[AgentZero]

I have to say I do find it a bit odd how people treat the Internet as some sort of special case, because at the end of the day, it's just another medium for communication. If this horrible woman had communicated via text message, would we be calling for nationwide wire tapping? Or if she'd used snail mail, would we be demanding that the Post Office filter all of our mail? What if she'd done it face-to-face (I know that wouldn't work in this particular example, but I'm sure there are other cases where it would)? Would we be demanding that federal agents monitor all of our conversations to make sure we don't say anything mean?

People will say and do nasty thing to each other regardless of the medium of communication used, and when these nasty things pass into the realm of the criminal, suggesting that we hold the medium responsible is to miss the point entirely. The fact that this woman used MySpace as a medium should be completely irrelevant to the case. If you don't think a little note tied to a rose and left outside her door every morning wouldn't have had an equally, if not more devastating effect on this young girl's psyche, then I really don't know what to tell you.

What I'm getting at is that it's the actions committed that should be criminalized, not the medium over which they were committed. I don't know about the US, but here in Canada, instigating someone to commit suicide is a criminal offense. If anything, the focus should be not on MySpace, but on why there are no laws to punish those who push someone to take their own life. But of course, everyone is going to keep talking about MySpace, because Internet bogeymen are more fun to talk about than perplexing holes in a justice system.