The use of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace increases exponentially seemingly every day.  As a result, more and more people are blogging, sharing online journals and posting photos and other personal information about themselves so that it can be viewed by others over the net.  Cases involving the use of such networking sites give us a glimpse into how the law is evolving to deal with the issues that arise from individuals posting personal thoughts and information on these sites.

A cautionary tale came recently out of the California Court of Appeal in a case entitled Moreno v. Hanford Sentinel, No. F054138 (April 30, 2008). The case involved a UC Berkeley student — Cynthia Moreno — who grew up in the suburban California town of Coalinga.  Ms. Moreno had posted to her online journal on her MySpace page a poem that she wrote entitled “Ode to Coalinga.”  The Ode began with the statement that “the older I get the more I realize I despise Coalinga.”  The Ode apparently went on to make other highly critical comments about Coalinga and its residents and portrayed the town in an extremely unflattering way.  Although Ms. Moreno removed the Ode from her MySpace page within less than a week, it was sent by the principal of a local high school to a newspaper in Coalinga.  The newspaper published the Ode along with Ms. Moreno’s full name.

The publication of “Ode to Coalinga” elicited an immediate and heated reaction in the Coalinga community.  Ms. Moreno’s family — including her parents and sister (who still resided in Coalinga at the time) — received death threats and shots were fired at the Moreno family home.  The family was forced to move out of Coalinga and, due to financial losses, shutter the twenty-year-old family business.  As a result, the Moreno family sued those involved in the publication of the Ode, including the school principal who had sent the poem to the local newspaper for publication and the newspaper itself, for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.  The trial court dismissed the Morenos’ claims.

The Court of Appeal made several significant findings.  First, the Court affirmed the trial court’s ruling that the Morenos could not make a claim for invasion of privacy based on the private disclosure of public facts.  Because Ms. Moreno had published her opinions about Coalinga by posting the Ode on myspace.com (thereby making the Ode available to anyone online), she lost any expectation of privacy in the Ode.  The Court rejected Ms. Moreno’s arguments that she had expected only a limited audience for the work and that she had removed the work almost immediately from her MySpace page.  The Court also found that Ms. Moreno’s family could not have a claim for invasion of privacy as such a claim — if it existed at all — is highly personal and belongs only to Cynthia Moreno.

Also significant is the fact that even though Ms. Moreno’s last name appeared nowhere on her MySpace page (she referred to herself only as “Cynthia”), the Court rejected the notion that her last name, which was published by the newspaper, was a private fact which could support an invasion of privacy claim.  The Court based its finding in part on the fact that her MySpace page contained her photograph, thereby making her identity “readily ascertainable” and “a public fact.”

The Court of Appeal did hand the Morenos one victory — overruling the lower court and allowing the family’s claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress against the school principal who sent the Ode to the newspaper to proceed.  The Appellate Court held that it was up to a jury to decide whether the principal’s actions in sending the Ode to the newspaper for publication were extreme and outrageous in light of all the circumstances.

Ms. Moreno’s Ode therefore reminds us all that the self-publication of information and opinions on the internet will likely result in the loss of privacy rights in the material and at least some loss of the ability to control where and how the information is promulgated by others.