Published: November 27, 2008

Is lying about one’s identity on the Internet now a crime?The verdict Wednesday in the MySpace cyberbullying case raised a variety of questions about the terms that users agree to when they log on to Web sites.

The defendant in the case, a Missouri woman, was convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles on three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud for having misrepresented herself on the popular social network MySpace. The woman, Lori Drew, posed as a teenage boy in using the account to send first friendly and then menacing messages to Megan Meier, 13, who killed herself shortly after receiving a message in October 2006 that said in part, “The world would be a better place without you.”

MySpace’s terms of service require users to submit “truthful and accurate” registration information. Ms. Drew’s creation of a phony profile amounted to “unauthorized access” to the site, prosecutors said, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which until now has been used almost exclusively to prosecute hacker crimes.

While the Internet’s anonymity was used in this case as a cloak to bully Megan, other users say they have perfectly good reasons to construct false identities online, if only to help protect against the theft of personal information, for example.

“It will be interesting to see if issues of safety and security will eventually trump the hallmark ideology of free, largely anonymous or pseudonymous participation in cyberspace,” said Sameer Hinduja, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University.

Andrew M. Grossman, senior legal policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, said the possibility of being prosecuted for online misrepresentation, while remote, should worry users nonetheless.

“If this verdict stands,” Mr. Grossman said, “it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law. That’s a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions.”

The judge in the Los Angeles case, George H. Wu, is to hear motions next month for its dismissal. Ms. Drew’s defense asserts among other things, as it did at trial, that she never read MySpace’s terms of service in detail.

“The reality, recognized by almost everyone, is that the vast majority of Internet users do not read Web site terms of service carefully or at all,” said Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School.

Representatives of MySpace declined to make any executives available for interviews about the case. In a statement, the site said that it did not tolerate cyberbullying and would continue to work with industry experts to raise awareness of the “harm it can potentially cause.”

Mr. Hinduja, who writes for the research site CyberBullying.us, said there had been a handful of cases involving teenagers who were “driven to suicide in part because of cyberbullying by peers.” What drew the greatest attention to Megan’s death, he said, was that it involved the actions of an adult, Ms. Drew, now 49, whose daughter’s friendship with Megan had soured.

It remains easy to create a fraudulent account on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, though a witness at Ms. Drew’s trial, Jae Sung, a MySpace vice president for customer care, said “impostor profiles” were deleted when they were flagged by users or discovered by the Web site’s employees.

A number of corporations are competing to develop age verification software for Web sites. But relying on technology to confirm a user’s identity is not without drawbacks. There are legitimate reasons to hide one’s name and other information online, be it concern about identity theft or a need for comfort when asking for advice or help.

“We’ve been telling our kids to lie about ID information for a long time now,” said Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard.

Ms. Boyd said forms of digital street outreach were needed.

“There are lots of kids hurting badly online,” she said. “And guess what? They’re hurting badly offline, too. Because it’s more visible online, people are blaming technology rather than trying to solve the underlying problems of the kids that are hurting.”