Comments on: Teenager Busted for Creating Fake “News” Story

By: Andy (Intelligent Teenager)

Andy (Intelligent Teenager) — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:19:38 +0000

No. Lightening up on “practical jokes” is by far the wrong thing to do. I’m 16 and I’m in high school, and even I know how incredibly unintelligent my fellow classmates are. They do it to themselves. They’re the ones who make the choices. They’re the ones who choose to do illegal drugs, drink alcohol, and engage in sexual activity. They apparently don’t understand the consequences of what they do. I am honestly ashamed of being a teenager, even though I can’t help it. If you’ve ever heard a conversation between two teenage kids, it’s truly mind numbing. I believe that listening to their unintelligent babble has actually sapped some of my intelligence. My point is this: if we lighten up on teenagers for making bad choices, it will worsen the situation. We’ll essentially be telling them that it’s okay to insult their teachers and disobey their parents. We’ll be telling them that they can do whatever they want without major consequence. This is wrong. We need to go the other way. Crack down on underage drinking, illegal drugs, and even the “practical jokes” (not really practical). I am absolutely sick and tired of seeing unintelligent teens walking around the world, completely in tune to their own needs. We need to send teens a message that says “get with the picture”

By: JWSR

JWSR — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 12:09:35 +0000

As a 56 year old ex-Marine Viet Nam combat vet, even I find this action ludicrous. For Gods’ sake, this nation needs to lighten up a bit. What used to be harmless jokes, nowadays have become actionable offenses to further line lawyers pockets. If you lawyers and teachers want to persue something, how about finding a way to keep kids out of porn sites, and drug dealers off the streets. Stay out of the practicle jokes field. These are dynamically generated urls and ore only seen by the person clicking on them. By retyping a string of x’s in place of your name in the url and clicking go, the url is gone, it is stored nowhere. If it is posted on a forum, that’s another story. But, at the bottom of these stories there is usually a disclaimer that the above story is ficticious. The friend fills in the name, not the website.

By: Michael Mayes

Michael Mayes — Fri, 26 May 2006 09:29:56 +0000

Libel and the American Teenager

I picked up this story and was amazed at the attention given the web site and not the unimaginably stupid kid who throught to distribute it at school. I’ve been to websites that allowed me to get “married” by entering two names, to print pictures of myself with celebrities or even print out my own official “badge,” and yet I’ve never been sued for alimony by the online bride, tried to sell my photo with Britney to the Post nor tried to use my badge to confiscate pot from the local teens.

Give me a break. The site doesn’t advise to “print and distribute.” Saying the site is leading users to be irresponsible is like saying gun manufacturers are encouraging drive-bys. The 14 year old did something utterly ridiculous and damaging to the teacher–the site didn’t do that.

By: Evan

Evan — Thu, 25 May 2006 22:04:57 +0000

“The website authors wrote salacious content that they knew was false.”

Interesting proposition. Can content be false if, when it is written, it is about no one in particular?

One could argue that the real “content,” that is the subject for the various predicates provided by the website developers, is provided by the users of the site when they fill in the name and locations.

Then again, the real content seems to appear once the info submitted combines with what’s already there. The line of demarcation is the same as in Carafano, but seems to be slid much further over toward the website provider.