Court Rules Parents Liable for Facebook Posts
October 2014
A Georgia appeals court has held that the parents of a minor may be found negligent for failing to supervise a child who defames someone over the internet. The ruling threatens to open a Pandora's box of personal liability far beyond the family in the case.
The parents in question have not yet been found liable; the case was remanded for a jury to weigh the matter. But the decision is bound to expand internet-related theories of tort liability for employers, parents, and anyone else charged with supervising those who commit mischief on the web.
In Boston v. Athearn, a thirteen-year-old girl was the victim of cyberbullying by two classmates, who created a fake Facebook profile, posted images of her altered to be graphically offensive, and sent email blasts inviting other students to view it. The victim quickly identified the perpetrators, and within days she and her parents brought the page to the attention of school administrators, who obtained signed confessions. Yet even after the classmates served suspensions, the fake profile remained on the internet for eleven months, accessible to anyone, and came down only after the family sued.
One would not expect a court of appeals to dwell on the finer points of competent parenting. Yet the Georgia Court of Appeals was plainly troubled by the defendants’ inattention:
During the eleven months the unauthorized profile and page could be viewed, the Athearns made no attempt to view the unauthorized page, and they took no action to determine the content of the false, profane, and ethnically offensive information that their son was charged with electronically distributing. They did not attempt to learn to whom he had distributed it, or whether the distribution was ongoing. They did not tell him to delete the page.
Because the underlying tort was libel, liability attaches with each publication of the fake profile. The court therefore found an ongoing series of torts, and reasoned that by failing to intervene and remove the page, the perpetrators’ parents could be found liable for negligent supervision.
It would be tempting to file this away as a case about bad parenting, its liability confined to extreme facts. But libel is far broader than cyberbullying, and presents itself in every form of content online. How different is a fake Facebook profile from an email critical of a business competitor? Could an employer be sued for a fake LinkedIn profile posted by an employee? If damages are measured by the number of times information is disseminated, could high-volume platforms give rise to larger awards still? The Georgia court may well have reached the right answer — but in shining a light on this emerging theory, it has revealed the open-ended exposure that all of us now carry in using the internet.
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