Is Facebook an inalienable right? It's certainly a pleasure that no modern human who desires to has any problem wasting many, many minutes of their precious lives poring over. And now convicted sex offenders are challenging statutes in state courts that prevent them from using social networks, and civil liberties advocates are helping their cause.
Obviously, concerned parents everywhere want laws that are extant in Louisiana, Nebraska, and Indiana to stand barring sex offenders from joining social networks or entering online chat rooms. But civil libertarians argue that such venues as Facebook are now essential and indispensable to protecting free speech. But what if your free-speech platform is also your trolling-for-thirteen-year-old-tricks platform? It's a dicey affair.
Court challenges to the statutes have been successful in many cases, as the AP reports, but this sounds like an area of the law that hasn't fully been hashed out. In California, it's already illegal for prisoners to use Facebook, but that doesn't stop many of them who use smuggled cell phones to post status updates, harass victims, or, in the case of Charles Manson, keep in touch with fan boys.
