venting). I don’t know how actionable it ought to be. But a “hate crime”? Would it matter to the authorities (or for that matter, the girl) any less if after “a thousand times” the guy had added something like “even despite the fact that she’s the same race as me”?
That’s not as distressing to me as the 20 kids being suspended for viewing the site. What is that, a “Look Crime”? It’s even more absurd to think of when you learn that it’s not at all evident any of the 20 even saw the offending post!
