MySpace Hoax

When I was growing up we didn’t have myspace or facebook, and for most of my childhood the internet wasn’t widely available and certainly wasn’t a part of everyday life for a child. Now kids spend way too much time on computers and tend to live in a fictional world where your popularity is based on how many facebook friends you have, and the ‘cool kids’ don’t just ignore you at lunch, they post terrible things on the internet for everyone to see. What happened to Megan Meier is an example of how horrific this bullying can be. The worst part about this case is that it wasn’t another teenage girl making Megan’s life miserable, it was an adult woman with children of her own. Why Lori decided to create this fictional boy who pretended to have a crush on Megan and then break her heart and spread terrible rumors about her is unthinkable. “Both ethics and morals are concerned with standards of right and wrong.” (Essentials of Business Law, Liuzzo, pg. 19) While Lori Drew did not break one specific law, she certainly doesn’t have a very strong moral code. Everything about what she, and everyone involved did was wrong and it resulted in an already depressed little girl taking her own life.

To read that she was found guilty of something is a relief, but to find that she wasn’t found guilty of everything she was charged with is somewhat of a disappointment. While there are no laws in place that allowed Lori Drew to be charged with Megan’s suicide, hopefully something good will come from this tragedy and new laws will be put in place. “A precedent is a court decision on which later courts rely in similar cases. In some instances, a court may be influenced by precedent, in other cases it may not.” Essentials of Business Law, Liuzzo, pg. 5) This case has certainly raised awareness of internet bullying crimes, but hopefully the outcome will not be a precedent for other cases of this nature. People need to be held responsible for their actions, and if Lori Drew were found guilty of all of the charges brought against her anyone who may have thought about doing something like this, a child or an adult, would have second thoughts knowing that they would get in serious trouble.