Should cyber-bullies get the death penalty?

That is not a silly question. The damages caused by cyber-bullying may be very large - much larger, even, than the damages caused by traditional "brick and mortar bullying." The most recent cyber-bullying case involves the suicide of Megan Meier. Megan committed suicide a month ago, mid-October, after receiving a crushing email from her on-screen Myspace boyfriend, Josh Evans, that read, among other things, that he no longer wanted to be her friend because he had heard she was mean to her friends and "the world would be a better place without you." Megan went upstairs and hung herself not a half hour after receiving this email. She had been diagnosed previously with both Attention Deficit Disorder and clinical depression. What makes this really bad, though, is not merely that she was dumped by her boyfriend, which happens everyday to thousands of teenage girls in America, but that "Josh Evans" was actually the mother of one of Megan's former friends with whom she had had a falling out. This neighbor, Lori Drew, had concocted the entire affair with the help of her daughter, they claim, in order to learn whether people at school were gossiping about the daughter. But in the end, they used it to psychologically bully Megan.

With the ubiquity of the Internet and the increased popularity of Internet communication and social networking sites, one hears about cyber-bullying more and more. One of the first cyber-bullying cases, and not coincidentally one of the most famous viral videos of all-time, was the Star Wars Kid in which a boy had secretly taped himself imitating fighting scenes from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, only to have his alleged friends take the tape and upload it to a peer-to-peer file-sharing site, where it quickly became hugely popular and an Internet phenomenon within days. Now much older, the boy has since filed a lawsuite against his former classmates because of "[what he] had to endure, and still endures today, harassment and derision from his high-school mates and the public at large, [and for which he] will be under psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time." According to Cyberbullying.org, it is currently a federal crime to "annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person" via the Internet or any other telecommunications medium, and is punishable by a fine and/or up to two years of imprisonment.

The question I am now asking myself is what is the optimal punishment for cyber-bullying? No doubt, we could ask Larry Lessig and he would know. It seems that the reason the death penalty might approach the efficient punishment is because of the potentially very large external costs created by cyber-bullying if the bullying ends up becoming viral, in the way that it did for the Star Wars Kid. Each act of bullying can potentially grow exponentially if the bullying is publicly replicated through something like Myspace, Youtube, or other forms of social networking. In such a case, the appropriate penalty would be to match the bullying with some monetary value equal to the value of the damages done, assuming the probability of catching said-bullies was equal to 1.0. But as Becker showed, the more difficult it is to catch people for their crimes (i.e., the lower the probability of arrest), the larger the penalty must be set to to achieve efficient punishment. His classic, footnoted example was Vietnamese authorities chopping off the arms of individuals caught stealing rice - a small crime indeed, but so difficult to catch that it was necessary (allegedly) to make the punishment sufficiently draconian.

Well, here we have one of each. On the one hand, the externalities from cyber-bullying make the damages a function of the size of the network itself. What did the damage to the Star Wars Kid? If it was the number of times his video was viewed, then it's already almost at 4 million views on Youtube. That's not counting the hundreds of parodies that have been created, both online and on the small screen (I saw an episode of Arrested Development recently that was effectively a parody of the Star Wars Kid video). Over 4 million separate events of one and a half minutes of laughter and derision add up, and they add up quickly since viral videos escalate rapidly. Even if the damage is simply linear in the number of times the video is watched, the damage grows quite large, but if it is nonlinear (which is plausible), then it's even moreso. But, given the anonymity of the Internet, it's possibly quite easy to get away with this kind of bullying, if one is savvy enough.

So how do we adequately "price" this kind of crime? Two years, honestly, seems like on the low side to me. It seems like if we take Becker's theory to heart, we should pursue monetary fine equal to some estimation of the damages done, which are a function of the size of the network itself, using the available evidence that indicates how many viewings occurred. But this takes me back to the death penalty question. In light of the size of the damages, and the difficulty of capturing assailants, it's not at all the case to me why it shouldn't be a capital crime. That so many have now begun retaliating against the Drew Family, with threats, vandalism, prank calls, and published information about them online, in my minds speaks to how we may intuitively appreciate that this kind of viral bullying is really bad. Serious reflection, legislation and enforcement is necessary if we are to deal with this peculiar new crime.