Is pretending to be another person on the internet an exercise in the freedom of speech? or is it identity theft?

As far a community partners go I am not sure who I will able to connect with yet that will help me to further my research in this topic.

I was denfinitely planning on using different news sources to give some good examples of how impersonating another person can be a bad thing and a good thing in some cases. otherwise I am planning on looking into the rates of suicide directly related to harrasment over the internet by people that pretend to be a person close to the individual. There is a large spectrum of internet users that pretend to be another person and I would also like to explore why social norms do not apply to internet usage and wether or not that is a good thing.