Social media messages are becoming more and more punishable by law, but still, schools have yet to catch up in teaching online etiquette to incoming freshman, Inside Higher Ed reported.

Bradley Shear, a Bethesda, Md.-based lawyer who specializes in social media and Internet law, said the biggest reason for many teens and college-age people is they do not realize the very real consequences of their postings.

"The travesty of all of this is that people - especially young people - don't understand their digital interactions create tremendous legal consequences," he said.

Caleb Clemmons was released a week ago after serving a six-month sentence for posting to his Tumblr blog what he called a social experiment. The message said he was planning on shooting up Georgia Southern University and wanted to see how quickly he would be arrested. Police arrived and cuffed him three hours after he published the post.

Before Clemmons, a teenager in Texas was sentenced to a five-month jail term for "joking" on Facebook about "shooting up a kindergarten." He followed that message up with the comments "LOL" and "JK" trying to indicate it was a joke.

In 2011, two British men were sentenced to four years in prison for inciting online a riot, even though it never occurred. A Massachusetts teen was arrested for making terroristic threats online after he posted a rap referencing the Boston bombings and the White House. His bail is $1 million and he could face up to 20 years in prison on felony charges.

Shear believes college and high school students simply are not aware that their online activity is as widely public and easily accessible as it truly is.

"My philosophy is if you make a threat - whether it's a phone call, whether it's an email, whatever medium you utilize - the same law applies throughout," Shear said. "People - especially students - aren't given that type of education... Students need to be apprised of the things that may happen if they utilize digital tools in a way that may create criminal issues or liability issues."

Georgia Southern communications professor Michelle Groover said students can take a social media and public relations course as an elective, but even the students who do are usually upper classmen.

"I don't think you're really teaching them how to use it. You're just giving them more tools to use it more appropriately," Groover said. "Because of the age we're in, I think it is something that should be discussed in an orientation."