Registered sex offenders fight for access to Facebook
(Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images / May 30, 2012) — Registered sex offenders who have been banned from social networking websites are fighting back in state courts. — Sex offenders have successfully challenged many of the restrictions …
Context & Ripple Effects
This fight is five years in the making. New Jersey moved first with a law barring sex offenders from internet use in December 2007, and by early 2009 researchers had tracked thousands of offenders who migrated from MySpace to Facebook after MySpace purged them — the MySpace-to-Facebook refugee wave that made platform bans look enforceable.
What changed by May 2012 is that the bans are losing in court: registered sex offenders have successfully challenged many social networking restrictions in state courts, turning statutes written for the MySpace era into constitutional test cases. The stakes sit squarely with Facebook, which as of late May 2012 is also defending its ad model and market value post-IPO — an added reason it prefers legislative bans over policing obligations.
First-order effects
- State laws that barred registered offenders from Facebook and similar sites are being struck down or narrowed case by case, so platforms that relied on those bans for safety assurances must re-evaluate their own enforcement policies.
- Facebook gains a legal argument it did not have before: exclusion enforced by statute is increasingly unconstitutional, pushing responsibility for account-level controls back onto Facebook itself.
Second-order effects
- Legislatures are likely to shift from blanket bans to disclosure-style requirements — forcing offenders to self-identify online rather than excluding them — which converts enforcement from a legal question to a platform data problem for Facebook.
- Other states drafting social media restrictions will face costlier litigation, slowing the spread of blanket bans and giving platforms more say in what restrictions they will actually support.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward courts establishing that broad social media bans fail constitutional scrutiny, pushing policy toward targeted, behavior-based rules — and making platforms like Facebook the de facto regulators of who participates in public online life.
The trend: Social media is moving from statutory exclusion of registered sex offenders toward court-limited, platform-enforced participation rules, with legislatures retreating to disclosure mandates.