The Case Of the Facebook Bully

Do rude comments about a high school student qualify as hate speech?

- Vicki Glembocki

IN DECEMBER 2011, Dillion Price’s mother found him crying in his bedroom. For three months, students in his class at Southern Alamance High School in North Carolina had been posting nasty comments and pictures of him on Facebook. His mom took the posts, some describing Price performing sexual acts in very crude language, to the county sheriff’s office.

Soon after, a county detective, David Sykes, began to investigate. He created a fake Facebook profile to keep tabs on Price’s account and monitored it for two months. When he came across posts he considered to be cyberbullying, he took screenshots of them and added the users’ names to a list, which he took with him to the high school on the morning of February 7, 2012.