Parents Rally to Stop 'Cyber Bullying' Calling Internet rumor mills harmful, some move to shut sites. Defenders say free speech is at stake. By Erika Hayasaki and Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writers When Internet users log onto http://www.schoolscandals.com and click on the Beverly Hills High School link, they will find a message calling one student a "retard" who "deserves to go to hell." A posting in the Frost Middle School chat room describes a student as a "homosexual with a pigeon-like face and a penguin-like body." Such name-calling and gossip about students are common on the 3-year-old Web site, similar to the crude messages scribbled inside of school bathroom stalls for decades but on a much larger scale. That "cyber bullying" has an audience of tens of thousands, and it features links for chat rooms about nearly 100 Southern California middle and high schools, particularly in the San Fernando Valley. As a result, parents and school administrators are calling for the site's closure, contending much of its content is libelous and harmful. ... Wendy Seltzer, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties organization, said that the authors of the postings might be held liable, but that a 1996 federal law protects many Internet service providers from lawsuits about their content. Only sites like http://www.salon.com, http://www.latimes.com and others can be sued for defamation, since they hold the right to edit their content, she said. The notion is that most Web hosts "don't look at all, because if you do look, you might be held liable for what your users are saying," she said. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-website17apr17,1,911742.story?coll=l...