If you use Facebook, the case of the guy who hate-posted about his estranged wife

shouldn't apply to you. But it should interest you.

It shouldn't apply to you because the behavior of the Facebook user, Mark Byron, was astonishingly stupid as well as belligerently venomous. According to the Huffington Post, Byron – who is in the midst of a nasty divorce in which his wife filed for a protective order – posted a comment to his "friends" on his FB page saying, in part, "If you are an evil, vindictive woman who wants to ruin your husband's life and take your son's father away from him completely — all you need to do is say you're scared of your husband or domestic partner and they'll take him away." You don't need to know anything about the actual facts of this marital war to know that the post was an unbelievably dumb move on Byron's part. Posting that statement to be read by an untold number of online "friends" on a notoriously-hackable site is nothing at all like telling real friends over drinks that your wife is an evil, dishonest person. Facebook, even when posts are supposedly visible only to your "friends," is a dangerously public place devoid of any real privacy. Anyone with more than two brain cells should know better than to do what Byron did. He paid for this by being required by a judge to post daily Facebook apologies to his wife in order to avoid jail time and fines. (Unseemly details here.)

But, in spite of the idiocy, Byron's case should interest you because it raises real questions about what "privacy" and "free speech" mean on Facebook – and, implicitly, on Twitter and whatever other electronic shout-out realms are soon to come. The judge, in response to a complaint by Byron's wife, ruled that Byron's FB post and resultant sympathetically angry posts by his "friends" were sufficiently abusive to cause his wife to feel intimidated and threatened. There is no way for you or me to know if this is true. Her attorney says it is. Some civil rights attorneys say it looks as if it's not. The larger issue, though, is that at this point nobody knows how to legally judge what the Constitution allows a FB user to post to his or her "friends." I think a good place to start is with existing standards for libel and threats of violence. But the reality is that, in the legal Wild West of online speech, judges are going to rule on what you post based on what they personally think, or on what they guess the government is going to think, or on what police or prosecutors prod them to do. That's not very comforting.

The lesson: treat every entry you make on Facebook, Twitter, and all other forums as if it is a transmission to every electronically-connected person on the planet. It may very well be.

Thanks to Laurie.