One student faces expulsion and 20 students have been suspended as a local school board investigate the charges that a student set up a group on the popular website myspace.com to celebrate their hatred of another student. The group they set up included various anti-semitic references and explicit depictions of actions people would like to have done to this person.
"Who here in the (group name) wants to take a shotgun and blast her in the head over a thousand times?"
The person who set up the site is the one facing expulsion--the rest are people who had joined the group.
Look, when I was in High School I wasn't all that popular (unlike now, where I'm so dammed popular that it's silly) and I'm sure if there had been a myspace back then I might have had a group dedicated to me. It sucks to be a social pariah, and especially so in High School where kids are particularly cruel, but this seems like a standard case of censorship and a curtailing of freedom of speech. As long as they never acted on it, they should have the right to post anything they like about anyone. Hell, half they Internet posts crap about Bush, and I can personally say I've wanted to blast him in the head with a shotgun about a thousand times. (Though I never would!) Should stating my feelings and opinions be criminal if they don't conform to our societies vision of 'happiness?' And how can we teach the Middle East about freedom of speech when we haven't mastered it ourselves? The all too simple fact that if you want freedom, you have to take the good with the bad, and the intelligent with the out-and-out offensive.
Besides, if there's anything to worry about in Myspace it would be the crapload of pedofiles patrolling its virtual halls. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11644084/).
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