Facebook doesn't lack for annoying features, from fake IKEA giveaways to chronic oversharing among its regular users. But this must be a first: a son bringing criminal charges against his mother for hacking into his Facebook account.
The boy, 16-year-old Lane New, has charged his mother with harassing him by policing his Facebook page too aggressively — and with spreading slander in her own public postings on the page.
The boy's mother, Denise New, of Arkadelphia, Arkansas, says she's flummoxed by the charges. She is aghast that (a) her son would sue her, and (b) that a local prosecutor would take the case.
"You're within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it's his account or your account or whoever's account," Denise New told a local reporter. "It's crazy to me that we're even having this interview."
New said that she'd been thinking for sometime that Lane's Facebook account wasn't reflecting well on him — and last month, she took it upon herself to start editing it so as to excise material she deemed offensive and/or embarrassing. One day, she noticed that after Lane had updated his account on her computer, he'd failed to log out of it. So she made a few changes and then changed his password to prevent him from accessing the account again.
"The things he was posting in Facebook would make any decent parent's eyes pop out and his jaw drop," New said. "He had been warned before about things he had been posting."
Among the offending entries, she explained, was an account of driving 95 mph to Hot Springs one night after getting in an argument with a girl he liked.
It should be said that Lane currently lives with his grandmother; Denise New has explained that she began experiencing mental problems in the wake of her divorce about five years ago and felt she couldn't provide the proper supervision.
In his handwritten complaint to the court, Lane New described his mother's behavior: "Denise first hacked my Facebook and changed my password. She also changed the password to my email so I could not change it. She posted things that involve slander and personal facts about my life."
This may have been one case, in other words, where a bit of mother-son oversharing on Facebook might have done some good.
— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.
Teen files charges against mother for manipulating his Facebook page - Yahoo! News
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