Ha!  That always works for me.  The best way to counter a troll is to engage in calm and civil discourse.  

Seriously though, your second point is spot on:
“ b) strengthen the educational system so there are fewer ignorant people”

I think the aspect that can set it apart from everyday speech is the public shaming part, the sense that one can be attacked in front of a (seemingly) infinite audience with no recourse.  For a kid, that seems to be a pretty heavy burden.

The more I think about it the more I suspect that special protections for young people might not be out of the question.  There are all sorts of other ways minors are protected from the adult world.

The real downside would be harrassment-by-criminal-complaint, with vindictive parents turning adolescent disagreements into frivolous criminal cases.

I’m not sure what the best remedy is, but I wish we could have an intelligent conversation about it here instead of an uninformed snarkfest.

- Opinions: I think opinions should be entirely free and there should be no limits to expressing them. E.g. If you disagree with the government or powerful corporations, you should be free to say so without worry.

- Facts: This one’s tricky because some facts you talk about are true and other false. Talking about true facts should only be limited if there’s a very, very good reason for it (e.g. I don’t think it should be legal to reveal military secrets to enemy nations). Spreading false facts, however, can be illegal where it makes sense (e.g. false advertisements, shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel). We should err on the side of freedom, but there are cases where discussing facts shouldn’t be allowed.

- Orders: Orders to a subordinate should be limited by law where it makes sense. A mafia boss shouldn’t be able to ask for a the murder of someone while protected under the guise of “free speech”; a CEO shouldn’t be able to ask employees to destroy a protected national park without being punished for it.

- Threats: Unprotected speech. Protecting people’s right to menace others with harm isn’t part of a civilized society.

If we followed something like this, I think what is and isn’t free speech would be much clearer. Cyberbullying would be illegal because it’s a mix of spreading false facts (libel) and making threats. No need to weaken the protection of other types of speech.

“Fuck You.”

You Have Been Trolled.
You Have Lost.
Have A Nice Day.

- Klein, Savino, Carlucci & Valesky

(seriously, they know there is no way this crap could pass. They are counting on the outrage it will provoke on Teh Internets to get people to think about things…)

Also, tweaks are possible. For example, Oregon’s state constitution expands the scope of the 1st Amendment, allowing greater speech than the federal constitution. If you’ve ever visited Oregon and wondered why there are so many strip clubs, it’s because the state court system has interpreted its freedom of speech clause so that zoning cannot be used as a weapon against undesired but legal activities. In other parts of the nation, zoning laws are allowed to do a lot of work restricting what some might consider speech, or at least communicative activities.

Now, that’s been reduced to a few cordoned off areas about 500 feet away from wherever you happen to be protesting.

Some reasonably snappy colloquial usage(maybe “freds” as a shortening of “fed friends”) and you’ll be all set for a Nice Happy Fuzzy Inclusive idea to turn into a vitriolic insult.(Consider the fate of “Special”: Once “Crippled”, “Retarded”, and “Handicapped” had been burned through, “Special needs” came in, and, within a short time, every middle-schooler knew exactly what it meant when you rolled your eyes a touch and described somebody as “special”. )

I, for one, would be happy to add the sponsors of this notion to my freds list.

It’s not a bill.  It’s providing background for something they want to do in the immediate future.  The language about the first amendment is not in the bill, and so nobody is actually going try to legally change the definition of your first amendment rights.

What they actually want to do is (1) broaden the concept of “stalking” to include harrassing electronic communications, as a special protection for people under 21.  (This is indeed debatable.)  and (2) expand the definition of manslaughter to include bullying that leads to suicide.  (This is actually pretty reasonable IMO, for cases like an adult woman impersonating a teenage boy and inducing her neighbor’s daughter to kill herself.   Really happened.)  

The mentions of “happy slapping” etc. aren’t in the actual bills either.  Again, it’s just presented as background.

While the passage about free speech being a privilege is indeed unfortunate, it is followed by a much better citiation of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “harm principle” – “the right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”  

Now, contrary to what a lot of first amendment fans on the internet believe, this is actually the standard in contemporary law.  Not all speech is protected.   It is already illegal to harrass, defame, and defraud — to intentionally harm others with words.  

While I think the proposed bills that are debatable and need refinement, I think merely excising the passages one finds silly and ignoring the actual bills being proposed is bad journalism.  Like JSD, Savino is also my state rep, so I read the report ready to fire off a letter.   But what I found made me much more irritated at BB and the other bloggers who want to make hay out of this.

“DO NOT FEED.”

As Soodonim said, neither the 1st amendment nor any of the others “grant” us rights, they *restrict* the government from passing certain types of laws or acting in certain ways.  This is a small but important distinction.  It’s the difference between a right and a privilege.  Unfortunately, we have all been conditioned to believe that our rights are actually privileges, that can be taken away at a moment’s notice.

One of the most out of control example of this is the prohibition of certain rights based on whether or not somebody has ever been convicted of a felony.  In many states, you can’t vote if you are a felon.  I understand the sentiment, and I believe that for a time such a schema worked, but we have lowered the bar for felony over the past 100 years.  Felony crimes generally used to be capital crimes…  Just google “ridiculous felonies” and imagine all those crimes carrying the death sentence in years past.

Principally speaking, we either need to stop prohibiting rights based on felon-status (because that makes it a privilege, not a right) or restrict felonies to murder, rape, certain violent crimes and so on.

/soapbox_off

“It’s for the children”  has become such an overused, manipulative, political ploy.

I just saw a flyer in a workplace: “Cyberbullying affects us all blah blah blah seminar blah”.     

please g(h)od, make it stop.   I think this is one of those areas where LIEberals and KKKonservatives might be able to find common cause.  enemy of my enemy etc.