Sending “annoying” or “offensive” messages to others is now harassment. To paraphrase Tyler,  the Creator (a popular rapper with the kids these days): “Just turn off your computer man.”

Christopher White at the College Fix has the story:

Syracuse Internet policy makes everything ‘harassment,’ student reps say

Policy language should focus on ‘threats of violence, obscenity, child pornography, harassing communications’

Syracuse University students acting like jerks online – or just arguing heatedly – could be punished under school policy.

That’s because the school’s Computer and Electronic Communications Policy defines harassment as sending “annoying” or “offensive” messages to others.

The Student Association wants to clamp down on such vague and unenforceable terms. It passed a resolution earlier this month asking the school to make the harassment language more specific and concrete, according to The Daily Orange.

The request to revamp comes on the heels of a similar brouhaha over the Internet use policy at Northern Illinois University.

As The College Fix reported, a student trying to look up the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church on Wikipedia got a Web page warning that clicking through to the site would probably “violate the Northern Illinois Acceptable Use Policy.”

That policy was changed after an Internet outcry, though one administrator grumbled that the school wouldn’t be able to track “illegal activity” as well.

Zachary Greenberg, a student in the Syracuse law school and the author of the proposal, told The Daily the resolution is a good first step toward replacing vague terms, such as “annoying” and “offensive,” with “more specific language such as threats of violence, obscenity, child pornography and harassing communications as defined by law.”

In an interview with The College Fix, Greenberg said the wording of the computing policy is an imposition on students’ freedom of expression because it makes virtually all forms of electronic communication a form of harassment.