A teenager in Arkansas, however, has become so annoyed with his mother’s Facebook intrusion that he has reportedly decided to sue her for harassment.

The claim is the mother hacked into the Facebook account, changed his password and made some postings under his account name.  The mother states she has every right to do so and is defending that in court come May.

Here are both sides of argument from us at SocialStalking only, not as attorneys:

Her intention was ok
The mother was trying to act in some responsible manner of seeing what and why her teenager was making particular postings.  The better approach would have been to actually communicate with the teenager and have them log into their Facebook account while she sat there.  This would keep some of the trust and respect factor between them while allowing parenting to occur.

Parents always wish to know what is going on with their kids online and do not have well defined rules, guidelines and restrictions of how they will interact.  Her exact quote allows them to take the below stance when she said

“You’re within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it’s his account, or your account, or whoever’s account.”

Yes, with monitor being the key here.  You could not hack into another adults account legally.  Monitoring does not include taking over.  It means watching, reviewing and even logging/taking notes on content.

Her intention broke numerous rules
The mother made one major mistake that the article from CNET mentions.  She hacked into a computer account with malicious intent.  This, in itself, is a crime she has admitted to. She has accessed a computer (Facebook server) without authorization and with intent to portray herself as someone else.  Now enter identity theft arguments.  The teenager has a strong case if he follows this and removes the emotional and parental battle from the fight.  The local Clark County laws even address this as quoted in the article.

If the teenager was on the parents computer, it is not the one in question.  The Facebook server is the one in question and was hacked by the mother.  She had no technological right to do so and should have relied on parental rights such as knowing the passwords and lines of communication.

Summary

The legal battle needs to be separated far from the parental battle to clearly understand this.  The parent broke laws.  Good intentions do not allow this.  The parent took offense to what the child was posting.  Good parenting and communication resolves that portion.  We hope they both win in court and later parenting.

Although there is no universally accepted definition of cyberstalking, the term is used in this report to refer to the use of the Internet, e-mail, or other electronic communications devices to stalk another person. Stalking generally involves harassing or threatening behavior that an individual engages in repeatedly, such as following a person, appearing at a person’s home or place of business, making harassing phone calls, leaving written messages or objects, or vandalizing a person’s property

Pretty close to how we would define it now, with more emphasis on the tools and ways of contact.  The report refers to creating anonymous mailboxes somewhere on the Internet through an ISP.  How things have changed.  Now you have a presence all over social networking sites with tons of personal information shared in different levels depending on their defaults and your work at setting preferences.

I believe that this study/document needs a definite update to account for the explosion of sites that every age group is now participating.  We need stronger rules and laws that govern peoples actions in cyberstalking to add controls over the new features being offered.  The section on cybercrime is being updated regularly.  Shouldn’t the section on cyberstalking follow suit?

Narcissistic personality disorder is a condition characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, need for admiration, extreme self-involvement, and lack of empathy for others. Individuals with this disorder are usually arrogantly self-assured and confident. They expect to be noticed as superior. Many highly successful individuals might be considered narcissistic. However, this disorder is only diagnosed when these behaviors become persistent and very disabling or distressing

So the youth in question must self-promote and inflate themselves as have no empathy to others?  Sounds like every bulletin board, social site and a lot of blogs to me.

The idea of Facebook is sharing minutia about your day and life as well as communicating that to a broad audience.  Twitter takes that to another level with short bursts of messages, instead of longer details on walls and postings in Facebook.

I don’t think these sites have any influence on growing this in our youth, just exposing it to a wider audience at a faster rate.  There are many of our youth calling for help across the networks, and many friends that spend time online trying to help them.  Is it the removal of the face to face interaction that brings this to our attention?  Where the parents and public can read in near real-time the interaction between teens.  Where before, the conversations were private or on the phone in the closet in their room?

You tell me, do you think the youth or the same, more or less than previous?

I think that the instrument used in the crime, in this case a computer, should not have been the focus of the crime itself.  I say that since the trial was moved to where the MySpace servers are located and treated as a computer case in the charges filed.

I believe that if you knowingly cause physical or emotional harm to someone that you also knew had current emotional issues, then the crime is apparent.  Missouri said they couldn’t prove that harassment was intended:

"Their purpose was never to cause her emotional harassment that we can prove," Banas said. "There’s a difference between what people think or what we may believe the reason was that they created this, it’s what we can prove and what a jury would believe."

This quote is from St. Charles County Prosecutor Jack Banas.  Maybe I am way off, but there was nothing but the attempt to cause this type of harm.  The whole purpose of the woman pretending to be a young boy and then dump a neighbor girl with a known emotional problem should be taken as humor?

The current Missouri law classifies the above as a class A misdemeanor unless done by someone over 21 years old against someone under 17 years old.  Then it becomes a felony charge.  Once again this meets the criteria if the state law had not been so old that it only included the telephone as electronic communication.

Each state, and federally, need to create laws to address the trends in social stalking, harassment and even squatting (which will be a post shortly).

Hopefully this quickly summarizes our thoughts on what happened and our thoughts are with the family and their loss.