A US judge has indicated that he will overturn the conviction of a Missouri woman accused of “cyber-bullying” a 13-year-old girl who later killed herself.

Lori Drew was alleged to have posed as a teenage boy on MySpace and sent flirtatious messages to Megan Meier.

After the fake boy “dumped” Ms Meier online, she committed suicide.

Drew, 50, was found guilty of illegally accessing computers last year, but Judge George Wu said he was tentatively

acquitting her.

If Drew were convicted for breaking the social networking site’s terms of service, “you could prosecute pretty much anyone who violated terms of service,” he said.

‘Public symbol’

Prosecutors alleged during the trial that Drew had set up the phony MySpace account in order to find out if Megan Meier was spreading rumours about her daughter Sarah.

Posing as “Josh Evans”, she started an online relationship with the 13-year-old, before apparently staging a falling-out and sending a message that “the world would be better off without” her.

During court proceedings, Drew’s lawyer argued that “the government’s case is all about making Lori Drew a public symbol of cyberbullying”.

“The government has created a fiction that Lori Drew somehow caused [Megan's] death, and it wants a long prison sentence to make its fiction seem real.”

But federal prosecutor Tom O’Brien said he stood by his decision to prosecute.

“I’m proud of this case,” he said. “This is a case that called out for someone to do something. It was a risk. But this office will always take risks on behalf of children.

This article is from the BBC News website.