Mom Convicted After Hijacking Son’s Facebook Account, Posting Vulgarities
In what sounds like a nasty parent-child spat worsened by social media, a woman in Arkansas who tampered with her 17-year-old son’s Facebook account was ordered by a judge to pay a $435 fine and take anger management and parenting classes, and she was barred from having contact with him.
Ironically, the chill in relations between Denise New and her son began when he refused to return one of her house keys. Thereafter, she locked him out of his Facebook page and proceeded to muddy his online standing.
The LA Times reports:
Some of the postings New said she put on her son’s Facebook page included vulgarities. One, which she said she mistakenly posted on her son’s page instead of her own, said, “The only mistake I ever made was having a kid.”
…
New has said she posted items on her son’s page after he had failed to log off the social-networking site. She also changed his password so he couldn’t use it again.
One of the Facebook messages that disturbed the judge was worded to appear as though the son had written it: “Check this out — I went to my mom’s and deliberately started an argument and called the police on her. She almost went to jail. How cool is that? Ha, ha, ha.” New said she posted it because she thought her son had told two police officers that she had hit him. She said she had merely pushed her son away from a door.
Parent-child estrangement is, sadly, nothing new, but up until recently, it wouldn’t have been possible for one party to get revenge by so easily impersonating the other, save in a farcical stage play. Whether or not one agrees with the criminal outcome of this particular conflict — the judge’s verdict was “misdemeanor harrassment” — it’s creepy that it’s a tactic at all.
(via LA Times)
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