Who even knew you could be arrested for such a thing?

The College Fix reports.

Student arrested for calling his classmate ‘homoerotic’ gets N.C.’s cyberbullying law overturned

Posting to the internet is an “act,” not “speech,” so you can arrest someone for saying something mean.

That was the logic of the North Carolina Court of Appeals in upholding a conviction under the state’s broad cyberbullying law.

Fortunately for First Amendment defenders, the state supreme court just overturned that decision and struck down the seven-year-old law, saying the state can’t give teens a criminal record to protect other teens “from online annoyance.”

The case involved high school students making mean comments about a fellow student, Dillon Price, on his Facebook page more than four years ago.

After one posted “a screenshot of a sexually themed text message Price had inadvertently sent him,” defendant Robert Bishop called the exchange “excessively homoerotic” and said people shouldn’t take “the internet so seriously.”

Price’s mother complained to police, who used “undercover Facebook accounts” to take screenshots. Bishop was given a suspended sentence and four years of “supervised probation” for violating the cyberbullying law, which prohibits “any person” from using the internet to post or “encourage others to post … private, personal, or sexual information” about a minor “with the intent to intimidate or torment a minor.”

The state supreme court didn’t buy the appeals court’s breezy conclusion that the law had a “merely incidental” burden on speech and that it was “no greater than necessary” to help the state protect children from bullying:

Posting information on the Internet—whatever the subject matter—can constitute speech as surely as stapling flyers to bulletin boards or distributing pamphlets to passersby—activities long protected by the First Amendment. … Such communication does not lose protection merely because it involves the “act” of posting information online, for much speech requires an “act” of some variety— whether putting ink to paper or paint to canvas, or hoisting a picket sign, or donning a message-bearing jacket.