In an Alabama Senate committee hearing Wednesday, Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, presented the bill, which would create a misdemeanor offense for students who build fake social media profiles or conduct a wide variety of other online actions sometimes associated with online bullying.
Orr himself said he was "ambivalent" about the bill, which he brought because of concerns about cyberbullying in his district.
"It's a start," he said. "If we need to work on it, I'm all open to doing that."
Orr's bill would ban students from several online activities, from posting personal information about other students and breaking into password-protected accounts to posting "real or doctored images" of students or school staff on the Internet. The bill would also ban students from making "any statement, whether true or false" that would lead to stalking or harassment of a student.
Ebony Howard, a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said kids need to be held accountable for cyberbullying, but not in the way Orr's bill would do it.
"The way that we're trying to hold them accountable in this bill is going to push them into the juvenile justice system," Howard said.
Howard said the bill lumps together "sinister" activities such as posting pornographic photos of students along with "benign but annoying" acts such as signing someone up for an email list without their consent.
Senate Education Policy Committee chairman Dick Brewbaker, R-Montgomery, said the state needs to take some action on cyberbullying. He claimed online bullying has led to two suicides of students in Montgomery.
"You can teach tolerance all day long, but if one student causes the death of another, you need to do more than talk to him about it in the gym with his peers," Brewbaker said.
The bill appeared to be headed for revision Wednesday. Brewbaker's committee held no vote on the bill and agreed to consider it again at a later meeting.
©2015 The Anniston Star (Anniston, Ala.)
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