A recent ruling from the Georgia Court of Appeals may push parents to pay more attention to what their kids put on Facebook.
The Georgia appellate court ruled that parents can be held liable for their kids' posts, which stems from an incident in 2011 in which a boy in the seventh grade made a fake profile about a female classmate and posted explicit comments that make her appear racist and promiscuous, according to The Wall Street Journal. The girl told her parents about the profile after finding out about it, and her parents took the issue to the school principal, resulting in the boy being punished with two days of in-school suspension and a week of being grounded by his parents.
However, the appeals court opinion states that the page stayed up for the next 11 months, and it wasn't deleted until Facebook deactivated the account after being urged to do so by the girl's parents. The girl's lawyer said her parents didn't immediately confront the boy's parents because confidentiality concerns kept their school from identifying who put up the profile.
Judge John J. Ellington wrote in the decision that the boy's parents "were negligent in failing to compel [their son] to remove the Facebook page once they were notified of its existence," Newser reported. He added that their negligence could be viewed by a jury as a cause for the girl's victimization. The court dismissed one part of the case that argued that the boy's parents should be held accountable for the page being posted to begin with.
Edgar S. Mangiafico Jr., an Atlanta litigator who represented the boy's parents, said he has not found a case in which parents were found liable for what their kids were doing online.
Natalie Woodward, an Atlanta attorney who represented the girl, also said the court's decision was unusual, The Wall Street Journal reported. She added the ruling shows that in "certain circumstances, when what is being said about a child is untrue and once the parents know about it, then liability is triggered."
