A bill in the Georgia House would make it a crime to digitally alter a person’s face onto an obscene picture.
Bloggers and internet activists responded to House Bill 39 by inserting the face of one of the bill’s sponsors into graphic and nude pictures.
Representative Earnest Smith (D-Augusta) was the subject of the viral campaign, but Representative Pamela Dickerson (D-Conyers) authored the legislation.
When she first introduced it last year, internet users placed Dickerson’s face on obscene pictures.
Dickerson says one of her constituents’ under-aged daughters had her image manipulated and posted onto a pornographic website.
Dickerson says her bill protects children from similar cyberbullying.
“I believe in free speech and protecting people,” Dickerson says. ”I believe in the Constitution. But two hundred years ago computers had not been invented.”
The bill doesn’t mention minors but it does add to Georgia’s current criminal defamation statute, which makes spreading false statements that hurt a person’s reputation a jail-able offense
WABE legal analyst Page Pate says criminal defamation is much less common than civil lawsuits.
“The reality is that no prosecutor in Georgia is out there looking to arrest and send people to jail for criminal defamation,” Pate says. ”It just does not happen in the real world.”
Pate also says similar statutes to House Bill 39 already exist to protect children from cyberbullying.
If made into law, House Bill 39 would make the punishment for obscene image manipulation a maximum of $1,000 or one year in jail.
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