Thanks, that was really helpful

I am taking a Business Law class through DVC right now, and it is all done online. The class is compressed, and therefore every two weeks I must read 4 chapters in the text, and answer a discussion question. The discussion questions come from the book, and our professor wants us to cite multiple sources in our answer, refer to ourselves in the third person, and basically give some convoluted answer. Here is my first post, which was answering the question "If providers of social networking sites are failing to protect their minor users, why should they be immune from negligence claims?"

Social networking sites should be immune from negligence claims because they do have measures in place to protect minors.

When signing up for an account on Facebook, for example, one commits to them to ‘not provide any false personal information on Facebook.’ (1) Also included in Facebook’s terms of service is a commitment to “not use Facebook if you are under 13 (Facebook).” MySpace also has a similar minimum age requirement for its users, and reserves the right to terminate a user account if it is discovered that the user is under 18 but representing that they are over 18, or vice versa (MySpace). In the case of Doe v. MySpace, the plantiff was 13, however, she chose to provide a false age to the social networking site, thus eliminating one layer of protection the site would have provided to a user under the age of 18. Defense counsel for the site can put forth an affirmative defense of Assumption of Risk (Miller & Jentz, 116); when the minor joined the
site, he or she agreed to the terms of service, and in the case of Doe v. MySpace, Julie was in clear violation of those terms, and would have had knowledge of the risk she was taking.

An additional consideration for exempting these sites from negligence claims pertains to the idea of contributory negligence3. Julie Doe was still under the care of her legal guardian, her mother, whom it appears
was unaware of Julie’s online activity until after the sexual assault occurred. Julie herself was negligent when she agreed to meet with a 19 year-old man alone. In this instance, the minor using the social site initiated face-to-face contact, which was not the responsibility of the creators of MySpace. Most social networking sites attempt to remove offensive or criminal images, language, or videos; these sites, however, cannot remove or prevent crimes that occur outside of the digital domain.

Section 230 of US Code 47 states that the U.S. government has to goal “to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their
children's access to objectionable or inappropriate online material. (47 U.S.C)” While it appears that the idea is to assist companies in developing so-called ‘child filters,’ this does not guarantee that minors will (1) circumvent the filters put in place by social networking sites; or (2) that the filter will be effective at blocking all
potentially dangerous images or interactions.

References
1. Facebook. (2011, 26 April). In Facebook Terms, section 4. Retrieved from http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?ref=pf
2. MySpace (2009, June 25). In MySpace.com Terms of Use Agreement. Retrieved from http://www.myspace.com/Help/Terms
3. Miller,R.L., & Jentz, G.A. Business Law Today (9th ed.). (2011). Mason, OH: South-Western, Cengage Learning.
4. 47 U.S.C. § 230


After this post (I got 17 out of 20), the professor advised all those of us who got 17 or less to reread the syllabus. Ok, I did that; it basically says, don't copy from the text or other students, write in the third person, and use a lot of references. I did that, but clearly it was not enough, so I emailed the professor to ask him about additional sources of precedent, and all I got back was that I should look at the students who did well, and if "that is too hard," I should refer back to the examples.

I love circular reasoning - especially when the students who got 18-20 points weren't really better than me, and had grammatical errors (which he claims to dock points for). Thanks for the help, Dr. Churchill - P.S. your syllabus is full of formatting errors.